Bajeesh Balakrishnan
Artificial Intelligence in Recruiting
This is from an era of human transition wherein, it says that years ago hominids turned people developed the art of fire. Richard Wrangham, an anthropologist from Harvard stated that the hominids have had this so-called master brain and small jaws, and they mastered the fire, which was primarily for cooking and meet the hunger. Later, several archeologist came forward to present his or her own versions of human transition and invention of fire. As the time progressed and the human life continued to exist and developed their existence from a traditional way of doing a work or a business to a much more advance way of performing the work or business. Technology has played a crucial role in revamping the businesses, and from a traditional way of performing a job manually (skilled worker job) to a moderate way of performing the business through analog devices and computers to a very advance way performing job through advance computers and robotics.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a boom in this digital world. There seem to be a complexity in the society that we live in, which says that all the jobs done by human, will be taken over by the so called Robots in coming years, which in turn is causing an uncertainty in the minds of people. As the job market revolves on the skill sets and technology there seem to be either a scarcity of work force in the areas of business or there is a significant raise in the salaries of people performing the skilled jobs, which is creating a negative impact on the business.
Recruiter’s job is proving to be highly challenging, as there seem to be a dearth of quality candidates versus the amount of open positions that are available to close. Artificial intelligence in recruiting has the potential to boost the recruiting experience from a recruiter and a candidate point of view. Imagine how Amazon’s Alexa uses AI to understand the voice commands to answer the basics of customer queries or an Otto, the self-driving truck that drove miles to deliver beer through Denver.
The growing challenges in recruiting and with the scarcity of getting the right people for the right job there is always an element of whether or not a recruiter is able to give enough time to shortlist and select a right candidate. Here, Artificial Intelligence can come in to the picture by performing few basic checks that often a recruiter misses to validate thoroughly and push the candidates to the next round of interviews. At times, a recruiter cannot even validate certain credentials of the candidates, which is because there is a large pool of candidates attending interviews and affecting his or her workload or simply does not have the right access control to get in depth of a candidate profile and validate. For example: A machine-learning algorithm has the potential to judge the communication of candidates and the job fitment by giving a far better output and in addition to this, the question is how many candidates are actually receiving feedback on the interviews that they attended with a company in recent times. The recruiters or the HR literally falls short of the feedback chain mechanism to fulfill and close the loop during a complete hiring cycle.
There seems to be questions on what are all the top recruiting skills that AI is less likely to replace in comparison with a human involvement. Some of them could be candidate relationship, measuring the interpersonal skills of the candidates, negotiate the offers with candidates, and convince them to join the Company, analyzing the candidates potential and know-how beyond credentials, and analyzing the fitment of a candidate from a company’s cultural point of view.
With the introduction and implementation of Artificial Intelligence in recruiting, it is certain that the role and responsibilities of a recruiter is going to change from typical profile/bio-data pushers to a much more responsible role as Talent Advisors or Talent Consultants. Artificial Intelligence will come into existence as a medium to interact and help the recruiters to their job better. It can take up certain challenges to improve on the overall experience of a recruitment in terms of sourcing, screening applications etc. and recruiters can take up more challenges in terms of building relationships, talent mapping and act more like a strategic partner in the hiring process.
