AI should run your HR department first – Here’s why that’s good news
AI takes over as massive layoffs continue in HR departments. That headline won’t look pretty, irony aside, but I’ll say it anyway, the first function AI genuinely displaces will be human resources.
Why? Because HR has spent decades in a lose-lose position.
Workers see it as management’s enforcement arm; management sees it as a function that adds no measurable value. That’s the CxO’s real dilemma. A function everyone agrees is broken, protected mostly by the fact that no one has proposed a credible replacement.
Take hiring as the test case. Every job board worth using, LinkedIn, Indeed, Monster, already runs algorithms and data mining to surface resumes that match a role. And yet the complaints persist on both sides. Companies can’t find talent, and candidates can’t find roles that fit. The professional equivalent of ‘I have no room in my closet and nothing to wear!’ No amount of equal-opportunity policy fixes this either. I watched a manager route his buddies into the best roles for years, technically following every process, while HR did nothing because, on paper, nothing was wrong. That story repeats across companies and countries with depressing regularity.
Here’s the framework I’d propose instead. Match personality to organizational and team culture, not just skills to job description. Imagine AI narrowing a talent pool to three genuinely well-matched candidates instead of the current drawn-out funnel, properly built, that beats even the most rigorous conventional process, because it weighs soft skills, adaptability, and cultural fit with the same rigor we currently reserve for technical requirements, ideally backed by real psychometric data rather than gut feel in an interview room. I won’t go the extra step of AI actually recruiting and onboarding the candidate, yet. If your hiring funnel is optimizing for keyword match instead of cultural and behavioral fit, that’s a gap worth closing before your next hiring cycle, not after it. Happy to go deeper on this one.