Enrique Rubio: Well, let's start here, and it's more of a foundational component, rather than actually using the tool, right, which we will do. The ChatGPT is not perfect, neither it is the response the human would give to any issue, right? There's always room for improvement. And I want to say that because the best-case scenario will always be the collaboration and the partnership between ChatGPT and the human.
What this means is that whatever you ask ChatGPT will never be perfect. Whatever you respond with your own, ChatGPT will probably try to do it better. But when you do it together, that's always the best-case scenario, as I mentioned before. So as you're asking questions to ChatGPT, which we're going to be doing now, bare in mind that number one, we're doing this exercise real time as we're recording this podcast.
But number two, when you do it on your own, for whatever practice or whatever problem or whatever thing that you're working on in your practice, in your HR practice, or whatever you do at work, just understand that you can't take ChatGPT's input or response to your questions as the final word on anything You have to add the human element, whether that is in the form of asking more questions to get a more refined answer, or whether it is at the end of the journey, you may need to go back to that answer and reframe it in a way that doesn't sound too computerized, perhaps that sounds more like a human, right.
So in this case, imagine that you are a small company, right? You are, say ABC Enterprises, I don't know, maybe you are a 500 people company or a 100 person company, you may be just to up to maybe three people working in your HR department, if at all, you may have an HR strategist, or maybe you have a one admin in HR and maybe one recruiter, and you're trying to grow your company by 20%, which is a conservative number if you are in the startup world over the next one year.
So if you are in this role, imagine that you are a new leader in this role, and you are just in that company and your mandate is help us grow this company by 20% next year. So I'm going to go to ChatGPT right now, which I have opened on version number four, you can use version number 3.5 or version number four. 3.5 as a little faster, but less accurate perhaps than version four. So I'm using version four, and it may take a little bit of extra time to do this right and bear with me, by the way, because you may hear the sound of my typing in the keyboard. So I want to ask I'm gonna say something.
ABC Enterprise is I don't know, a 100-person company aiming to grow by 20% next year. I am the HR leader for the company, this is what I'm writing, for the company and I want to know what areas should be my priorities for the next year in order to achieve the 20% growth goal. Let's see what ChatGPT says right? And, of course, achieving a 20% growth, giving you, you know, a little bit of an answer here.
It's not just HR's responsibility. That is the first paragraph that is saying, thank you so much for telling us that growing by 20% is not just HR responsibilities, it's everybody's responsibility.
And then you go, it's telling us right now, I want to try to bring up some of the top priorities that are coming up in here. Recruitment and onboarding is scalable recruitment process, and an effective onboarding process. Training and development, upskilling current employees, leadership development, performance management, clear KPIs and goals.
So we're gonna be talking about OKRs, right now, feedback and reviews, retention strategies, culture and communication, workforce planning, it continues to tell me more answers, but I'm gonna stop there one second. Felicia want to go back with you. And from these answers in here, recruitment and onboarding, training and development, performance management, retention strategies, culture and communication, workforce planning, diversity and inclusion, the thing continues to spit out more answers. But from this top 10. Felicia, which one do you want to work on right now?
And by the way, everybody, we're doing this real time. So we did agree on a case before coming to this recording, but what we're doing is real time, so bear with us. So Felicia, just pick one of this.
Felicia Shakiba: Yeah, thank you so much, Enrique. This is so amazing to see. And as I'm watching ChatGPT share these answers, my mind is moving fairly quickly. And a lot more questions than answers are coming up for me. So for example, when I think about workforce planning, right, because if you don't have workforce planning properly laid out, it's really difficult to say, Okay, if we are going to grow by 20%, what areas of the business do we need to grow in?
If you think about workforce planning, and you also think about succession, for example, if we have to find someone to fit like i.e. Head of Technology or Head of Engineering, let's say, there might be somebody inside the company that might fit that role better that we could put in that place, instead of look outside the organization. If we don't have workforce planning and that succession element in place first, about where people need to be in the next year, I think it's going to be really difficult to pinpoint who we want to recruit and what type of roles we want in the organization.
So I think one of the first things that I would do is really look at how are we going to move people that we already have within the organization before we even get to streamlining recruitment.
Enrique Rubio (07:46): Yeah, yeah, well, that's a great example. A strategy number six spit out by ChatGPT is workforce planning. And let's just dig a little deeper into that one, right, let's see what happens. So I'm going to ask ChatGPT up to again, I want to focus on developing a workforce planning strategy for ABC Enterprises, what may be the challenges, let's say just for now, and then we're gonna go to the OKRs by the way, what may be the challenges around doing workforce planning, because it's a small company, I'm a new leader, I have no idea what challenges I'm going to be dealing with, and I would like to know, right?
I mean, if GhatGPT is giving you answers from aggregate information from around the world. So you know, there are 1000s of other HR leaders who have said in the past, if I am growing a company from 100 people to 150, or 200, people, whatever it is, these are the 10 challenges that I have dealt with when it comes to workforce planning. Me as a new leader in this role. I may want to know that so that they I keep an eye on those challenges.
