THE FUTURE OF TALENT ACQUISITION: AI IN RECRUITMENT

AI is bringing immense possibilities and Human Resource industry hasn’t been able to keep itself distant from this disruption.

Recruitment and Selection indeed is a complicated process. When Hiring team being thrown CV’s, cover letters, recommendations and everywhere, it’s not easy to analyze which are really worth the limited amount of time and investment. And when in modern business pace just one bad hire can cost organization upwards of $50,000, hiring team can’t afford to employ the wrong person.

In this day and age, Artificial Intelligence comes into rescue, it has the possibility to leverage in the recruitment process, just to make sure hiring team is putting the best individuals in to the open positions, without having to spend 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in the office.

AI for recruitment is an emerging category within HR Tech helping recruiters to skip repetitive processes and allows them to spend that time on really important stuff and get back to doing what they do best i.e, Interacting and interviewing the candidates.

Artificial intelligence in recruiting refers automating all the process, faster resume sorting and a heightened form of applicant tracking and eliminating all tedious task. It allows recruiters to ask the accurate questions, and make smarter choices about the open positions.

CHATBOTS

A chatbot, in a very simple language is an application designed or software system to perform automated simple and repetitive tasks. Chatbots make use of a combination of Artificial Intelligence codes and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to have conversations with people and interact with them to extract and provide limited, yet very relevant and desirable information. AI bots are rapidly used in everyday operations of organization.

Recruiters use them to add vetting, skill-matching, resume parsing and for collecting the required information from candidate’s database.

“58% of job seekers say they have a negative impression of a company if didn’t hear back from the company after submitting an application, whereas 67% of job seekers have a positive impression of a company if they receive consistent updates throughout the application process.” Consistent updates, feedbacks, text- conversation are possible by using Chatbots.”

Hence, we can say that AI-powered bots have a lot of potential to improve the candidate experience.

Following are some Chatbots used by Companiesglobally to quickly and effectively led hiring process.

RESTLESS BANDIT

Location: San Francisco, California

Restless Bandit uses an intelligent chat bot recruiter which has algorithms to connect, fetch and retarget the highest qualified and suitable candidates. The algorithm is built around 30 million CV’s and applicant profiles it contains 120 million job descriptions and good 50 thousand hours of data analysis which ensure the discovery of top candidates in a company’s Application Tracking System and everywhere.

Industry impact: Restless Bandit is used by many industry lead generators like Quicken Loans, Adidas, Wayfair and Macy’s.

PARADOX

Location: Scottsdale, Arizona

Paradox comes with an AI-powered assistant for job seekers and recruiters. AI assistant, named Olivia, engages and connects with candidates on mobile, web or via various social channels to know better about their expertise, knowledge, skills, and relevant job experience. Olivia then indicates candidates with next steps to follow like scheduling interviews and answering company about process-related questions using Natural Language Processing

Industry impact: Working with companies and organizations of many sizes, Olivia takes candidate engagement to the next level and make it way more that efficient for companies like Public Storage Staples, CVS Health and Delta.

TEXTRECRUIT

Location: San Jose, California

TextRecruit is an engagement platform use for interaction with candidates and employees through text messages and live chats. TextRecruit being the platform’s chatbot which is customized to match company’s need like company’s voice and brand, keeps company’s culture intact even with the talent pipelines. Beyond recruitment, the platform helps with onboarding, sending timely alerts or provide reminders about things like health insurance policy.

Industry impact: TextRecruit is using the platform to speed up their communication process and it is very beneficial to organizations that employ numerous hourly workers. Thred Up, Online clothing marketplace uses the platforms as their employ’s workers are hard to reach via email, this enables them to reach their employees more easily.

HIRETUAL

Location: Mountain View, California

Hiretual works on the latest AI technology sources talent by aggregating over 700 million professional profiles across the internet and uses 30 public platforms to effectively analyse the information about their market value, experience, skills, and most importantly availability.

Industry impact: Some real big Tech names including IBM, Verizon, Intel and eBay— use Hiretual to develop their workforce.

ENTELO

Location: San Francisco, California

Entelo uses artificial intelligence with predictive analytics and sifts through millions of job seekers to connect employers with new team members. Its machine learning platform called Envoy, which, saves up time for recruiters and perform unbiased sources top candidates and delivers them to the company’s recruiter’s inbox.

