How AI Can Improve Recruiting and Business Productivity?

Hiring is a tricky business especially these days when job roles are merging into each other and becoming more cross-departmental. Businesses are also adapting to new technologies, and finding the right fit for positions and retaining the right people in the organization has been challenging.

Here are some of the most common challenges that people face while managing their talent pool or in creating a new one.

1. Attracting the Right Talent: Most organizations never meet the right talent that they expect to recruit. In its place, they only choose the best person they can find at the time. With limited time, and urgency to fill the position, most recruiters either go by “who they know,” or their biased-judgment in selecting the candidate. Many times, the organizations do not have the right understanding of the skill and talent that they need for a particular job.

2. Time Consuming: Talent acquisition through traditional methods is highly time-consuming and it does not ensure the right candidate is found. Going through the data in each resume is highly inefficient, and unscientific; critical information can be missed or wrongly interpreted by executives while analyzing the talent. The right candidate either never reaches the employer, or the data is never analyzed to its full potential.

3. Scope of internal-mobility undiscovered: Often, employees decide to quit for better opportunities. Rarely do they see how their skills and experience can fit internally, in the same organization? The employer loses someone who already knows the business. Getting someone to refill the vacancy costs the organization anew. This process of looking outside for untrained talent to fit the role consumes many hours and resources of the organization.

4. Hurting Brand Reputation: Employer brands are something that can either attract people to come and work or the opposite. A good reputation of the employer helps attract the best talent. Few employers consider how their talent-management activities are shaping their employer-brand image. Not only do disgruntled ex-employees go to social media platforms to share negative experiences, but job applicants who fall through the cracks can damage the brand. Many organizations reject applicants by just ignoring them, creating a bad image for the employer.

The challenges mentioned above, however, are ironic, because access to data today is exponentially so much higher than ever. Accessing data about the right person or the right job does not take much effort. A lot of job-related information resides on career websites, social media profiles, professional profiles, etc.

Also, organizations themselves have a pool of data on talent accumulated over time. The challenges we talked about should be smaller today than ever. But more data is not necessarily better. It just means there are more places to find different information and try to cobble together a more holistic view of a candidate.

It is not humanly possible to take in all this data and identify if candidates fit, or have the potential to excel in a role, particularly for thousands of candidates across hundreds of jobs. Also, hiring managers have specific visions as to the skills and experiences that they are building on their team.

This is where AI can come in for the rescue.

AI Helping to Thwart Recruiting Challenges

AI algorithms are gaining traction among hiring leaders. More organizations are exploring the technological expertise of AI in choosing new workforces.  AI-based software aggregates available internal data like in the Applicant Tracking System with a plethora of sourcing and recruiting tools that are used by the organization, with externally available information, to create an enriched talent repository.

AI algorithms calibrate each open role according to the specific needs of the organization. This improves recruiters’ and hiring managers’ intake experience, provides an instant pipeline of qualified candidates, improves the overall candidate experience, the employee referral experience, and drives retention because of improved internal mobility. Once the AI platform has ingested robust data from legacy and public profiles for each person, it creates a rich profile of each candidate. The algorithm takes a look at the profile of all employees. The moment a new job acquisition is raised, the algorithm matches the employee database. Those employees who are the best fit will get notified by the algorithm.

Enhanced AI algorithms can also anonymize the profile, CV, photograph, mail ID, LinkedIn ID, etc. to produce unbiased listings from the data. The hiring managers can then shortlist based on the merits, skills, and experiences of the profile that they see, without getting biased by the gender or racial identities of the candidates.

Sandesh Goel, Managing Director, Eightfold.ai

AI Makes Everyone Happy

Thanks to the progress happening with machine-learning technology, AI is getting a much better reception among businesses, especially in recruitment. AI recruiting is a strong response to the competition in the market. AI-based platforms can bring the maximum RoI for an organization, especially if rival organizations are becoming competitive for talent, and are attracting key staff from other firms.

Hiring managers will interview better-fit candidates and, on average, fill their job openings faster. Even if they never interact directly with any AI recruiting technology, hiring managers to benefit from it.

Human resources will benefit because they can coach employees based on real data regarding skills, career progressions, and opportunities. Internal mobility is enabled in a fundamentally new way. AI is still considered a threat to human employability. But, in talent management, AI doesn’t replace human recruiters—it makes them better. Recruiters can source full pipelines of qualified people much faster, and spend more of their time engaging and advancing great candidates, rather than scrolling through endless lists of resumes or clicking through tedious workflows.

Not least of all, candidates benefit when companies use AI recruiting. The technology enables these companies to communicate faster and more usefully with candidates. If AI is deployed directly on a career site, candidates can match themselves to their best-fit jobs without frustrating searches or applying to dozens of jobs at once. Candidates from diversity categories can especially benefit from AI recruiting because this technology removes sources of unconscious bias that impact these candidates negatively.

By Sandesh Goel, Managing Director, Eightfold.ai