So that's why I'm asking for ABC Enterprises. What may be the challenges around doing workforce planning, and what should be the priorities for an HR strategy focus on only, let's say, for now, on workforce planning, I just want to see what it says. Again, I haven't asked this question as before to ChatGPT so whatever we're getting here is going to be new for you listening or watching this video or- and for me. So forecasting demand, accurately predicting the number on types of roles required what you were saying before, Felicia, we need to know where the team is going to be growing. Talent pool shortage, making sure that we know where there may be some scarcity.
Balancing current needs, and future needs. Cost implications, changing business environment, retention, data, accuracy, cultural fit. Those are some of the challenges for ABC Enterprises. Again, these are very general questions, don't expect this to know everything about ABC Enterprises. If you haven't given the software, ChatGPT all the information that it may need to give you an answer. So of course, when we talk about priorities for a workforce planning strategy is going to give you some very general ideas, right clear understanding of business goals.
Evidently, if you're an HR leader, helping out your company to grow by 20% you're gonna have to talk to all the other leaders to know where the team is going to be growing and wherever you want to put the most amount of effort. For example, imagine that in this company, they want to put the most amount of effort in growing the, I don't know, the development or engineering team. So that's going to give you some insights that you can fit back into ChatGPT.
Data driven decisions of the skills gap analysis, flexible recruitment strategies. So it gives you a bunch of different ideas here of what you could do in your HR strategy as priorities when it comes to workforce planning. So you know, I'm gonna just pick one of these, right? I'm gonna say ABC Enterprises wants to grow, I don't know the engineering and development team faster than any other teams, I don't know if this is real, I'm just making it up, right, engineering teams. What should we do when it comes to workforce planning for the engineering team? Again, very general question. As you give ChatGPT more information, it is going to be able to give you better responses.
Again, no response will ever be perfect. Some of this will be very general, some of this will be very specific, and you will have to play... to play with that. The point is that it's giving you a lot of information, some of which you may have thought about before, and some of it may be completely new for you. Like, I mean, you'd be surprised still today, how many HR leaders spend in high growth companies - spend so much time in recruitment strategies, and they forget the quality of the onboarding and the quality of the cultural experience for those employees.
So you end up spending a lot of money, trying to expand your talent, by whatever amount is needed to meet company needs, only to see them go 3, 6, 9 months down the road, because the onboarding wasn't proper, or there was no cultural sort of alignment or fit between that person and the needs of the company. So if you didn't even think about that before ChatGPT gave us those insights, right?
And now you may say, Oh, I didn't think about onboarding before, so now I'm thinking about it. And in fact, when he asked his latest question that he asked about ABC Enterprise wants to grow the engineering and development team, how should we think about workforce planning for that specific team? There are some answers here that are very general, and one of them is onboarding, ensure a comprehensive onboarding process that equip new hires with the company's tech stack, coding, etc, and assign a mentor to help those new hires.
And I'm going to ask here, can you suggest some OKRs for onboarding of new engineering and development team, please take into account that this is a new company, I'm just adding a new element here of information, right? That's something that I didn't say before... that this is a new company leaders, some leaders are inexperienced people leaders, and the company is, I don't know, I'm gonna say this laser focused on growth. Let's just see what happens here. I don't know what's going to come up with.
So I asked for some OKRs here. So now ChatGPT is thinking a little bit about this, it took a little bit of time to think as opposed to the previous questions, right? So it's a little bit less general. So now we got a few answers to here.
Objective number one, streamline the onboarding process for engineering and development team. And it gives you some data: Reduce the time from hiring to a new engineer's first code commit by 15% over the next quarter, that's very interesting, I wouldn't have thought about that specific goal.
By the way, this generally is called Time to Productivity, right? When from the very first day that a person comes in the door to the very first day that they actually deliver results that can be quantified, that's a very powerful indicator. I didn't think about that, but in this case, it is telling us reduce the time from hiring to a new engineers first code commit by 15% over the next quarter. So this may not make sense at all for you, or in May, maybe you didn't even think about this before. Let me go to another goal here.
Objective number two: Equip new engineers with necessary knowledge and tools efficiently. And one key result that is proposed by ChatGPT in this case, is ensure that 95% of new hires are paired with a mentor or somebody within the first three days, that is fantastic. Again, you know, you may have thought about this, but it took us literally what five minutes to create this OKRs and these key results with ChatGPT.
Some of them may not make sense for you. Now it's the human element bringing that to your board and thinking, does it make sense to say in the first three days, maybe we say 100% In the first week, or 75% in the first two days, you decide what makes sense for you. But these are powerful insights that you can use to leverage on. So anyway, I'll stop there for a second, Felicia, because I think I've said a lot so far.
