How Is AI Affecting HR? Hype vs. Reality with Matt Barkley

AI is affecting HR by taking over repetitive administrative work, especially in recruiting, screening, scheduling, and basic benefits questions. Matt Barkley argues the real value is not replacing HR professionals. It is giving them more time for coaching, employee support, corrective action, culture, and decisions that still require human judgment. 

Episode Summary 

AI is getting plenty of attention in HR, but the most useful conversations are the practical ones: Where does it actually help? Where does it create risk? And where does the human side of HR still matter most? 

In this episode of People-ing with Purpose, Mary Beth Meadows and Katie Saliba talk with Matt Barkley, Chief Human Resources Officer at Great Southern Wood Preserving, about how AI and HR technology are changing the way companies recruit, screen applicants, answer common questions, and reduce administrative drag. 

Matt brings the conversation back to fit. Technology can help companies move faster, but it should be evaluated through the lens of the business, the culture, and the people who will use it. His advice is straightforward: take your time, ask better questions, and make sure the tool supports the way your company actually works. 

Guest Bio 

Matt Barkley is the Chief Human Resources Officer at Great Southern Wood Preserving, the largest wood-preserving company in the country, with approximately 2,400 team members across 13 states. 

Matt has worked in HR for more than 30 years across public and privately held companies. His experience includes HR strategy, talent alignment, systems implementation, employee development, and organizational support. In this episode, he brings a practical operator’s view to the conversation around AI: where it can help, where it can’t, and why HR leaders should protect the human side of the work. 

What You’ll Learn 

In this episode, Mary Beth, Katie, and Matt discuss: 

• How HR technology has moved the profession away from paper-heavy administrative work 
• Why AI is most useful for repetitive and transactional HR tasks 
• How AI can improve recruiting, screening, interview scheduling, and candidate experience 
• Why leaders should be careful about using AI in employee relations, coaching, corrective action, and sensitive workplace issues 
• How to think about bias, data quality, and legal risk when adopting HR technology 
• Why company culture should guide technology decisions 
• How Great Southern Wood Preserving is using HR technology to reduce time-to-hire 
• Why moving fast with AI is less important than choosing tools that fit the business 

If this episode made you think differently about AI, HR systems, or the tools your business is considering next, share it with your leadership team. 

For more conversations about HR, staffing, leadership, and people strategy, listen to more episodes of People-ing with Purpose. 

Connect with PRemployer

• Visit our website 
• Subscribe to our blog
• Connect with our hosts on LinkedIn: 
  • Katie Saliba 
  • Mary Beth Meadows 

Transcript

Transcript 

Transcript lightly edited for clarity and readability. 

Introduction 

Mary Beth Meadows: 

Welcome to People-ing with Purpose, a podcast dedicated to helping companies manage staffing and HR. Each week, we’ll offer insights to simplify your HR processes and discuss challenges people face to help you find, retain, and engage the best talent. 

We’re your hosts from PR Companies. I’m Mary Beth Meadows. 

Katie Saliba: 

And I’m Katie Saliba. PR Companies is a family of companies headquartered in Southeast Alabama. We’re dedicated to helping businesses maximize their success through leveraging their human capital. 

Join us as we share our favorite staffing and HR strategies and help you drive business growth through your most valuable asset: your people. 

Katie Saliba: 

Welcome back to People-ing with Purpose. Today we’re diving into AI and HR, a topic that’s getting a lot of attention right now. 

Mary Beth Meadows: 

Most of that conversation swings between extremes. Either AI is a solution to everything, or it’s something to be cautious of. This episode is about a more practical, grounded perspective. 

Katie Saliba: 

We’re joined by Matt Barkley, Chief Human Resources Officer at Great Southern Wood Preserving, who brings more than three decades of experience in HR strategy and systems. 

Mary Beth Meadows: 

Matt shares where AI is actually creating value, like speeding up hiring, improving candidate experience, and supporting better decisions. 

