Performance reviews can make or break your future at a company, and should be taken seriously both by employer and employee. So why are bosses increasingly leaning on bots to create them?
Per new information from HR software provider Workday Inc., its new suite of AI-powered products are being heavily considered. The tools aim to lean on artificial intelligence to do tasks like create job descriptions and even write annual performance reviews. And according to Bloomberg, some Wall Street banks are close to using it.
“You have 100 employees and it takes seven hours to write a job description, so 700 hours,” Carl Eschenbach, co-chief executive officer of Workday told the outlet in a November 17 report. using a hypothetical example during an interview with Bloomberg at a Workday conference in Barcelona. “Now it takes two minutes. You can do the math, you just saved all that. So that’s a productivity gain. There’s quantifiable impact you can have through the use of AI.”
While this may save HR managers time, it may cause issues with eliminating bias. Research has shown that certain generative AI-powered tools are still riddled with unethical systems.
“AI is built by humans and deployed in systems and institutions that have been marked by entrenched discrimination — from the criminal legal system, to housing, to the workplace, to our financial systems,” the ACLU writes in a 2021 report explaining the dangers of leaning into AI for traditionally human-driven tasks. “Bias is often baked into the outcomes the AI is asked to predict.”
In a LinkedIn post, Lindsey Hill, a Houston-based HR professional, pointed out that bias can show up on either side of the aisle.
“All this talk of AI’s bias being problematic has everyone overlooking one key fact: human bias can be even worse,” Hill wrote. “Studies dating back to 1998 demonstrate that 60% of employee ratings reflect managers’ bias. So, while AI bias may be an issue, it is likely far less significant than human bias.”