- In our latest talent survey, conducted with marketing research firm 3Sixty Insights, we found misalignment between HR and business priorities, with only 18% of HR leaders telling us they’re fully aligned.
- Despite HR leaders’ best efforts to prioritize internal mobility and retention, nearly half of employees told us they’re unsatisfied with their current roles, with 82% actively seeking new jobs.
- AI-powered talent intelligence platforms offer a promising solution to bring the business, HR teams, and employees back into alignment. These can help HR teams make sense of data, understand skills in real time, and make more strategic hiring decisions to promote internal mobility.
AI is changing the way we all work today, yet many HR leaders are still struggling to realize its full potential or still sitting on the sidelines.
There are many reasons why you might be hesitant to use AI in your HR practices, including the best approach to adoption and scaling, or even concerns about compliance or the potential for unconscious bias. But whatever might be standing in your way, one thing is clear from our latest talent survey: many HR teams are adopting AI in suboptimal ways that are hindering progress and results.
The truth is if your organization is waiting to fully embrace AI in HR, you are at risk of losing top talent. On top of that stress, it’s likely that your HR teams are struggling to meet your organizational needs and employee expectations.
And yet, only 18% of the HR leaders we surveyed reported that they are fully involved in business strategy, regularly collaborating with the C-suite, and that their talent strategy fully aligns with business objectives.
How can you serve the organization when you are not fully aligned?
To recruit, retain, and promote talent in a way that is aligned with the business, HR must create data-driven talent strategies that resonate with employees and serve the objectives of the organization.
Related content: The disconnect is real—and so is the solution. Read the entire talent survey now to learn more about how an insights-driven, skills-based approach can bring any organization back into alignment.
HR’s mismatched priorities
Recently, Gallup reported that HR disconnects and inefficiencies are contributing to a staggering $8.9 trillion, or 9% of global GDP, lost due to low employee engagement at work. Sixty-two percent of employees also told Gallup that they were not engaged at work, with a 15% saying they were actively disengaged.
In our Talent Survey, 71% of HR leaders reported that they face staffing challenges, while 82% of employees we surveyed told us that they were actively looking for a new job, with nearly half saying that they were unsatisfied with their current roles.
Clearly, employees are disengaged at work and seeking new opportunities. This presents a unique problem to solve for HR: How to find new talent while also keeping current employees satisfied.
Additionally:
- 53% of unsatisfied employees don’t believe their leaders execute effectively on internal mobility.
- 47% of people who are unsatisfied with their jobs do not believe that their company promotes internal mobility.
To help solve this staffing crisis, HR leaders told us that their top three priorities in the next 12-18 months included: recruiting better candidates (83%); lowering turnover (82%); and identifying internal high performers to promote (81%).
Despite these well-meaning intentions, HR is still struggling to find talent. Surprisingly, two of the most important things that could help them improve this disconnect ranked last. Gaining a better understanding of the skills makeup in their talent networks ranked last, with only 52% of HR leaders saying it’s a priority, along with only 59% saying that using data to inform workforce decisions was a priority.
HR leaders told us that they are struggling to keep their organizations staffed, and employees are not happy with the efforts their organizations are making. This disconnect between what HR leaders need to accomplish (filling roles) and their view of their current workforces’ ambitions and abilities are not lining up.
Here’s how a better understanding of the skills makeup of workforces—paired with the right intelligence and technology—can bring this disconnect into harmony.
Related content: Misalignment between your talent and business strategies is likely hurting your ability to reach overall objectives. Here’s how to get aligned—and start reaching your goals.
Why skills and data gives HR a strategic advantage
Nearly one in five HR respondents admitted they have little to no insight into their organization’s workforce skills makeup.
Harnessing data at scale to gain a real-time understanding of your organization’s skills, your competitors’ skills, and candidates’ skills requires something many HR organizations have yet to fully adopt and scale—AI-powered talent intelligence.
Many HR leaders told us that they’re still looking into AI (24%), piloting (19%), or scaling up usage (32%). Only 21% told us that they consider themselves advanced users.
In other words, most HR organizations have not fully integrated AI into HR functions, and as a result, have not seen or experienced what it can do to help them align their employees’ skills to serve their organizational goals.
These lagging organizations are incurring significant opportunity costs. Of the “advanced AI users” surveyed, 80% said they saw improvements in the efficacy and efficiency of their business, HR departments, and employees after using AI—a telling number.
Given these results, why is there still so much hesitation around AI adoption?
One likely reason is that businesses have been disillusioned with AI’s promise, either from buying suboptimal solutions, or choosing the wrong vendor and getting burned by AI that wasn’t fulfilling its promise.
However, the most cited reasons HR leaders reported in our survey include a lack of perceived data privacy (37%), complying with AI-related regulations (30%), and concerns around bias (29%).
These are valid concerns, but far from insurmountable. Many can be mitigated by choosing the right AI vendor—one that has built a platform on transparent and ethical AI.
