How Darussalam Assets is tapping AI in HR operations

Darussalam Assets, a holding company managing a diverse portfolio of government-linked companies in Brunei, has been leveraging the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to improve its human resources (HR) operations.

Its journey began in 2016 with the implementation of SAP’s S/4Hana enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite across its portfolio companies, followed by the roll-out of the SAP SuccessFactors HR suite in 2019.

The adoption of SAP SuccessFactors was a crucial step, enabling the company to streamline its learning management, performance management and recruitment management systems.

More recently, Darussalam Assets has started using SuccessFactors’ business AI capabilities to automate and optimise various recruitment processes, resulting in significant time and resource savings.

An AI-powered job description generator, for instance, allows hiring managers to create job postings in minutes. These postings can then be sent to the HR team for approval within a day, a process that previously took days, according to Apurv Sharma, senior manager of group information systems at Darussalam Assets.

The company has also integrated SuccessFactors’ recruitment capabilities with Microsoft Teams, which allows the AI to generate interview questions based on the competencies and requirements outlined in job descriptions.

When a virtual interview is scheduled, the AI-generated interview questions are automatically populated in the Microsoft Teams platform, which the interviewers can then use to guide the conversation. This saves the interviewers time and effort, as they no longer need to manually craft questions or worry about ensuring consistency across interviews.

Darussalam Assets’ AI journey has not been without challenges, however. For one, it has to ensure that the job description generation tool can deliver accurate and reliable results. To this end, the company’s HR team worked closely with their IT counterparts to train the tool, aligning outputs with company standards and requirements.

“The moment we were done training with 10 to 15 job descriptions, from the 16th or 17th description onwards, it was already generating descriptions the way we wanted,” said Sharma. “It takes a bit of learning, but not too much as it learns very fast.”

Looking ahead, Darussalam Assets plans to leverage SAP’s Joule AI assistant to provide accurate and consistent information to employees on group policies, procedures and regulations. This would reduce the need for manual lookups and improve the overall employee experience.

“Rather than use an outside AI model and getting all sorts of information which might be inaccurate, we want to train Joule on the information we have,” said Sharma. “Across the group, this chatbot can be available at any point of time to provide standard answers to questions like, ‘What’s the amount of annual leave available to executives?’”

Additionally, the company is testing the use of AI to analyse candidate profiles and match them to the required skills and competencies, improving the efficiency of the screening process.

Even as Darussalam Assets is making use of AI-infused business applications like SuccessFactors, the company is still building AI models to bring AI capabilities to other systems it uses that are not AI-capable, at a time when the technology is being overhyped.

Sharma noted that while many technology suppliers may pitch a system as AI-capable, “it doesn’t make sense until you really have it in your hands to see what it has learned and get insights out of it – and if it’s not there, then it’s no use”.