Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning Technologies for

HR TransformationProf. Murli Viswanathan

Carnegie Mellon University

mkrishna@cmu.edu

Introduction & Outline

Artificial Intelligence

in HR

HR Analytics

Applications of AI &

Analytics

Success Stories

Best Practice

AI and associated technologies are transforming IT today and HR is catching up !!

AI for HR

AI Has Already Arrived

• Artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to have a transformative effect on consumer, enterprise, and government markets around the world.

• Total spending in the technology is predicted to rise from $8 billion in 2016 to $47 billion in 2020.

• AI technologies have use cases and applications in almost every industry and promise to significantly change existing business models while simultaneously creating new ones.

• Tractica forecasts that annual worldwide AI revenue will grow from $643.7 million in 2016 to $36.8 billion by 2025.

What is AI?

HR/People/Workforce Analytics

The Human Resource Information System

©Nmatec.com

Modern HRIS/HCM

WORKDAY

• Cloud-based Unified HR system resulting in increased efficiency

• Consistent workflows with flexibility

• Robust reporting and analytics and improved auditability and drill-down capabilities

• Real-time data across modules• Consistent user experience for

all users

What is Analytics?

“Analytics is an encompassing

and multidimensional field that

uses mathematics, statistics,

predictive modeling and

machine-learning techniques to

find meaningful patterns and

knowledge in recorded data” -

SASDESCRIPTIVE : What happened?

DIAGNOSTIC : How or why did it happen?

PREDICTIVE : What will happen?

PRESCRIPTIVE :How can we make it

happen?

© IBM 2013

What is HR Analytics? “HR analytics enable

organizations to use their

wealth of employee data to

make better decisions about

their workforces and improve

operational performance.

From attracting top talent, to

accurately forecasting future

staffing needs or improving

employee satisfaction, HR

analytics tools empower

organizations to align HR

metrics with strategic business goals.” IBM

Why HR Analytics?• Low cost of data storage• Increasing computing

capacity• Variety of advanced

analytics tools that can be used for analysis in any domain

Analytics Maturity – Assess yourself

The HR Analytics Process

Areas Transformed by HR Analytics

• Recruitment – Identifying talent

• Workforce planning – predicting workforce

• Optimizing recruitment advertisement

• Aligning workforce utilization to strategic and financial goals

• Improving employee satisfaction and productivity –wellness

• Preventing employee attrition and identifying high-value employees

Applications of AI & Analytics in HRM

Sentiment Analysis• Using AI-based natural language understanding and text analytics to

understand employee sentiment

• Transform employee engagement and measuring employee satisfaction by analysing employee communication

Hyphen

Workplace Issue Understanding• Automatically categorization of employee feedback into predefined HR categories

like compensation, satisfaction and benefits to efficiently help organizations plan the right actions

• HR can use AI to quickly analyze qualitative feedback and organize it by both workplace issue and sentiment

Hyphen

Smart Assistants

• Smart assistants, or virtual assistants: present analytics for higher executives from HR systems

• Companies like WebHR are designing various workplace applications to sync with smart assistants like ALEXA or CORTANA

Such smart assistants offer a new perspective into your HR data by conversing and providing information from the system, such as “who is present today?”, “Give me last year’s employee retention rate”, “Give me performance evaluation reports” etc.

Chatbots

• A chatbot is an AI powered program or tool which conducts a conversation about business or social domains via a chat interface.

• In recruiting, chatbots are being used to interact with candidates to ask qualifying questions, answer FAQs, and even schedule an interview with a human recruiter.

• Instead of having to log into their HR software or going back-and-forth through email, employees can save time by scheduling time off and vacation days using a chatbot.

Gartner predicts that we’re going to have more

conversations with chatbots than our spouses by 2020 !!

Talent Understanding

• Automated resume analysis in talent identification and recruitment

• Using existing data these systems are able to predict who would be a successful candidate going forward

• Use natural language processing to talk with the candidate and check the fluency of the speech, the pronunciation, the vocabulary and even the progression of ideas

• Using AI-based image recognition to analyse video recordings for behaviour analysis

© Samantha Mclaren

Success Stories

Australian Gov. worked with Acendre to create a Talent Register system for temporary employees to help it locate, attract, hire and onboard high-quality candidates quickly and with a reduced burden on HR staff.

The Department of Homeland Security, US Customs, USDA, Department of Interior and other agencies have seen faster hiring, reduced costs, improved security and more benefits using solutions incorporating insightful, actionable, real-time people analytics.

5 million candidates visit L'Oréal website each year for jobs. The costs and time to review all resumes and application letters were huge. Using AI-based tools the efficiency of recruitment process has improved remarkably and job offer ratio for interviewed candidates is up to 82 percent!!

Using HR analytics Starbucks, Limited Brands, and Best Buy—can precisely identify the value of a 0.1% increase in employee engagement among employees at a particular storeGoogle, Oracle, Sprint, AT&T, and a large number of organisations

are using HR Analytics to predict employee attrition

Best Practice

From Data to Intelligence – A Useful Process• Define a key question, critical objective, or

unsolved issue

Start with an important business goal, challenge,

or priority

• Factors you want to quantify as metrics Determine the HR

variables that drive the goal… or impede it

• Map each variable/factor to the HR management systems that contain the relevant data for mining and analysis

Identify the related HR management functions or

strategies

• Find and retrieve the appropriate data, run the analytics to generate the metric

Derive your metrics

• From insights, develop and implement strategies to improve HR function

Take metrics-based action

© Sap - SuccessFactors

From Data to Intelligence - Example

© Sap - SuccessFactors

• Create a high-performance teamBusiness Goal

• Are top performers staying?HR Factor

• Core HR system Related HR Area

• Core HR Average top-performer tenure by department

Metric Derived

• Recalibrate incentive packages (bonuses, options, etc.)

Metric-Driven Action

Public Sector Challenges1. COST

• Need to understand that analytics can help optimize workforce management and generate long-term savings

2. REQUIRED SKILLS TO MANAGE HR ANALYTICS• Consider exploiting skills from existing

employees (outsource to other agencies)

3. NOT ENOUGH DATA?• Focus on quality not quantity!

© Sap - SuccessFactors

© 2011-2018 EVEREST GLOBAL, INC

Ask the right business questions & understand the data needed to find answers.

Final Words• Public and Private Organisations are loaded with employee, HR, and

performance data. Demographic & social/professional network data are easily accessible

• 40 percent of the HR functions of international companies are currently using AI-applications

• The judgment calls of the human professional are, and always will be, decisive in people management. But AI will provide more time, more capacity, more budget space and better information to do so

• MOST IMPORTANTLY – BE DILIGENT ABOUT EMPLOYEE PRIVACY & ETHICAL ISSUES

Analytics is here to stay. And agencies need to carefully think about their “data-driven” decision making culture.