It’s easy to get as excited as a kid in a candy shop when there’s an ever-growing selection of AI tools at your fingertips.
This excitement for new AI tools in HR is palpable, as 77% of organizations surveyed by Workday plan to increase their use of AI for hiring in the next year. But leaders should be wary of investing in AI technology blindly, and instead ensure that any tools they invest in can solve an existing problem, Kerry Gumm, VP of HR services and experience at Allstate, warned during a panel on the business case for AI innovation at the Workday Rising conference in Las Vegas this week.
“There’s a lot of technology, there’s a lot of opportunities that exist now, and I know that will continue to grow. It’s easy for an employer to just start taking those and trying to design a problem around a solution that exists, versus first [asking]: ‘What’s the problem we’re trying to solve for?’” Gumm said. “We’ve really tried to take a step back and look at the problem we’re trying to solve.”
Gumm was speaking on a panel moderated by Josh Lannin, Workday’s VP of productivity technologies, along with Athena Karp, general manager of HiredScore, an AI talent platform acquired by Workday earlier this year, and Steve Chase, vice chair of AI and digital innovation at KPMG.
As an example, Gumm said that Allstate leveraged HiredScore to more quickly identify top job candidates and improve the hiring experience. The insurance giant has received applications from around one million candidates this year and hires around 14,000 people annually.
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“Candidate flow hasn’t really been a crux of the problem for us, but it is for us finding the talent in that flow,” Gumm said. “We want candidates to know they have the best possible opportunity to be considered [for] this role, and the best way for us to do that is to supplement what recruiters are able to do today with better insights [and] better access to that talent.”
Since the third quarter of 2023, Gumm said Allstate has seen a near 40% reduction in the time candidates spend applying to jobs, thanks to AI helping them find relevant postings and share their credentials faster. It’s also seen a 25% reduction in time from when candidates submit an application to the initial screening. Additionally, Gumm said Allstate has leveraged AI to help recommend alternative opportunities, if the position a candidate applied for wasn’t a good match. So far in 2024, around 100 candidates have been redirected to opportunities that they hadn’t applied to previously.
Karp says clients who actually see success typically approach HiredScore already knowing the business outcomes that they want to see.
“That’s, to me, the difference between a lot of the AI experiments that are just starting with the technology—‘Let’s drop generative AI in any pocket we can’—versus what we’re seeing our clients who actually get outcomes are doing, which is saying: ‘No, let’s start with these big business problems and the outcomes, and then craft the human-machine collaboration that gets us there,’” Karp said.