Your Employer Already Knows If You Are About to Quit the Company!

Do you know how many resumes does IBM receive on an average day? An astounding 8,000! Yes, it is true that the giant receives more than 8,000 resumes a day, which makes it No. 1 on the job-search site Glassdoor for Gen Z applicants. It is not the only way that the technology giant, employing roughly 350,000 workers knows which resource is looking for career change. Disruptive it may sound, but IBM artificial intelligence technology is now 95 percent accurate when deployed to predict which workers are planning to leave their jobs. This sounds creepy, doesn't it!

IBM has come up with its patented HR attrition system which was unveiled by CEO Ginni Rometty. This system uses machine learning to study the employee's behavior patterns and determine when they might be about to quit, helping organizations with valuable inputs. The company points out that the accuracy of these predictions hover at around 95 percent mark, adding that the program has saved IBM roughly $300 million in retention costs. Speaking of retention, CEO Rometty said at CNBC's "@ Work Talent + HR Summit" that the best time to reach out to an employee is before they quit and go.

How to Reach an Employee

So what does reaching an employee entail? According to Rometty, this could mean education benefits, financial incentives or promotions that motivate the employee to stay with the organization. Media major CNBC claims the AI is successful as it analyses many data points, pointing to important determinants like job satisfaction which is determined through regular performance reviews and the frequency of disagreements or arguments an employee has with other employees and supervisors.

Many Employees need Career Path

Often HR departments and corporate managers have been bogged down at keeping employees on a clear career path and identifying their core skills. This is a domain where AI will play a bigger role in the future.

In the CNBC summit, Rometty said that being transparent with individual employees about their career path is a poignant issue in which many companies still fail. This issue is going to become more critical. With the dynamic work patterns now, the IBM CEO expects that AI will change 100 percent of the jobs in the next five to 10 years.

If an organization is transparent with employee's it is being brutally honest about the skills they need to perform in the job.

IBM AI can zero in on an individual's strengths by better understanding adjacent skills and data patterns. This will, in turn, enable a manager to direct an employee to future opportunities which they may not have seen using methods.

Is there a need for the Current HR system?

Traditional HR management is divided into two systems, one where the employee takes care of their own performance and second where there are poor performers which are taken care by the HR managers. The urgent need of the hour is to bring AI everywhere by getting rid of the existing self-service system that is predominant. In the near future, employees will no longer need to decipher which programs will help them up-skill it will be AI that will suggest each employee what they can learn to get recognized in their career.

Meanwhile, poor performers will not be a problem that is dealt only by managers belonging to HR, legal and finance department but by the solution groups and solutions centers to help senior managers who look for better performance from their employees.

The new technology devised by IBM can view the tasks completed by the employees, the educational courses they have taken and any rankings which they have earned. Through these data points, the AI skills inference and HR managers can gain a greater understanding of an employee's skill set than they would by assessing multiple feedbacks from manager surveys.

In the current scenario, AI is getting better at providing career feedback to employees, like that of IBM'S MYCA (My Career Advisor) AI virtual assistant uses Watson to help employees identify where they have to re-skill themselves.

Summing up, AI will change all jobs once it is in the workflow, and that is indeed the most meaningful kind of AI.