Industry impact: The software using Envoy platform helps big brands like SONY,Credit Karma Hallmark and SpotX to find top potential employees.

MYA SYSTEMS

Location: San Francisco, California

Mya Systems offers an assistant to guides applicants with open-ended, natural conversation which bridges communication gap between recruiters and candidates. Mya is used support to candidates and employees throughout the career life cycle for say from career website engagement to hiring onboarding and then employee retention.

Industry impact: Mya helps big cosmetics giant like L'Oreal on an average of 40 minutes per candidate review, which results over six months that is 45 working days.

DISRUPTION TO ANOTHER LEVEL: Introduction to The Recruiting Car

Recruitment is the most technologically disruptive industry. In the recent years there is no doubt that new technology innovation has changed the dynamics of hiring process completely and one such example is the collaboration of Volvo and FamousGrey to develop a car that helps find new employees.

Volvo teamed up with a creative agency called FamousGrey to retrofit an S90 into a self-recruiting machine. This car upgradation involved equipping of an advanced artificial intelligence program that allows it to interview prospective technicians and candidates.”

In March 2018, the car unveiled for the first time in Brussels at Brussels Motor Show in Hall 6 and managed to snag most of the media coverage from the show, that’s how creative recruitment is disrupting at its best.”

During this Prestigious show, a car that could recruit without bias, its own technician with the help of AI and testing competently named the HR90 instead of V90.”

Just before the Brussels show, the car manufacturer posted on social media that they were hiring 200 technicians and inviting applications to their plant in Ghent, Brussels.”

Interested candidates had submitted their applications online and the car then interviewed them directly.”

Volvo HR90 used AI pattern speech technology, pedestrian recognition, face recognition and other technology to assess what the candidate looked like. The interview was conducted via the car’s central touchscreen and then the Car quizzes them with pre-set parameters, mapping, and by analysing the candidate's facial expressions and word use it could test both technical and social skills as well as conduct unbiased evaluations of candidates.”

Based on the conducted interview quizzed, the recruitment car generated an evaluation report which is directly forwarded to Volvo’s HR department. Candidates, meanwhile, are able to upload additional information and update their profile for the HR department to consider.  Once the HR team read HR90’s recommendations, they let candidates know if they are being called back for a human face to face interview at their office.”

 

POTENTIAL PITFALLS OF AI

It’s not always peaches and creams! Like every innovation Artificial Intelligence raises lots of questions.

Question like “As humans, are we not worthy of more than just a machine judging us?”

Lack of Human Touch

Not denying the fact, that automated process makes work so smooth but lack of human touch sometimes results the process termination prematurely.

In case of Video Interview, body language is not always limited to being nervous or cheating. Some human qualities and tendency to connect over emotions, empathy and contextual understanding are just impossible to replace with software.

Reliability is a matter of concern sometimes.

AI undoubtedly requires plethora of data to provide accurate results One very tricky situation is because the tools still learning Data Curve, they have various inconsistencies and flaws. For instance, AI derive some conclusion based on keywords search for employee having necessary experience, but what about the fact that same applicant has changed three jobs in a year.

An unusual format, page orientation, or any specific picture placement may get a lot of applicant rejected, even if they would make perfect choices for the role required.

Also, with increase in social recruitment, these tools may start judging applicants on their digital footprints and social media activities. While this “may” provide great insights into their skills, but what about a person who is great for the role but isn’t much active on social media?

Human Biasness is still there

AI, which is supposed to reduce bias related to name, gender, age, religion, nationality, etc. in the recruitment process, may unknowingly introduce bias in the process, mainly because these tools analyze patterns. Now, if you feed in the company’s last five- or ten-years’ recruitment data into an AI-powered tool, the tool will learn from the database and pick up any pattern that was present earlier but hasn’t been excluded by company from the algorithm yet.

For example, In case of Amazon’s AI recruitment system. The company tried the AI based tool to shortlist applicants automatically for unfilled positions. The team working on the tool found out that it was biased against female applicant because the previous years’ data fed into the system database had a pattern of unconscious/subconscious bias against females. And at this the algorithm had no idea it was supposed to ignore it.