ETHRWorld spoke to leaders of different HR platforms and service providers in the spaces of recruitment and staffing, employee engagement, payroll and benefits providers to understand their perspectives, feedback and fears related to this OpenAI-invented chatbot ChatGPT.
ETHRWorld spoke to leaders of different HR platforms and service providers in the spaces of recruitment and staffing, employee engagement, payroll and benefits providers to understand their perspectives, feedback and fears related to this OpenAI-invented chatbot.
The use of ChatGPT in an HR context is bound to become exceedingly popular and the reason is pretty evident. This AI innovation, which is hardly a few months old, is causing a pandemonium and a rippling effect in the HR domain.
A chatbot operating through artificial intelligence, ChatGPT can give quick and impressive responses to HR-related questions from executives, employees, or job applicants.
ETHRWorld spoke to leaders of different HR platforms and service providers in the spaces of recruitment and staffing, employee engagement, payroll and benefits providers to understand their perspectives, feedback and fears related to this OpenAI- invented chatbot, which has already been integrated into the web search engine Microsoft Bing.
Sidharth Agarwal, Director, Spectrum Talent Management, a staffing and other HR-services provider, said, “My first impression of ChatGPT is that it is a powerful language model that can provide a wide range of services for not only the HR functions, but for other segments as well.”
Agarwal is of the opinion that the amount of data and content ChatGPT is capable of generating is amazing and it can gradually help organisations to save costs, and also can aid a lot of human labour that goes into completing basic tasks.
Sachin Alug, CEO, NLB Services, a global staffing and recruitment agency, said, “On the first look, ChatGPT is just what it promises to be. From simple facts to creative answers, it provides the user with information of varying degrees. Surely a step up from the search engines of the world, ChatGPT offers coherent and creative output to the queries one throws at it. However, prolonged usage of the platform may reveal that the outputs might often be repetitive and would probably need some tweaking before processing as final.”
Vijay Yalamanchili, CEO, Keka, an HR payroll software, said, “For many people, ChatGPT has become a personal assistant of sorts. I was quite impressed by its speed and how much it mimics human interaction.”
Yalamanchili added, “Although we can access encyclopaedias and other knowledge hubs online, what make ChatGPT different is how it optimises and presents information according to our questions, making it a highly efficient and knowledgeable personal assistant.”
Anil Agarwal, Co-Founder and CEO, Incruiter, a player in the Indian recruitment space, said, “As an AI tool, the first impression of using ChatGPT is therapeutic, as it provides helpful and informative responses to a whole wide range of questions. Well, the responses are generated based on its huge database of information and knowledge. But its ability to understand the input and interpret answers instantly is terrific.”
Sourabh Deorah, Co-Founder and CEO, Advantage Club, an employee engagement, rewards and benefits providing platform, said, “ChatGPT with its user-friendly interface does generate nearly real human-like responses in an interactive manner, through its ML algorithms. Hence, it is not surprising how quickly it has infiltrated nearly all age groups and professions alike.”
All the leaders that ETHRWorld spoke to had similar views with regard to the different areas in HR where ChatGPT can be applied.
All of the leaders shared insights regarding the functions of ChatGPT in HR as summarised below:
With proper input guidelines, ChatGPT can be used to automate the recruitment process and help screen the candidates. It can also respond to the candidates’ queries and provide feedback on their application status.
The platform can be used to answer new employees’ questions about the company policies, benefits and procedures, which are necessary for completing the forms and training.
ChatGPT can also be used to generate personalised and need- specific training content for different employee groups.
It can help offer and provide access to training materials, answers to questions about training programmes, and suggestions on personalised learning opportunities, based on employee interests and career goals.
By feeding the AI with instructions, ChatGPT can aid employees with feedback on their performance through information and also provide guidance on their respective career development.
The platform can be used to administer employee surveys, gather feedback on company culture, and suggest ways to improve employee engagement.
By instructing the AI in its language, ChatGPT can facilitate HR functions with quick and accurate responses to these questions.
As a quick source for compliance research, with ChatGPT, HRs can access compliance-related information such as laws and rules easily.
HR professionals can also ask ChatGPT to simplify the compliance matters for the ease of understanding. This is because compared to other sources, ChatGPT offers its users personalised answers and explains complex information in a more detailed fashion.
