The Huge Potential of NLP in Human Resources

NLP has grown into a practical, deployable technology used by many HR departments across the globe. By automating the tedious, menial hobs, NLP is freeing up HR professionals to focus upon what they do best - building corporate cultures, solving people problems and driving the business forward.

Human resources as an industry has always been defined by the need to balance opposing metrics. HR departments are challenged by the need to be empathetic yet metrics-driven, reactive to daily issues but proactive to long-term culture development, administrative in nature yet strategic in their outlook. 

All the while, HR teams across the globe are bogged down by repetitive, time-consuming tasks such as screening resumes, analysing feedback, addressing queries and understanding wider sentiment within the company. 

Whilst these tasks are crucial to ensuring a smooth business operation, they do not necessarily move the needle in terms of improving employee satisfaction or delivering the all important business growth.

Which is why many HR departments are turning towards NLP.

Natural language processing, a subfield of artificial intelligence, focuses upon bridging the gap between human language and machine understanding.

NLP enables the automation of information extraction and understanding on a scale that just is not feasible manually, helping HR departments to step away from reactive menial roles and into more of a strategic, proactive role driven by data.

Areas of HR Benefitting from NLP Integration

Talent Acquisition 

If you have ever been part of the hiring process, whether as a recruiter or the candidate, you will know how inefficient the traditional resume screening process can be. 

Not only is the manual resume review process inefficient, it is also prone to human error, inherent biases and inconsistencies. 

Utilizing NLP in HR can streamline the recruitment process via automatically screening resumes and applications for relevant skills and experience, identifying top candidates more efficiently. Chatbots powered by NLP can also engage with potential candidates, answer their questions and guide them through the application process. 

By doing so, recruiters can focus on building relationships with top-tier talent rather than drowning in admin.

Employee Engagement and Experience 

Effective management often relies upon accurate measurement of the pertinent data. 

Analysing employee feedback from surveys, emails, and internal communication platforms using NLP can reveal insights into employee sentiment, areas of concern and inform strategies to improve engagement and satisfaction. 

Custom HR NLP platforms can even visualize these insights in dashboards that update live as new data comes in. 

For human resource departments, it’s like having a live pulse on company morale - an important aspect of any business, as communicated by those at Lyra Health.

Learning and Development

Not everyone learns in the same way, and not everyone needs to learn the same thing. 

Many staff training programs are one-size-fits-all, offering a blanket approach to staff development that doesn’t necessarily get the best out of the unique skillsets of your team. 

NLP can personalise learning experiences by analysing specific employee skills gaps and recommending relevant training materials. 

It can also be used to analyse training content for effectiveness and identify areas for improvement.

Performance Management 

Performance management meetings, such as annual reviews, can be time consuming, subjective and prone to inherent biases that do not necessarily paint an accurate picture. 

NLP tools can be deployed to standardize performance management by analyzing written feedback to identify recurring themes and sentiments. 

This qualitative approach can deliver more consistent evaluations, highlight strengths and weaknesses across teams and help to reduce unconscious bias, something that remains a major issue for many organisations and HR departments.

Operations and Compliance 

Ensuring compliance is one of the least glamorous but most important parts of an HR department’s remit. 

NLP can automate the processing of documentation, ensuring compliance with regulations by analysing policies and procedures and providing quick access to HR knowledge bases through intelligent search functionalities. 

This helps employees to get compliance answers faster. For example, a member of staff could message a chatbot regarding “what is our remote work policy” and receive an accurate, up to date response from the latest documentation immediately, rather than having to wait for a response from the HR department. 

For industries and businesses that face ever-changing compliance and regulations, NLP solutions can be updated to display only the relevant information at that time, as opposed to human agents who might struggle to differentiate between contemporary and legacy compliance regulations. 

Retention Prediction

By conducting analysis of historical employee data and identifying patterns in language used in internal communications and feedback, NLP can contribute to predicting potential employee attrition, allowing HR to proactively address retention strategies. 

If the data shows that the team is under pressure and morale is starting to decline, proactive interventions can be rolled out, whether that be better support, changes in workload, leadership coaching or the all important salary increases.

Interested in an NLP HR Solution?

If you are in the HR space and looking to adopt NLP into your workflow, NetGeist HR is a great solution designed to solve your textual data problems.

We welcome custom projects and requests in order to deliver the best AI-driven software for your business application, so if there are additional elements you require please do not hesitate to contact us.