HR today is a fast-moving space—in part owing to the emergence of AI in HR—and Stefani Steinway has a front-row seat to it all.
Throughout her 14-year career at multinational credit reporting agency Equifax, Steinway has held roles focused on recruitment, talent management, employee experience and more. For the last two years, she’s been in the CHRO seat at Equifax Workforce Solutions, a subsidiary of Equifax providing HR solutions.
Leading HR at such an organization, she says, gives her a unique vantage point into the day-to-day challenges facing today’s HR professionals—and the most innovative answers. In many cases, those solutions lie in AI, Steinway says. But, she cautions, AI implementation relies not just on the tech itself, but on HR’s capacity to shift its behavior and mindset in order to drive adoption and think strategically about a changing landscape.
Steinway spoke with HR Executive about the promise and pitfalls of AI in HR, and where leaders should focus today.
HR Executive: What is the greatest opportunity to elevate the strategic role of the HR function today that people leaders may be missing out on?
Steinway: I have a great vantage point as an HR leader in the HR services industry. I get to provide real-time feedback and be a true voice of the customer to help us solve with creative solutions for our business. This is a moment as the HR profession to shift the paradigm from being a reactive function to a proactive function. To me, that is what innovation and strategy are all about. The greatest opportunity for HR leaders is to embrace technology, particularly around automation and AI—to free up their teams from manual, administrative tasks.
Equifax recently surveyed HR professionals, and 50% reported that one of their top challenges is using technology to automate workflows. But if we can automate those repetitive tasks, it would give us time to focus on what really matters in the employee lifecycle—enhancements to employee engagement, stronger talent development plans, retention, proactive hiring; all of those can be improved.
HR Executive: What are the most critical ways you’re actively aligning people and business strategies at Equifax Workforce Solutions?
Steinway: We have a multi-layered education campaign so employees can understand our business strategies—town halls, site visits, ask-me-anything opportunities, coffee chats with leaders. We’re constantly soliciting feedback to ensure our employees know and understand our business strategies and their role within those strategies. In fact, we just had an employee engagement survey, and one of the highest scores was when we asked our employees, “Do you know and understand how your role contributes to the success of the organization?”
That’s a great indication to me that we shouldn’t stop our work there. Throughout the entire employee lifecycle—from onboarding to offboarding—we continue to invest in scalable programs, like leadership development, digital fluency, AI education, career pathing. All of those things, in a multi-layered approach, can help our employees drive our business strategies.
HR Executive: What are the most effective uses for which your team is integrating AI in HR processes?
Steinway: First and foremost, we’re taking a very human-centered approach to integrating AI. We want to use AI to automate repetitive tasks that free up our time to focus on more strategic initiatives. Seventy-six percent of survey respondents reported using AI to improve efficiency in hiring and onboarding; that’s only scratching the surface of what AI can do. Down the line, it’ll be important to get the right HR tech vendor to help bring novel solutions for your particular needs and problems.
See also: An expert’s 5 pillars for successful AI in HR implementation
HR Executive: Have you encountered any friction in incorporating emerging technology? If so, how have you navigated that?
Steinway: We’re navigating friction with new technology by building culture. We have to start with the culture first: building digital fluency, giving employees training and resources at their fingertips so they have a solid understanding of how to use the AI in the day-to-day. We emphasize AI as a tool for growth, not a threat. We’re investing in some of those scalable, training tools and resources that can help empower our employees to do this work confidently. That can ease the transition and foster innovation.
HR Executive: How can HR leaders refresh their own approaches to change management as AI in HR becomes an increasing focus of their work?
Steinway: Change management is and forever will be incredibly important—and it’s sometimes, unfortunately, overlooked. We take a very employee-driven, citizen-led approach to getting employees comfortable with new processes, especially with AI. That means sharing best practices, promoting regular town halls, developing an internal website employees can go to and ask questions.
We encourage employees to utilize AI as an opportunity. For me, the most important thing we need to think about as HR leaders is modeling the growth mindset to embrace innovation and encourage our organization to use these new technologies. We can give the best practices and the resources, but it’s also about modeling that behavior and mindset.
HR Executive: Where do you see the greatest potential for technology advances to enable HR to drive success with strategic workplace planning?
Steinway: The greatest potential for innovation is around predictive analytics. AI can predict future staffing needs, identify retention risks, analyze skills gaps. That all allows HR to be that proactive partner to ensure we have the right talent in the right place at the right time.
HR Executive: Apart from technology, what are the necessary mindsets that will drive leading-edge workforce planning in today’s landscape?
Steinway: One of the things I have been evolving as a new behavior for myself—and I’m encouraging our leadership team to do the same—is to start asking ourselves, how can we do this differently?
For example, in the survey Equifax did, we found that only 12% of respondents reported consistently hiring candidates quickly. We know this is a problem. Speed-to-hire needs to be improved. Bringing an innovative mindset, we can ask ourselves, What should we be doing differently? What does the process look like today, and how can I shift the candidate experience or the hiring manager experience a bit by diagnosing this problem differently? We have to be asking those questions with the technology components sitting alongside.
