Personnel Today
  • Home
    • All PT content
  • Email sign-up
  • Topics
    • HR Practice
    • Employee relations
    • Learning & training
    • Pay & benefits
    • Wellbeing
    • Recruitment & retention
    • HR strategy
    • HR Tech
    • The HR profession
    • Global
    • All HR topics
  • Legal
    • Case law
    • Commentary
    • Flexible working
    • Legal timetable
    • Maternity & paternity
    • Shared parental leave
    • Redundancy
    • TUPE
    • Disciplinary and grievances
    • Employer’s guides
  • AWARDS
    • Personnel Today Awards
    • The RAD Awards
  • Jobs
    • Find a job
    • Jobs by email
    • Careers advice
    • Post a job
  • Brightmine
    • Learn more
    • Products
    • Free trial
    • Request a quote
  • Webinars
  • Advertise
  • OHW+

Personnel Today

Register
Log in
Personnel Today
  • Home
    • All PT content
  • Email sign-up
  • Topics
    • HR Practice
    • Employee relations
    • Learning & training
    • Pay & benefits
    • Wellbeing
    • Recruitment & retention
    • HR strategy
    • HR Tech
    • The HR profession
    • Global
    • All HR topics
  • Legal
    • Case law
    • Commentary
    • Flexible working
    • Legal timetable
    • Maternity & paternity
    • Shared parental leave
    • Redundancy
    • TUPE
    • Disciplinary and grievances
    • Employer’s guides
  • AWARDS
    • Personnel Today Awards
    • The RAD Awards
  • Jobs
    • Find a job
    • Jobs by email
    • Careers advice
    • Post a job
  • Brightmine
    • Learn more
    • Products
    • Free trial
    • Request a quote
  • Webinars
  • Advertise
  • OHW+

Artificial intelligenceHR softwareLatest NewsHR Technology

How AI can level the HR playing field for SMEs

by Ben Thompson 22 Jun 2023
by Ben Thompson 22 Jun 2023 Photo: Shutterstock
Photo: Shutterstock

The emergence of large language models has the potential to completely alter the jobs of HR professionals in smaller firms, and help them recruit from wider afield, argues Employment Hero’s Ben Thompson.

Nobody ever said that running a smaller business was easy. But the last half decade has proved particularly challenging.

The hand-wringing over how to do Brexit introduced huge uncertainty. Now it is in place, it is far harder to export goods to the continent without the kind of legal muscle a large business can bring to bear. The potential hiring pool has shrunk significantly – again, larger businesses have the ability to sponsor migrants for hard-to-fill vacancies, but that is beyond the capabilities or resources of many SMEs.

Then the pandemic and its aftermath have proved particularly stressful for small HR teams. First, they had to craft work-from-home policies on the fly and make sure that their staff could keep working while staying safe, often while working out furlough payments and other brand-new instruments. Now there is the aftermath: an extremely tight labour market and a continuing divergence of expectations over flexible working.

Just as with Brexit, these issues are far easier to deal with where there is a well-staffed HR team. If HR consists of just a few people they can end up spending their entire day putting out fires or just managing the day-to-day, with no time left to focus on strategic tasks.

But I’m arguing that AI has the potential to radically alter this picture and level the playing field. Here’s how.

AI can streamline repetitive and dull tasks

Hiring, onboarding, and offboarding are huge parts of any HR team’s job.

These processes are crucial to get right but do involve a lot of paperwork. This paperwork is important, but writing it all from scratch or even within a template can take hours of work that a one-person HR team might not have.

HR tech

How will AI impact data protection compliance?

Peter Cheese: HR mustn’t be afraid of experimenting

AI could boost headcount and skills, recruiter predicts 

AI – or more specifically large-language models like ChatGPT – can be a huge force multiplier here. Instead of starting with a blank page you can ask the tool to generate, say, a job description based on a bullet-pointed list of requirements. Obviously this is only going to be a first draft, something a human needs to check and edit – but it is a lot easier to start with this than a blank page.

Now, you probably don’t want to just jump into ChatGPT for this, as the results can vary quite a bit and it’s difficult to get it to stick to one company style from session to session, or between several users. Software is becoming available specifically oriented for HR but using the same OpenAI tech as Chat GPT. At Employment Hero we have created Swag, for example, for writing job descriptions and other key HR documents such as welcome letters.

We’ve found that by using AI, tasks that once took half a day can take an hour now.

And this is clearly just the start. AI is getting better and better at data analysis every day – not just querying a nice and tidy spreadsheet, but gathering huge varieties of data from disparate sources including pdf documents, emails and websites, then completing custom analyses for the user.

This will make assessing the workload and performance of teams far easier and more holistic than some of the simplistic KPI metrics currently in use. If programmed correctly it will also avoid some of the biases humans can introduce into this process – whether those be based on gender, race, age, or just an HR manager’s relationship to a certain employee.