Felicia Shakiba: Enrique, I think that first of all, you did an amazing job sharing this journey and how we got here. So thank you for that. And one of the things that I think when I'm working with clients, they forget that just because it is HR's objective to help support these new leaders in the hiring process, they forget that OKR also needs to be shared with those hiring managers. Just thinking about for example, if you move up the page just to object, I think number three: Strengthen leadership skills among new and existing team leaders.
So that is really about helping those leaders who do need to grow their team and making sure that they understand what the hiring process looks like and feels like, what their expectations are for onboarding new employees. And they should actually share this objective but could have different key results, in their line of thinking.
Enrique Rubio (15:30): I know we are getting short on time, but I want to dig deeper, a little deeper into one element of what you just said, which is the working out of a goal or an OKR, together with our peers. So that is not just us, who are the accountable for those OKRs. So I'm gonna go to the response that ChatGPT gave before. So objective number three says: Strengthen leadership skills among new and existing team leaders. Remember that we were talking about before, we gave ChatGPT a context, we said, not only are we talking about ABC Enterprises, now, we're telling you that most of the leaders from this company are inexperienced leaders. So maybe they are younger people that are beginning their journey, or whatever it is, right. So that was objective number three.
And the second key result for that objective was: Achieved a 20% reduction in new hire queries and concerns escalated to HR, indicating better problem resolution at the team level. I love that, by the way, I'm going to copy that literally. That's what I'm doing right now. I'm gonna copy that. I'm gonna go back to the ChatGPT and I'm gonna quote it. And I'm gonna say, can you please, I'm gonna reread the result: Achieve a 20% reduction in new hire queries and concerns escalated to HR, this is fantastic, by the way.
Less work for HR, because we're focusing on other things, making sure that these queries are resolved at the team level, if they can be resolved there if they don't have anything to do with it, or of course. So I'm asking anybody for that specific result: Can you list several ways to, I don't know, I'm gonna say here, to influence hiring manager or team leader to do this together with us in HR, just I just want to dig a little deeper here in this question. And, by the way, talking about prompts while we get here, their response, so many cheat sheets on prompts to ChatGPT.
Forget about those cheat sheets, by the way, just imagine that you're having a conversation with somebody. That's the way you have to think about this, right? Imagine that you're having a conversation with another human ChatGPT is not another human, but when you imagine your conversation that way, that if you ask a question to another human, and that person responds back to you, and you're not getting the kind of answer that you were looking for, what you do is just you give you ask another question, a follow up question, or you provide more context, or you provide more information, or you ask for clarification,.
It's the same thing here. Don't think about those prompts. Think more of it as you're having a conversation with another human getting an answer. If the answer is satisfactory, fantastic. If it's not, which most likely will not be at the very beginning, ask more questions, provide more context, or request more information and whatnot. So I asked that question for key result. number two, can you list several ways to influence the hiring manager or team leader to do this together?
And when I say this, it means to have new employees resolve their questions at the team level and not back to HR. And then it provides a number of answers: Educate on the importance of this that... empowerment and training, open communication channels, provide tools and resources. Some of these may be very general, some of these answers you may have thought about them before, and maybe some are completely new for you.
But once again, I'll stop here, because I think we're getting up on time. But I think this is a good way to approach these kinds of conversations. And you can have whatever ways you want. I use ChatGPT right now literally every day for a number of different things from helping me design learning and development programs to just reviewing a letter that I'm using to invite a speaker to one event, things of that kind. And the answer that ChatGPT will give me will always depend not only on ChatGPT, but on the kinds of questions and the context that I am providing.
And always the best-case scenario will be how you ask those questions, how you provide that context, how you take the answer, or the responses that should the parties giving you and how you add your own human element to it and decide what makes sense, what needs reframing, what needs to be reworked, and what can be left as is.
Felicia Shakiba (19:28): Enrique this has been amazing. I almost think that I would encourage people who are listening to this to work with not just ChatGPT but work with someone like another human or a group together with ChatGPT, which I don't think I ever really thought about before because I thought, Why would I need so many people in the room when ChatGPT has all these amazing ideas?
But at the same time, I think that the riff between you and myself made this so much more applicable and made more sense that I think that ChatGPT isn't just an assistant, it's a collaborator.
Enrique Rubio: Imagine you and I just did in 10 minutes, right? Imagine if you and I were part of that team from ABC Enterprises working this out and coming together and saying hey, Felicia spends the next hour a couple of hours, literally playing with ChatGPT. That's what we're doing. We're playing with ChatGPT. And ChatGPT is giving us answers, and we're like, whoa, I didn't think about that. Let me dig a little deeper here. Let me dig a little deeper there. And then you start getting more and more insights, more ideas. And it's powerful.
So that again, goes back to what we said before the collaboration between the technology and the human. And if there are more humans, more than one human involved, even better, because the interaction between those two humans can improve the kind of questions and context that you're providing to ChatGPT. So I love that point that you just made.
Felicia Shakiba: Thank you so much, Enrique for being here. This was amazing.
Enrique Rubio: Thank you.