In addition, real deep-learning AI can help alleviate some of these concerns. Responsible and ethical AI platforms should comply with all local and federal regulations around data privacy, and vendors should have this information readily available to share.
AI can also reduce the potential for bias, not introduce it. Rather than relying on a hiring manager’s or recruiter’s instincts and intuition, talent intelligence platforms can mask demographic information—such as age, name, race, and sex—while revealing candidates’ and employees’ skills and potential. This actually widens the talent pool and helps those with less traditional backgrounds get noticed.
With this real-time skills understanding, HR and the C-suite can harmonize on business objectives and priorities, making internal and external recruiting much more productive while surfacing more internal opportunities for employees who wish to grow.
How to use AI to align your organization
AI has an abundance of applications, but not all are created equally.
For example, using AI to extract keywords in résumés can lead to missing qualified candidates in the recruiting process. Likewise, using AI chatbots to field employee inquiries can lack personalization or nuance.
And while the talent with the skills you need might already be in your workforce, most HR leaders are still focused on recruiting and hiring—not finding the hidden talent in their organizations.
Consider the inefficacy of having limited insights into the skills makeup of a workforce: How will recruiters know what talent to search for? How will they know once they’ve found it? How will they know if they already had it to begin with?
In our survey, only 28% of HR leaders currently use AI for cross-skilling and reskilling employees—the very thing they want most.
In addition, 20% of HR leaders reported having little to no insight into the skills makeup of their workforce. This insight is precisely what HR leaders need to recruit better talent and promote internal mobility.
The best use cases for AI in HR are those that help talent leaders achieve their goals: recruiting bright and capable people, empowering employees, and boosting productivity. These are the situations that help HR leaders turn insights into a differentiator.
Organizations already using a talent intelligence platform know that these billions of HR data points can reveal skills information and potential about employees, candidates, and competitors’ employees that align to the work at hand that needs to be done. And the work they’ll need to be successful in the future.
Skills are the common language that can align recruiters and talent managers’ requisition goals to what the organization needs to support its goals. Once organizational leaders know what skills they have in-house, and what they need to grow or add, they can then acquire those skills through targeted recruiting, upskilling, or reskilling.
Consider the benefits of AI-powered talent intelligence platforms:
- More accurate workforce planning: By analyzing internal and external talent data, organizations can forecast future talent needs and proactively identify potential skill gaps to address them.
- Targeted talent acquisition: Access to real-time market intelligence allows for recruitment strategies that find the best candidates faster.
- Improved succession planning: Identifying high-potential employees within the organization to prepare for future leadership roles.
- Enhanced employee retention: Understanding factors that contribute to employee attrition through data analysis can help organizations implement retention strategies.
- Data-driven decision-making: Talent intelligence provides actionable insights to support informed hiring, development, and compensation decisions.
- Cost reductions: Efficient talent acquisition processes can reduce the cost per hire.
- Increased innovation: Identifying emerging skills and talent can drive organizational innovation.
- Better talent development: Tailored training and development programs can be designed based on individual employee strengths and career aspirations.
- Market competitiveness: Staying ahead of industry trends and understanding the competitive landscape for talent.
- Diversity and inclusion: Analyzing data to identify potential biases and promote a more inclusive workforce.
The best time to start with AI is now
To be truly aligned on goals across the entire organization, HR must enter the AI arena effectively and strategically—and they must do it today.
The good news is that 96% of the global companies we surveyed told us that they currently use or plan to use AI. And nearly two-thirds, 67%, reported high satisfaction with the current tools they’re using and plan to invest even more in AI for HR in the future.
To get your organization behind using AI in HR, you’ll need support from everyone, including the C-suite, HR leaders, and hiring managers. Be prepared to communicate the value of talent intelligence and explain how AI can help everyone find internal opportunities, receive personalized training, and grow their careers.
There is no perfect time or place to start. There is only today, with its limited hours and budget, the open roles that still need to be filled, and the challenges born from the realities of modern business.
My best advice is simply to start.
Choose an AI solution committed to responsible AI that will help you reach your overall organizational goals. Investing in such a solution will help you move from overworked and understaffed, to strategic, informed, and fulfilled.
Most HR leaders I speak with entered the field because they want to help people find the right careers—and help their organizations succeed.
AI is that catalyst that can drive success for everyone—your employees, your HR teams, and your business.
For more findings from the Eightfold and 3Sixty Insights, download the full report.
Ashutosh Garg is the Co-CEO and Co-founder of Eightfold AI. With 6000+ research citations, 50+ patents, 35+ peer reviewed research publications, and the outstanding PhD thesis award from UIUC for his PhD thesis in Machine Learning, it’s fair to say that Ashu is one of the world’s experts in machine-learning. After his time managing Search and Personalization efforts at both Google and IBM Research, Ashu founded Bloomreach, a Visionary vendor on Gartner’s magic quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms. Now, he is applying his experience to the problem he is most truly passionate about – helping the world’s talent find their most meaningful and fulfilling work.