The Benefits and Drawbacks of Using AI in HR

The capabilities of AI in HR and talent management are rapidly expanding, which is exciting especially for smaller HR teams struggling to keep up with their workload. And AI does have significant benefits for many HR applications. But there are drawbacks to consider as well—like any technology, if it’s not used correctly, AI can do more harm than good. 

That’s why you need to understand what AI in HR can truly do, and how to avoid the most common pitfalls so you can reap the maximum rewards. 

Benefit: Decreased Time-To-Hire 

Candidates today expect the hiring process to move quickly—and with so many open job postings right now, if you don’t move fast, your top picks might get and accept another offer before you can make one to them. Decreasing time-to-hire is therefore critical to most companies right now. 

And AI in HR can offer significant time savings here. By automating the most time-consuming parts of your hiring process, such as scheduling and scoring candidate interviews and skills tests, your time-to-hire can improve without losing candidate quality. 

Potential Drawbacks

If your team is constantly pressed for time and you set up an effective AI-powered talent pipeline and process, that’s a great start. But these tools aren’t a “set it and forget it” solution—one common mistake is setting parameters for your AI tools now and forgetting to check if they result in the high-quality hires you need now and in the future. 

Don’t forget to regularly assess how your AI in talent management solutions are working to ensure they’re still serving your organization, even in busy times. 

Benefit: Increased Bandwidth to Build Candidate Relationships 

When your HR team is slammed with recruiting and hiring, it’s hard to devote time to building strong relationships with your candidates. But that’s a critical step to increasing your successful hire rate—candidates typically want to feel a connection with your company before they accept an offer. 

AI in HR can help you automate the tasks that take up time and don’t contribute to building those relationships, such as scoring skills tests against all of your open positions or narrowing the initial pool of applicants into candidates you’d like to interview. And you can use a chatbot to answer basic and frequently-asked questions for candidates as well. 

Potential Drawbacks

Using AI to manage your candidate communications can be great if there’s an experienced human hand ultimately guiding the communications strategy. But as NEDA, a US eating disorder hotline, recently found when they replaced their crisis hotline staff with an AI-powered chatbot, leaving sensitive topics entirely to AI can have grave consequences. 

Be sure to use your AI tools wisely and don’t leave strategic communications up to them without careful oversight. It’s best to use AI as a helpful complement to the work your HR team does, instead of replacing them with it. 

Benefit: Decreased Bias 

Removing pieces of the hiring process that introduce bias and replacing them with more objective measures can help increase diversity in your talent pipeline, and AI can give your team a boost here as well. For example, unstructured interviews are prone to introducing bias because interviewers unconsciously are drawn to people who are like them. 

Adding in asynchronous structured video interviews, with the questions generated based on skills assessment test results and the needs of your open role, can give you both higher-quality candidates and a less-biased process. 

Potential Drawbacks

It might seem like AI is inherently bias-free because it relies on algorithms instead of human impressions to make decisions. But actually, since humans build the AI algorithms, they can increase bias if you’re not careful (just ask Amazon’s recruiting team). 

To avoid introducing more bias into your hiring process, be sure to use ethical AI tools like Cangrade that are certified bias-free and ADA-compliant. Want to learn more about how we can help you create a more equitable and effective hiring process? Request a free demo today.