Why SMEs can beat the big boys with AI

Everyone is talking about AI right now, but most big companies are only just starting to dip their toes into using it.

Big organisations are like cruise ships. They turn slowly. New tools go through months-long procurement processes and take even longer to filter into the organisation, with weeks of training across huge numbers of employees and new policies to be worked out.

Smaller companies can be a lot more nimble. That doesn’t mean they should be reckless with the tools that AI provides them, but it does mean they can move to integrate a new tool in days instead of months. And in this time while we are all working out how useful these tools are, this is a fantastic opportunity for smaller companies to really move quickly – and fill some of those tens of thousands of vacancies they face.

Indeed, the hiring imbalance is one of the key areas where I think AI can help small companies. A lot of people would love to work for an SME. The energy you get from a small team is totally different to what one feels in a larger organisation. You get experience across a huge range of tasks and get to see the impact your own work has on the overall business very clearly.

With AI freeing up time, smaller HR and recruiting teams will be able to reach those currently working for large firms but actually want something a bit more exciting.

The limits of AI and the need for the human touch

We’re busy creating AI tools for HR teams at Employment Hero. But we don’t want to even consider the idea that these could replace them. HR needs the human touch – it’s in the name, after all. It is needed both in good times and in bad – to really celebrate high achievement and to offer counsel when things go wrong. I want AI to give teams more time to do these crucial parts of the job – more time to take people out for coffee and really have a think about their careers – not just sit behind a desk writing another document.

Sign up to our weekly round-up of HR news and guidance

Receive the Personnel Today Direct e-newsletter every Wednesday

OptOut
This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Indeed, in these early days, anything AI generated still needs to be looked over closely by a human. The machines are extremely smart, but they are capable of fairly obvious mistakes if you don’t watch them. That might shift eventually but, for now, make sure you keep an eye on exactly what they are doing.

Latest HR job opportunities on Personnel Today


Browse more human resources jobs

Ben Thompson

Ben Thompson is the CEO and co-founder of Employment Hero, which he started after an extensive career as an employment lawyer in order to help SMEs do HR better.

previous post
Farms warn of effects of labour shortage
next post
One in five doctors at risk of burnout as vacancies grow

You may also like

CIPD appoints expert in AI to boost support...

8 May 2025

How can businesses build protections for gig workers?

7 May 2025

Quarter of employees worried AI will threaten jobs...

28 Apr 2025

How can HR battle the rise in identity...

27 Apr 2025

Google concerned by slow AI take-up in UK

25 Apr 2025

HR teams build AI use but seek more...

14 Apr 2025

The future of work: is the UK workforce...

11 Mar 2025

New employment rights top priority for HR teams

10 Mar 2025

Singapore’s biggest bank slashes 10% of its workforce...

25 Feb 2025

What does the TV show Severance tell us...

14 Feb 2025

  • 2025 Employee Communications Report PROMOTED | HR and leadership...Read more
  • The Majority of Employees Have Their Eyes on Their Next Move PROMOTED | A staggering 65%...Read more
  • Prioritising performance management: Strategies for success (webinar) WEBINAR | In today’s fast-paced...Read more
  • Self-Leadership: The Key to Successful Organisations PROMOTED | Eletive is helping businesses...Read more
  • Retaining Female Talent: Four Ways to Reduce Workplace Drop Out PROMOTED | International Women’s Day...Read more

Personnel Today Jobs
 

Search Jobs

PERSONNEL TODAY

About us
Contact us
Browse all HR topics
Email newsletters
Content feeds
Cookies policy
Privacy policy
Terms and conditions

JOBS

Personnel Today Jobs
Post a job
Why advertise with us?

EVENTS & PRODUCTS

The Personnel Today Awards
The RAD Awards
Employee Benefits
Forum for Expatriate Management
OHW+
Whatmedia

ADVERTISING & PR

Advertising opportunities
Features list 2025

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • Linkedin


© 2011 - 2025 DVV Media International Ltd

Personnel Today
  • Home
    • All PT content
  • Email sign-up
  • Topics
    • HR Practice
    • Employee relations
    • Learning & training
    • Pay & benefits
    • Wellbeing
    • Recruitment & retention
    • HR strategy
    • HR Tech
    • The HR profession
    • Global
    • All HR topics
  • Legal
    • Case law
    • Commentary
    • Flexible working
    • Legal timetable
    • Maternity & paternity
    • Shared parental leave
    • Redundancy
    • TUPE
    • Disciplinary and grievances
    • Employer’s guides
  • AWARDS
    • Personnel Today Awards
    • The RAD Awards
  • Jobs
    • Find a job
    • Jobs by email
    • Careers advice
    • Post a job
  • Brightmine
    • Learn more
    • Products
    • Free trial
    • Request a quote
  • Webinars
  • Advertise
  • OHW+