Katie Saliba: 

But he’s also clear that AI can’t replace the human side of HR. It can’t coach, handle tough conversations, or build real relationships. 

Mary Beth Meadows: 

And for leaders, the takeaway is simple: start with your culture, take your time, and make sure any technology truly fits your business. 

Katie Saliba: 

Here’s our conversation with Matt Barkley. 

Matt Barkley’s Background 

Katie Saliba: 

Hey Matt, thanks for joining us today. 

Matt Barkley: 

Good morning. 

Katie Saliba: 

Good morning. We’re excited to have you. To kick things off, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background? 

Matt Barkley: 

My name is Matt Barkley. I’m the Chief HR Officer for Great Southern Wood Preserving here in Abbeville, Alabama. We’re the largest wood-preserving company in the country, with about 2,400 team members in 13 states. 

I’ve been working in HR for the past 30 years with both public and privately held companies, and I certainly love what I do. I love being in HR. 

How Technology Has Changed HR 

Mary Beth Meadows: 

Matt, with your experience leading HR strategy, implementing systems, and helping organizations align talent with business goals, how has technology impacted the way you think about HR? 

Matt Barkley: 

If I look back to when I started, it was personnel, and it was very transactional. We were talking one-on-one and still handwriting things. I hate to say it, but I still remember using paper. 

Now, you can apply for a job, do all your onboarding paperwork, and even do your safety training online. You can do it from your phone. 

We’ve really adopted a way of getting rid of paper transactions. What that has allowed us to do is step into a role of development. How do we make those team members better? How do we work on succession planning? How do we truly drive this business forward with our talent? 

We’ve gone from personnel to truly being HR professionals and helping our team members develop into the best they can be. 

Technology has taken a lot of that administrative work away. I remember at my last company, we had a 10-by-20 room full of filing cabinets. By the time I left, we had two filing cabinets because we scanned everything and made it accessible wherever we were. 

Technology does a lot of great things for us, but it still doesn’t get rid of the human element. You still have to be hands-on, talk with your team members, and keep that high-touch level. 

What Is Overblown About AI in HR? 

Katie Saliba: 

Obviously, we’re here today to talk about AI in HR. When you look at the current conversation around AI, HR, and HR tech, what do you feel is most overblown? 

Matt Barkley: 

That we’re going to get rid of HR professionals. 

I hear that. “HR people won’t be needed in the future. AI is going to take all this over. AI is going to take over everything. We’re going to get rid of jobs.” 

In my opinion, we have to be good customer service people, and AI is not going to take that away. AI is not going to take away the caring you have to do. 

Most of the work we do is in that gray box. It’s a specific situation with a team member who is experiencing something for the first time, something we may have never seen before, and something AI isn’t trained to handle. 

Maybe someday it gets there, but I don’t see it in my lifetime. Maybe I’m wrong. I also didn’t have a cell phone when I was in high school, and now kids can’t live without one. 

But to me, that human element, human interaction, and customer service cannot be taken away with AI. 

Mary Beth Meadows: 

We don’t think so either. Katie and I would answer that the same way. We see it more as a toolkit to improve productivity, not replace people. 

Where AI Is Most Useful Right Now 

Mary Beth Meadows: 

What do you think are the best places for companies to use technology, and specifically AI, in ways that are practical and make sense? 

Matt Barkley: 

I can talk about it from our perspective. 

One of the challenges we see is that people drop off when they’re doing their application online. It takes time. They have to put in their resume and work history, and we see a big drop from the time they start. We’ll lose them in the process. 

Where we’re engaging AI now is in the application process. It asks about 10 questions. It helps with name, address, work history, and it’s doing that work in the background. It helps match them to a job. 

If we’re hiring for a forklift operator, for example, and we say you need one to three years of experience and you don’t have that, we may not put you in that job. But we may suggest a general labor position, lumber handler, or machine operator. 

It can drive those decisions very quickly. 

