CHRO Insights: How to Give Your HR Team the AI Advantage

AI is reshaping the HR industry—revolutionizing how HR leaders help their businesses recruit, manage, and grow their talent. I had the pleasure of speaking with Ruchita Sharma, senior HR leader and executive, who takes a technology forward approach to her work. Below, I share some insights into how innovative HR leaders like Sharma are leveraging this technology to grow the impact and productivity of their teams.

AI has many benefits for HR teams, but it cannot fully substitute for human experience and expertise.  This is especially true in the HR space, given how essential human judgment and experience is when it comes to interacting with our candidates and employees.  As Sharma explained, AI technology is most effective with careful human guidance—as a tool to augment human effort, rather than a substitute.

“The evolution and maturity [of AI] is making a huge leap,” said Sharma, noting that sophisticated AI tools can now read your emotions and detect stress or falsehoods. To fully exploit AI’s potential, she urged HR professionals to think of AI not as technology, but as “a person who is wired differently, with a different IQ and EQ level.”

“AI can go through 50,000 resumes in the click of a button and give me a result. I can’t expect a recruiter to do that,” she said. However, she explained, a recruiter looking at a job description knows the ten key bullets to focus on when reviewing resumes. Without training and guidance from the recruiter, AI might treat every element as equally important.

We also discussed how AI can enhance your team’s effectiveness and productivity by reducing the time spent on time-consuming projects.  For example, previously arduous tasks – like synthesizing information or data analysis—can easily become more manageable and more importantly, more timely and responsive to business needs. Sharma provided the following ways that HR teams can leverage AI to deliver impact more quickly:

Despite all the powerful ways AI can transform how we work and enhance our productivity, creating a culture that embraces AI requires change management. The most common concerns I’ve heard are the time and effort required by team members to educate on AI usage or the time it takes to get better at prompting with AI tools, which they see as doubling their effort.  And there is always the unstated concern from employees about losing their jobs to AI. Sharma provided some valuable insights on how to overcome these concerns to create a culture that embraces the use of AI.

It’s likely your team is already using AI on the sly, Sharma said, but maximizing its potential to elevate your HR game requires bringing it to the forefront. She suggested, for example, periodically playing around with Microsoft Copilot for half an hour as a group to see what you can learn from it. Experimenting with AI as a team can help everyone feel more comfortable about the technology—and get people excited about its potential.

Since most HR teams are already short-staffed, she also urged executives not to be “trigger-happy” when it comes to AI. HR leaders should treat AI not as a cheaper way to manage the existing workload, but as a tool to help the same number of employees do more and do it better. When you put experience before cutting costs with AI, you typically find efficiencies too.

Legacy background checks are known to take several weeks on average, which is loss of productivity and seriously impacts time to hire. Being open to exploration, viewing AI as a partner, and taking time to train your AI tools can help your organization get the most from this emerging technology. So can working with partners that embrace AI, like Checkr. Our AI-powered platform delivers background check reports that meet your specific needs with industry-leading speed. In fact, 89% of all criminal checks complete in one hour.

Eager for more AI insights? Checkr recently surveyed 500 CHROs to find out how they’re using AI for strategic talent acquisition. To discover what they’re doing in the full report.

The resources and information provided here are for educational and informational purposes only and do not constitute legal advice. Always consult your own counsel for up-to-date legal advice and guidance related to your practices, needs, and compliance with applicable laws.