How to use generative AI as a human resource management assistant

Abstract

Human resource management (HRM) professionals are often overworked, and their jobs are increasingly complex. Therefore, many suffer from job burnout, and only some can allocate the necessary time to strategic issues. We show how generative artificial intelligence (AI), particularly ChatGPT, can be a helpful HRM assistant for both strategic and operational tasks. But, for this to happen, we demonstrate the need to create valuable prompts that result in specific, helpful, and actionable HRM recommendations. Accordingly, we provide eight guidelines for creating high-quality and effective prompts and illustrate their usefulness in general across eight critical HRM domains and in more depth in the particular areas of workforce diversity and strategic HRM. We also provide recommendations and demonstrate how to implement a critical verification process to check on ChatGPT’s suggestions. We conclude with a list of “dos and don’ts” and that when used by sufficiently trained HRM professionals, it is a very useful tool because it helps complete tasks faster, hopefully reducing their job burnout and allowing them to allocate more time to strategic and long-term issues. In turn, these benefits will likely result in helping achieve the as-of-yet-unrealized aspiration of “having a seat at the table.”