It also helps hiring managers screen faster. It takes time out of the process. It can take days out of the application process. 

For us, that’s one way to use AI technology: make it easier, keep applicants engaged, and get them into the right job faster. 

At this point, those are very transactional items. They are not the gray issues we deal with in HR. They are easy transactional items that we can teach the system to handle. 

That’s where I see AI having a really big impact. It handles the quick, transactional items that don’t require a lot of customer service. Then my team members can spend time on the really important things: the tough questions from team members and the tough questions our leaders are asking us to support. 

Katie Saliba: 

Seeing it used in staffing, recruiting, and talent acquisition is exciting for us because there’s never enough time in the day to get through all the applicants, applications, and people calling to ask about the status of their application. 

Matt Barkley: 

It’s not taking the place of interviewing. I’m still not screening candidates out. What we’re trying to do is get them directed to the best fit for them as fast as possible. 

In the talent market right now, it’s a tight labor market. The faster you can get them in the process and to the interview, the higher retention you have. Gone are the days when you could let an application sit around for two weeks. You can’t let it sit for 48 hours. People will be gone and working somewhere else. 

It’s all about speed to interview and speed to process. 

Other HR Areas Where AI Can Help 

Katie Saliba: 

Aside from talent acquisition, what other areas of HR benefit most from stronger systems, automation, or AI support? 

Matt Barkley: 

I think we can use it in benefits. 

One of the exciting places we’re looking at is developing our top 10 benefits questions. The questions that are repetitive: What’s my coverage level? What doctors can I see? How do I enroll? 

Those don’t always have to involve high customer contact. They’re quick questions. How can we put those into an AI database so someone can access the answer by phone, computer, app, or call? 

That way, it’s not tying up an HR person with a repetitive question we get all the time. 

Not that I don’t want people to talk to us, but I also have to recognize that I have a lot of 22-year-olds who don’t want to talk to me. 

Mary Beth Meadows: 

That’s a great idea. I recently learned that artificial intelligence has its own kind of optimization, similar to search engine optimization. In the early days, SEO was about making sure your company website was easy to find when people Googled you. 

Now artificial intelligence has a separate category of things. Building that list of frequently asked questions around benefits can make the AI experience more accurate. 

What’s interesting is that people think about AI as a way to eliminate people, but people have to think about the strategy behind using AI. If we’re not intentional about the data we’re putting out there, then the library AI pulls from becomes more inaccurate, and the experience spirals downward. 

Matt Barkley: 

I tell people, “Don’t believe everything ChatGPT tells you.” 

Katie Saliba: 

It’s a little bit of a pain point for us because we constantly have to have someone go behind AI and the questions people are asking on our website to make sure it’s answering properly. It still requires the human touch for us too. 

Matt Barkley: 

Exactly. That’s where we’re being very pointed. We’re saying, “Here’s where we’re going to engage it. We’re going to make sure the data is right.” 

We’ll get better with it as we build. But I want to baby-step this along because it comes back to true customer service for our team members. I don’t want them to say, “They’re just telling us to use this and don’t want to talk to us.” 

That’s not the case. 

I need to engage with my 55-year-old team members who don’t want that technology, but I also need to engage with my 18- to 22-year-old group who have no desire whatsoever to talk to me. They’re happy to look at their phone. 

I want the data we give them in both scenarios to be exactly the same and to be right. We’re going through that learning process right now. It’s fun. I’m relearning how this technology works. I’m having to rewire my brain around how to address these issues. 

What Still Requires Human Judgment? 

Mary Beth Meadows: 

What are some areas that still require human judgment, no matter how advanced technology gets? Where do you think people still need to pick up the phone? 

Matt Barkley: 

As easy as it is to answer some benefits questions, there are tough situations we deal with every day. 

People being sick. A family member needing care. Time-off requests. Someone saying, “I need intermittent leave to take care of a parent.” 

Those are things where you want to sit down with someone, talk with them, and work with them. You want to truly be a partner with them to get through that situation. 

