How GenAI Fits Into People Tech Across the Employee Lifecycle

More productive, more strategic, less expensive. That’s where HR is headed, thanks to the profound implications of generative AI (GenAI) in the HR software and people tech spaces.

A subset of artificial intelligence, genAI can create content or information like images and text based on prompts. With myriad applications to HR, like chatbots to boost self-service capabilities and skill matching to speed the resume review process, it has the potential to wildly transform HR in the coming years. According to a recent white paper from Boston Consulting Group, a balanced human and AI strategy could increase HR productivity up to 30%. 

With massive potential benefits to customers and documented revenue opportunities for vendors, now is the time to start leveraging genAI to superpower HR software. Read on to learn how genAI can be used throughout the employee lifecycle to increase productivity and support strategic workforce planning.

Four ways to leverage genAI across the employee lifecycle

1. Talent acquisition and hiring

Talent acquisition can be immensely draining to HR resources—from reviewing resumes and matching applicant skills to job descriptions to communicating with candidates to answer questions and schedule interviews. AI can help streamline the recruitment process by taking the lead on resume screening, conducting initial candidate assessments, and identifying top talent based on predefined criteria. It can also generate realistic job descriptions, tailor recruitment advertisements, and create virtual candidate profiles. 

AI chatbots can communicate with candidates to schedule interviews, and once a candidate has been hired, AI can provide personalized training materials, answer questions, and guide new hires through the onboarding process. Recent use cases have shown automation of over 50% of tasks in the onboarding journey using genAI, according to research from Boston Consulting Group. 

Bringing genAI to existing analytics platforms yields even greater productivity and accessibility gains as users are able to interact with their data fluidly and naturally through plain-language questions. With genAI-powered people analytics, users could ask questions and receive answers on crucial talent acquisition topics, like “How long does it typically take to hire a software engineer?” or “What sources provide the most high performers?”

This frees up HR professionals to focus on the areas where they can make the most impact, thus allowing them to be more strategic partners to the business. It also improves decision-making and reduces bias by leading with objective criteria. 

2. Learning and development

Learning and development initiatives are essential to making the most of the workforce by identifying skills gaps in the organization at large and in individual employees and offering training and learning opportunities to close the gaps. But this process can be labor intensive and quickly fall to the wayside when other priorities take precedence. 

Because it can quickly make sense of less structured data sources, like skills and job descriptions, genAI is particularly well suited to this task and can ensure that learning and development opportunities are both ongoing and available to all employees in the organization. By analyzing employee data like career aspirations, learning history, and performance metrics, AI algorithms can identify and suggest areas for improvement where employees may be lacking skills and knowledge. It can then personalize learning and development opportunities based on individual needs and preferences. 

And with genAI-powered people analytics, users could drill down into learning opportunities for themselves or their teams, by asking plain-language questions like, “What percentage of my team has had a learning or development opportunity this year?” or “What skills are present on my team?”

3. Retention

Retention is a key focus for organizations, and for good reason—replacing employees is expensive and time-consuming. GenAI can support this work in two key ways: monitoring employee sentiment and predicting turnover. 

AI algorithms can analyze employee engagement data to identify factors that contribute to employee engagement and satisfaction. These insights can point the way to the most effective and powerful interventions. And genAI can boost employee engagement by enabling an “always-on,'' personalized HR experience through the use of chatbots that can help employees schedule vacation, check in on their individual goals, and remind them of learning and development opportunities.

Meanwhile, genAI and predictive analytics can shed light on which employees are most likely to leave the organization and which categories of employees (by demographic information like age group, gender, ethnicity, or organizational information like job level, department, and tenure—or any combination of these) have the highest turnover rates or are most likely to leave in the future.

With genAI-powered people analytics, users can get instant insights into this most crucial area of investigation by asking questions like “How many team members are likely to resign in the next six months?” or “Which departments have the lowest employee engagement scores?”

4. Workforce planning

GenAI revolutionizes strategic workforce planning by analyzing historical data from across the organization to predict future workforce needs. AI can identify patterns and trends in performance, employee turnover, and business projections that might otherwise be missed. These insights can help organizations proactively plan for recruitment, training, and development initiatives to address these needs. 

GenAI can unite disparate data sources to provide a seamless, user-friendly analytics experience that has almost no learning curve. This makes it easy for leaders and people managers of all backgrounds and experience levels to plan their workforces more strategically. 

Generative AI allows users to engage more fluidly with their data by asking questions like “How many customer service representatives will I need next fall?” and then dive deeper by asking “How long will it take to hire and onboard them?” What once required hours of work is now an instant insight. 

Unlock your shortcut to genAI

GenAI will transform how organizations engage with their employees, from talent acquisition to retention and beyond. And now is the perfect time to get started and offer it to your customers. To learn more about how to embed GenAI in your product, visit Vee for Partners.