Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made it to recruitment. Unlike the promise of Big Data a decade ago, (which turned out to be an emperor wearing new clothes) A.I. has finally brought us the keys to the safety deposit box of our dispersed data. Finally, we can figure out what is in there without being limited to our own imagination of biased variables. A holistic view on our data, without prejudice, becomes available to predict the recruitment future. But how can we avoid simply seeing A.I. in recruitment as magic and start trusting it as science, albeit much of that science is happening in an AI black-box?
Some recruiters may see the end nearing of their age-old profession where their people experience, gut-instinct, and social network helped them sell candidates to jobs and vice versa. In reality the end of that recruitment era is already behind us, although some still need to come to grasps with the new normal.
“In case you are still in doubt of the relevance of your job as a recruiter, ask yourself if more than half of your day is spent on repetitive tasks such as calling candidates for phone interviews. If the answer is positive, your job is ready for automation, if not today then very likely tomorrow.”
There is no need to worry though. If you are a recruiter today, you are in high demand. Companies are craving for the right talent to fill their ranks. Interesting paradox to your job being automated, right? Or not at all? In reality automation is finally freeing up the ‘human’ in human resources. Too much time has been spent on repetitive tasks with limited added value. Artificial Intelligence brings us the opportunity to spend time where it is most useful, and that is in actual time spent with the right candidates to guide them to the right career opportunities.
Fortune Magazine recently featured a cover article “How A.I. is changing your job hunt”. I can recommend the article to anyone: http://fortune.com/2017/05/19/ai-changing-jobs-hiring-recruiting/
So does A.I. actually help you spent time with the ‘right’ candidate? The simple answer is that A.I. will be able to help you create a ranking of candidates based on predictability of job performance, cultural match and personality traits. In the recent past and present, we needed a CV (that we could scan with our biased assumptions), an interview (that would usually be unstructured), and maybe an additional e-assessment (that would score a candidate on a limited set of variables). Let me stick to the subject I personally know most about: video recruitment. At Cammio we work with our proprietary with Xpress Analytics™ engine. Today we are able to present a structured interview format for candidates to record video responses which we then can extract into multiple data analysis points using speech-to-text for the analysis of verbal reasoning, usage of words and overall language construct, but also to analyze tonality. The video interview therefor can deliver data points on personality traits. This enables selection against benchmark profiles of high performers or to merely get an individual impression of a candidate. With A.I., we can create an algorithm that is able to learn and improve as long as enough data, structured or unstructured, is fed into the model.
A.I. in recruitment is science and we can reverse engineer many patterns that we discover, but we should not engineer the discovery itself too much. What I mean is that we should use as much data as possible and our only concern should be that we should make sure that we do not feed bias into the algorithm with the data we are feeding it. We can then analyze the data to find patterns in the people we have hired or the people who made the biggest career advancements based on personality traits they have in common. A.I. helps us makes sense of the data and find patterns. Recruitment should not be a black-box, nor should it be magic. But is about time we use the data we have and add some A.I. to it to create an overall more intelligent process that does not forget, but frees up the ‘human’ in human resources.
Happy Hiring!
