Future Recruitment Process: The Impact of Artificial Intelligence

By Abhishek Agarwal, Senior Vice President, Judge Group

After taking the retail and banking and finance industry by storm, the cognitive technologies are all set to change the future recruitment process, revamping the traditional or outdated hiring and recruiting practices. In the IBM’s 2017 survey, nearly 66% of CEOs said that cognitive computing has an immense potential to create value in HR and Recruitment.

And, the organizations are enthusiastic and optimistic about the cognitive technologies for the substantial benefits offered. In fact, some of the early adopters of Artificial Intelligence and Predictive Analytics agreed that there is a sharp rise in their revenue growth in comparison to those which do not use A.I. and Predictive Analytics, as per a Deloitte Bersin report.

It is expected that the number of Artificial Intelligence adopters will increase at a galloping rate in the coming few years because of the reduced workload and less pressure put on the shoulders of the employees. The biggest application of A.I. in an organization is in hiring and recruitment and the biggest benefit will be agility, productivity, and precision.

In this age of automation, where A.I. technologies make it easier for the candidates to apply for the coveted jobs, it provides them recruiters with both adequate time and efficiency to focus on more important tasks that are dependent on human thinking and reasoning.

Abhishek Agarwal, Senior Vice President, Judge Group

On one hand, much is being contemplated if A.I. is a threat to human jobs. In fact, there will be more proliferation in job opportunities as the new job roles are emerging where human reasoning will be complemented by Artificial Intelligence.

Towards creating smart job ads

Artificial Intelligence is spearheading the development of new age tools for the use of recruiters making their task of sourcing candidates easier than ever. Such one is A.I. based recruitment platforms which support programmatic advertising. It enables the recruiters to post jobs and position relevant and well-targeted ads on the platform so that it reaches to the right set of audience depending on the browsing history, cookies, and online activity.

Using the AI-powered machine learning, the recruiters can collect, process, and analyze the huge volumes of data to derive the insights about the candidates who express interest in the job posted and accordingly make informed decisions. Such smart job ads do not use much time and resource of the organization because the data and predictive analytics are mostly self-generated by the computer. This data can be put into the advertising expanding the talent pool for the organization.

Bringing in cost-effectiveness and efficiency  

HR & recruiters can harness the full potential of A.I. along with robotics. There are various video interview software and assessment solutions lately introduced into the market which can recognize facial expressions, identify gender, assess voice quality, and read body language that of the interviewee. The software can also decipher the entire video interview to evaluate the education level and cognitive ability of the candidates and accordingly helping the recruiters make quick and better decisions.

Using such analytical tools and software, the recruiters will be able to intelligently shortlist the candidates for a particular job type and can even predict his compatibility during the recruitment stage. Besides this, we have also seen the use of A.I. chatbots gaining a huge popularity among the recruiters. The intelligent chatbots which interact with the applicants and compiles relevant data can make the future recruitment process 30% faster while cutting back on the overall recruiting cost by half.

No scope for biases during the recruitment

According to a Bloomberg report, businesses are now betting on Artificial Intelligence to make the future recruitment process completely fair without any bias. A.I. eliminates even the slightest possibility of unconscious bias because the technology is bereft of any preconception and stereotype. Bias is an inherent trait in all humankind and so technology is the only way to finish off the scope of conscious or unconscious bias on the basis of race, colour, religion, sex, and gender identity.

Using only automated and objective process, A.I. works on data such as skills, qualifications, experience, using complex algorithms to determine who would be the right fit for a particular job. However, A.I. can learn bias if the programmer creates algorithmic biases and feeds certain qualities and data points which might be associated with a particular gender, place, name, school, or the race. For preventing this to happen, extra monitoring and security measures can be taken.