As an HR professional, you may not think of yourself as a content creator. However, HR utilizes content creation throughout several areas of the job, and learning how to harness the power of content creation and storytelling can improve several areas of the organization.
HR has an important duty to communicate information across many functions, including to employees, leaders, and candidates. Many HR pros utilize content creation to help enhance these communications to keep employees more engaged and motivated.
Now, with the capabilities of generative AI at anyone’s fingertips, content creation has never been easier. Using the text, image, and video generation powers of AI, HR can level up their content creation skills to create a more engaged and informed workplace.
How HR Can Utilize Generative AI for Content Creation
Many functional areas of HR can be enhanced with content creation, whether the content is tailored toward employees, candidates, or customers. As an HR pro, you’re most likely already creating content, even if you may not realize it. For example, HR communications like emails are just one form of content creation that HR performs on a regular basis.
With a defined content strategy and top-quality content, HR can help level up their impact across the organization. Done right, content creation in HR can provide a lot of benefits to HR and the organization in general, including:
Improved engagement: Tailored content can keep employees' attention on topics that they may otherwise disengage from. By adding tailored and eye-catching content to routine communications and resources, you can improve engagement with communications and resources, which can have positive effects across the business.
Informed workforce: A byproduct of sustained engagement is a more informed workforce. Especially when it comes to HR communication about more “traditional” topics, adding tailored content creation can ensure that employees get the information they need to make well-rounded decisions about topics like benefits, insurance, and more.
Strengthened branding: Top-quality content creation that follows a defined content strategy can help strengthen employer branding, which can come with its own set of benefits, including better talent attraction and retention.
In the past, content creation may have been put on the back burner, as most HR professionals can’t take the limited time out of their day to create attention-attracting content that will resonate with its intended audience. However, with generative AI, content creation can be enhanced and optimized with little effort.
Although generative AI was first used to create written content, more advanced algorithms such as GPT-4o is able to create high-quality audio, video, and images. This can open up a world of opportunities for HR pros to make a profound impact through AI-generated content creation.
Use Cases for Generative AI in Content Creation
There are a number of opportunities throughout the many functions of HR that can allow HR professionals to use generative AI for content creation. Here are just a few functional areas that can be enhanced through content creation:
Recruitment: Generative AI can craft job descriptions, videos that showcase company culture, and develop social media campaigns to improve employer branding to attract more high-quality candidates.
Onboarding: Generative AI can create welcome videos for new hires that focus on values and culture, develop personalized training modules to get new employees up to speed, and design employee handbooks and resource guides.
Employee engagement: Generative AI can create a host of content tailored toward employee engagement, including routine newsletters about organizational changes, achievements, and upcoming events, as well as surveys and questionnaires to get employee information and feedback.
Information sharing: AI writing assistants can help craft email campaigns to share essential information, develop help guides or FAQ guides about essential employee topics, and even craft infographics and summarize data to help enhance information sharing.
Employee development: Generative AI can assist in many areas of employee development, including creating content for different learning courses, personalizing learning paths, and recommending curated content that is tailored to employee needs.
Tools to explore
There are many different generative AI tools that you can use to help enhance content creation. Some of the most popular tools for content creation in HR include:
GPT-4 by OpenAI: GPT-4 can generate human-like text based on the prompt given to it, which can be used to create written content like email blasts and recruiting materials.
Dall-E: Dall-E is a text-to-image generator that can create images based on prompts. Dall-E can help craft supplemental images for written content or newsletters.
Lumen5: Lumen5 can turn text content into AI-generated videos, and can be used to summarize information into a succinct video, such as a welcome video for onboarding.
5 Steps to High-quality Idea Generation
One of the best things about generative AI is that it acts more like a chatbot than a typical search engine, meaning you can go back and forth with it to tailor it to the exact output you want. HR professionals can use generative AI to bounce ideas around, get past roadblocks, and brainstorm for future projects.
Here are five steps HR pros can use to brainstorm and ideate effectively and efficiently with generative AI:
Define goals and boundaries: Let the generative AI tool know what you’re hoping to get from it, and define limits to help the AI stay focused on what you need.
Give context: The more context you can give AI, the more it can tailor its responses to your specific situation. Consider adding details such as company size, industry, workforce demographics, or anything else that may be relevant to the objective of the AI session.
Choose the right tool: Ensure that whatever tool you’re using meets your necessary criteria, as well as one that is reputable, especially if you’re planning on inputting any employee data.
Vary prompts: Use various prompts to help tweak the AI’s responses and generate more ideas.
Iterate: Iteration can seem tedious, but it can help take a simple response into a complex one. When it comes to brainstorming for content creation, iteration can help narrow down ideas or expand on concepts, which helps spur creativity and innovation in HR.
Best Practices for Content Creation with Generative AI
Like anything else, AI tools are only as effective as you allow them to be. It’s important to follow best practices when using generative AI to help ensure that the output is as relevant as possible, data privacy is protected, and information truly gets through to employees.
Here are some best practices for HR pros using generative AI for content creation:
Prioritize data privacy: Especially when dealing with employee information or data, data privacy should be an utmost priority. Vet any AI tools to ensure that your data is secure before inputting any type of data. Never put in sensitive employee information, because not only is there a data privacy risk, but because generative AI typically uses conversations to continue learning, that data may be absorbed by the generative AI and reused.
Learn how to prompt engineer: Prompt engineering is just what it sounds like: engineering the prompts given to an AI chatbot to maximize the value of its output. By learning simple methods for prompt engineering, you can help ensure that you get a tailored, relevant answer instead of a generic one.
Use a human fact-checker: No matter what type of content AI creates – whether it’s text, photo, or video – you should always have a human reading over its responses and tweaking it to ensure accuracy and organizational alignment.
Provide data when necessary: High-quality data can help the AI make more data-driven decisions and tailor its output to incorporate data results. This way, HR also has a dataset to refer back to that explains how the AI came up with its response.
Communicate with employees and stakeholders: Let employees and stakeholders know about how the organization is generative AI and be open to any questions or suggestions employees may have about it.
Final Thoughts
Although you may not think of yourself as a “content creator,” there is a lot of content that HR must make – and it has to be accurate, engaging, and eye-catching to help capture employees’ attention.
Luckily, generative AI can be a powerful tool in content creation. With ever-evolving technology, AI can create photos, videos, and text that can help in many areas of HR. However, it’s essential to use best practices to ensure that the results you’re getting from AI are high-quality and relevant.
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