Quite often, HR professionals spend a lot of time drafting different pieces of communiques for internal and external communication. If we provide ChatGPT with a brief, it can generate various communiques that can be customised as per our needs.
The chatbot can help provide employees with 24/7 support, answering their questions about benefits, policies and procedures. This can help to improve employee satisfaction and reduce the workload of HR professionals.
Other HR functions that can benefit early from ChatGPT are those that involve a high volume of interactions with candidates or employees, as well as those that require data- driven decision-making.
ChatGPT can also aid indirectly in employee benefits, as it can be used to answer questions about health insurance, retirement plans, vacation time etc.
None of the companies ETHRWorld spoke to, has begun using ChatGPT yet, as all of them are unsure and have their reservations on this generative AI tool.
Alug of NLB Services explained why they do not want to use chatGPT yet.
“As an organisation, we’ve not made ChatGPT an official tool as of now. The chief reason is our focus on the unification of artificial intelligence and human intelligence,” said Alug.
He added, “No doubt, tools like ChatGPT can enhance various aspects of work, however, we do need to take its output with a pinch of salt, as there are still loopholes within these systems that one cannot overlook. At least for the time being, we’re trusting our people a little more with our processes than offloading our work to an AI platform.”
Kartik Narayan, CEO – Staffing, TeamLease, a major player in staffing and HR services, summarised almost all the key problems of this AI-run chatbot.
“One of the limitations of ChatGPT is the illusion that it can answer anything, but in reality, it can only respond with the data that is already available on the internet till the cut-off” date,” said Narayan.
The limitation of the chatbot is that as of now, it cannot fetch data beyond September 2021, which means that information about any developments after September 2021 cannot be retrieved by the AI model.
Narayan highlighted that the data available to ChatGPT is not yet real-time, and it cannot speculate into the future of what might happen.
Another noticeable shortcoming of ChatGPT, Narayan said, is the lack of understanding of connecting with people at an emotional level. While it can understand the context of the question and respond with cleverly spun responses collated from already available data on the internet, it cannot make the variations required for the response to feel interesting to a human reader.
Narayan said, “It is like a lot of data converted into information, but still lacking the insights and intuitive connections required for humans to be interested in the content.”
“Try reading a long piece of content written through ChatGPT and you will get a sense of dry and somewhat repeated content where it becomes difficult to stay interested,” he added.
Explaining this with an example, Narayan said, “For instance, ChatGPT might be able to give me a good report on the 1857 revolution in varying lengths and versions, but it cannot possibly write an interesting and semi-fictional story around Mangal Pandey, and what all he must have gone through at that point of time.”
Narayan also talked about the ethical concerns, as ChatGPT is devoid of emotions also and lacks ethical boundaries.
He explained, “This means its output should be reviewed and refined by trained human eyes for the foreseeable future so that we don’t foolishly flood the internet and our lives with non-value-adding regurgitations of already existing data.”
Anil Agarwal of Incruiter and Sidharth Agarwal of Spectrum Talent Management talked about the language limitations of ChatGPT.
The AI tool, both feel, may not be able to understand or respond accurately to all languages or dialects, which could limit its effectiveness in a global medium
Deorah of Advantage Club talked about how ChatGPT can jeopardise HR-decision making altogether.
He said, “It is no secret that ChatGPT is a groundbreaking innovation that has caught the public’s eye, but there are some drawbacks as well. ChatGPT creates illusions by imagining things that do not exist and shares those in a convincing manner which may seriously jeopardise the decisions of the HR departments.”
Agarwal of Spectrum Talent Management believed that ChatGPT does not have emotions or empathy, which limits its ability to respond appropriately to emotionally charged or sensitive situations.
“Thus, it is important to understand the limitations of ChatGPT and use it in conjunction with human judgement and expertise. It should not be relied on as the sole source of information or decision-making tool,” Agarwal said.
Deorah of Advantage Club also said he was sure that chatbots like ChatGPT can definitely automate a lot of HR tasks and aid HRs, yet, they cannot completely replace human judgement, and as a result human jobs too.
Source: This article was originally published on ETHRWorld with featured comments on ChatGPT by Sidharth Agarwal, Director, Spectrum Talent Management.