AI tools among the HR tech pros tout

We’ve been checking in with HR pros about the tech they love. This year, we heard from HR pros about AI (shocker), but also classics like Excel.

Ali Meersman, talent acquisition manager, early careers at Viasat

Excel. A classic tool, but one that I have found some of my team members are not as familiar with in terms of knowing which functions can actually help them do their day-to-day jobs. In HR roles and specifically talent acquisition, we are constantly exporting lists from different systems (ATS, CRM, intern roster, etc.). The ability to use pivot tables, conditional formatting, VLOOKUP (or XLOOKUP, if you are fancy) is critical to efficiency and providing visually appealing, comprehensible data to our stakeholders

Kate Smiley, senior recruiting consultant, Park National Bank

LinkedIn Recruiting is a game changer for finding talent. If your LinkedIn profile isn’t up-to-date, take some time to do that because people like me may slide into your DMs with a life-changing offer!

Jamie Aitken, VP of transformation, Betterworks

Applications of AI in HR have been instrumental for me in making HR processes more integrated and efficient.

Allison Joyce, VP talent partner, Walmart

I’m excited about gen AI, and how it’s being used at Walmart. We recently introduced an internal gen AI-powered tool at Walmart embedded within our employee platform. This allows all our employees the chance to play around with the technology and use it in a protected way without the risk or worry that using AI can come with.

For example, when we got our employee survey results, we were able to enter the themes we were seeing into the tool, and it was able to give us immediate action items. This allowed us to jump into rich conversations instead of spinning our wheels on identifying action items. While this technology cannot make decisions, it helps us speed through many things that take time and allow us to level up what we focus our efforts and brain power on.

Erin ImHof, HR director at CertiK

I’m going to travel back in time to 2009 and revisit our iCIMS implementation when I worked at DeVry. It was amazing to be able to create a job description library, automate our job approval and offer process (which were previously faxed to locations for approval), and be able to post in many places with just a few clicks of a button, as opposed to posting individually on each site. This saved so much time and we were able to handle a high req load, in addition to other HR responsibilities. Talent acquisition has come a long way since then, but this stood out as positive, due to the company spending a lot of money to invest in the platform, [as well as] testing, training. We were able to attract more candidates to our open jobs, and provide them with a smooth, integrated onboarding system with ADP, our HRIS.