Then there’s the side everybody hates about HR: corrective action. 

Sitting down with a team member and saying, “Here’s where you’re not meeting goals,” or “Here’s where you may have taken too much time off.” Those difficult conversations will not be fixed by AI. 

That’s a situation where you have to use judgment and make sure that team member is headed down the right path. 

We all make an investment in getting people onboard. There’s a lot of money spent getting them onboard, and you want them to be around a long time. We pride ourselves on the tenure we have with a lot of team members here. 

I want to keep them. We’ve invested a lot in them, and they’ve invested a lot in us. 

I haven’t found an AI tool that’s going to teach me how to coach people or teach somebody else how to coach them up. That human interaction, sitting down and talking with team members, I don’t know that it will ever get replaced. 

Katie Saliba: 

Growing your people, for sure. Discipline and corrective action remind me of motherhood. We discipline our kids because we love them, not because we don’t. 

Matt Barkley: 

I have a 16-year-old at home, and I learn every day how I don’t coach well. I love her to death, and she is a great kid, but I also have to know how to handle her versus a team member over here who can’t get to work on time. 

Every one of them is different. I have to deal with them differently. That’s where I can’t ever see AI replacing that. 

Legal and Bias Considerations with AI 

Katie Saliba: 

From a legal standpoint, where should leaders be more careful when they start introducing AI or new HR technologies into their business? 

Matt Barkley: 

One of the advantages of AI, at least from the screening process, is that there is no bias. It’s looking at what your experience is and what you’re applying for. It doesn’t care about names, age, or where you’re from. 

There’s no introduction of bias into the situation. What’s great is that you’re getting candidates filtered to you who are the most qualified for a job, regardless of background. I think that drives good behavior for supervisors and managers. 

Situations where you are screening people out based on bias are a problem. That has to be monitored, and I hope it is never introduced. 

We want diversity in our team members. AI technology, when used well, does not know those things. 

But you still have to watch for it. We still have to learn as we go forward. We do not want bias introduced into a technology platform where it can continue to roll forward without controls. 

How Great Southern Wood Preserving Is Using HR Technology 

Mary Beth Meadows: 

What would be an example of an HR technology or AI practice that you’ve implemented that’s working well? 

Matt Barkley: 

We’re doing a project with UKG, our HRIS provider, called Rapid Hire. 

It’s 10 short questions. It’s a chatbot. When you apply for a job, it asks you a series of questions. It asks your name, where you live, your work history, and whether you have certain experience. 

What’s great about it is that it builds your application in the background. You’re not having to sit there and build it yourself. 

If you meet all the qualifications, our managers have their availability plugged in, and you can schedule your interview with the manager right then and there. 

Mary Beth Meadows: 

Integrated calendar is like the holy grail. 

Matt Barkley: 

What we’ve seen so far, and it’s still early, is that the retention rate stays in the 80th percentile. You’re keeping people engaged, and they’re transitioning straight over to an interview because they can pick the time they want. 

Our managers put their calendar and availability out there. The candidate clicks on it and shows up for an interview. 

Our managers know they are already qualified, so the conversation becomes more about the work environment, what we’re looking for, and whether they’re interested in doing the job. 

Then they move from the hiring decision into our background check and onboarding process. It’s all electronic and seamless. It reduces our time to hire by two to three days. 

Building a Better Candidate Pool 

Katie Saliba: 

When it asks those 10 questions, does it match them to the best job you have open? 

Matt Barkley: 

Right now, we’re doing it with very specific jobs. 

If you’re applying for a forklift operator, it gets you through that. If you’re applying for one of our tagger positions, which is hands-on work with lumber, it asks about general labor experience. If it’s a machine operator in our sawmill, it asks about your work history there. 

That’s step one. Step two is getting to where it points us in the right direction too. 

The nice thing is that on the back side, it’s also building a pool, which we never had before. Previously, you had to apply to a specific job. What this does is say, “You’re not a match for this, but we’re going to put you in a candidate pool.” 

For us, we never had a general candidate pool. That’s just how our ATS was designed. You had to apply to a specific job. 

Now, as we’re looking for roles, we can search that bucket too. 

We’re still early. UKG released this back in November when I was at a trade show, and I immediately asked how we could pilot it. 

Katie Saliba: 

When you’re in an organization that large, the number of people applying makes it worth it. 

Matt Barkley: 

We’re 23 locations in 13 states, and we’re looking for somebody all the time, especially in entry-level jobs. We’re promoting people up. People are choosing to do something else, and that’s okay. 

But we have to be efficient. 

I don’t want us to lose time. I want the time we have dedicated to truly interviewing candidates and getting the right people on the bus. If I can cut down the time it takes to get them to the interview, that’s time well spent. 

What Leaders Should Do Before Adopting AI 

Katie Saliba: 

If you’re an HR leader or business owner listening and trying to think about AI and HR technology, what do you think they should do first? 

Matt Barkley: 

You have to think about your business. You have to think about the culture of your business. 

For us, we protect our culture. That is non-negotiable. 

Our culture is hands-on. We want to be great customer service to our outside customers, but also to our internal team members. We call them partners. All of our customers are partners, and I view our team members as partners in this adventure too. 

What I don’t want to lose is that. 

I don’t want them to feel like we’ve outsourced this, pushed it off, or are not willing to take the calls. That culture has to be preserved. As we evaluate tools, we use that lens. 

You have to think about your overall business and how technology will impact your culture. Some businesses may be more transactional, and it may fit easily. We are not. We are a very high-touch, customer-focused business. 

We will apply technology where it’s right, but we are not going to lose that core vision of how we do our work. 

That’s the lens I use when I’m evaluating how we put technology to work for us. 

Matt’s Best Advice on AI in HR 

Mary Beth Meadows: 

Matt, you have shared so many great tips with our audience today. As we wrap up, we always like to bring it home with one closing question. 

Regarding AI, what is your best piece of advice for our listening audience? 

Matt Barkley: 

Take your time. 

Technology is advancing so fast today. Everything changes every day. Think about what has changed in the last 20 years. 

Take your time. Do the evaluation. Do the work up front and make sure it fits your business. 

Just because everything else is moving at the speed of light doesn’t mean you have to. Preserve your business. Preserve the integrity of what you’ve worked so hard for. Don’t lose focus on your core beliefs and culture. 

Take your time, evaluate it, and find out where it fits for you. 

I’m the last generation that didn’t come out with a cell phone. I didn’t grow up with a cell phone. I still played in the yard and drank out of a water hose. 

But the great part of that is you had this innate ability to evaluate. You figured out what was best. Keep doing that. Keep taking that time. 

Don’t just run out and grab the latest thing on the shelf. 

Sometimes we spend more time comparison shopping on Amazon than we do making major decisions for an organization. 

You’re not going to make a major purchase without looking it up somewhere to see if you can get a better price and whether it’s going to fit. Do the same thing for your business. 

Take the time. Comparison shop. Make sure it fits. Make the right call for what’s right for your team members. 

Closing 

Mary Beth Meadows: 

Matt, this makes perfect sense. You have been a delight, and you have shared so many pearls of wisdom with our audience today. We appreciate that. 

For those out there, thank you for tuning in to this episode of People-ing with Purpose. We hope this conversation made you think differently about AI, HR systems, and the tools your business is considering using next. 

You can find more resources and more episodes in the show notes, and we’ll see you next time. 

Katie Saliba: 

Thank you for tuning in to People-ing with Purpose, a PR Companies podcast. You can always get more information at PRemployerInc.com and PartnerWithExperts.com. 

Mary Beth Meadows: 

Be sure to like and follow us on social media, and you can find us everywhere you listen to podcasts. 

Until next time, happy people-ing.