Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the new buzzword, and we are constantly hearing or reading about Artificial Intelligence in the news, like the development of self-driving cars or driverless cars. Anyone interacting with a chatbot on any website is an AI tool. But did you ever wonder how exactly artificial intelligence in talent acquisition is used now-a-days?
What is Talent Acquisition?
Before deep-diving into how AI plays a major role in the recruitment industry, let’s learn about talent acquisition.
Gartner defines Talent Acquisition is the process of identifying organizational staffing needs, recruiting qualified candidates, and selecting the candidates best suited for the available positions.
The stakeholders include recruiters, HR managers, hiring managers, and top-level executives. The team’s goal is to identify, acquire, assess, and hire candidates to fill open positions within the organization. For the majority of organizations, the talent acquisition team will be part of the HR team. In a few larger organizations, talent acquisition is a different team that collaborates with the HR team.
Artificial Intelligence in Talent Acquisition:
How will AI assist the Talent acquisition to find highly skilled candidates?
In today’s competitive world, it is challenging task to hire right talent in a shorter time. In the future, finding suitable candidates will depend on how the recruiters and talent acquisition teams will automate their workflow.
According to a study, 96% of recruiters view that AI can enhance talent acquisition and retention. However, when it comes to implementing AI in recruitment, as of 2018, merely 13% of the HR team had implemented it. Still, AI in recruitment has tremendous potential as more than 55% of recruiters plan to implement it by 2023.
In this article, we will learn how AI in talent acquisition will benefit the firms in the longer run and how it will increase the recruiters and talent acquisition teams’ productivity.
Below we have listed some of the major features of AI in Talent Acquisition
1. Candidate Screening:
Candidate screening is one of the challenging tasks for recruiters. For a job opening, recruiters receive more than 250 resumes, and out of them 75% are unqualified. A recruiter spends 23 hours screening resumes for one open position; more than 60% of recruiter’s time is spent checking for the correct resume.
According to a survey, 52% of talent acquisition leaders mentioned that the most challenging part of recruitment is screening candidates from a large pool of candidates.
AI-powered tools will be a lifesaver for the recruiters. AI tools can find the right candidate either in the job boards or in the in-house database. Based on the keywords, AI tools will search in the database and list the qualified candidates. AI tools can be programmed to be legally compliant and avoid bias while screening the candidates based on their demographics (age, ethnicity, physical challenges, language, etc.).
One successful example of AI candidate screening is when IBM used AI screening of candidates back in 2013. According to IBM, it was able to relocate 80% of its staff from a closed business unit to other divisions.
2. Candidate Sourcing:
Sourcing Candidates from different job boards and social media is a time-consuming process, and recruiters need to put a lot of effort into finding the right channel to find the right candidate for an open position. In today’s competitive world, organizations do need to find and acquire the candidate in the shortest amount of time, and AI is the perfect tool.
Using AI, recruiters will find candidates from millions of resumes on different job boards like Dice.com, Monster, social media websites such as LinkedIn and GitHub. Furthermore, an AI tool lists the top candidates based on the recruiter’s search criteria and ranks them in order, which increases the recruiter’s efficiency in sourcing candidates.
Another significant advantage of the AI tool is that it can parse job requirements from the job description and include them while searching the database. AI considers various factors such as candidate education, experience, projects, and skillset matching the job requirements to find the right candidates.
3. Finding Candidates from Niche Websites:
Recruiters are aware that some of the positions related to data science and machine learning are hard to fill. Candidates for such roles are recruited through reference or internal hiring. But passive candidates are active in some niche websites such as GitHub, but it is next to impossible to hire from such websites.
GitHub is one of the most prominent places in the IT industry where candidates with different backgrounds join the platform for learning, sharing their views, and developing software.
However, by implementing the AI tool, such candidates can be sourced without using any Boolean tools. The AI tools will deep-dive into such websites and use different parameters to find candidates based on their skill set and languages they are proficient.
4. Job Posting and Targeting:
In the past, recruiters need to log in to the dashboard and add the jobs manually, which takes quite a bit of time. But Artificial Intelligence is revolutionizing job posting by running targeted ads. AI programming is done so that job is posted and targeted to the specific candidates who fit that role.
Targeted ads are possible based on the potential candidate skills (social media websites like LinkedIn), search history (cookies), and demographic profile. The candidate’s search history will reveal the job the candidate is interested in and might accept in the future.
Role of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in Talent Acquisition:
Before deep diving into the topic, we need to understand what Machine Learning is and what roles it plays along with AI in the recruitment industry.
John McCarthy, widely acclaimed as one of the godfathers of Artificial Intelligence (AI), defined AI as the science of creating intelligent machines that can perform ‘human-like’ cognitive functions.
Machine learning is a subset of AI, and it offers smart devices that can learn from a particular environment. Machine learning, along with AI, redefines how organizations work, and recruitment is one such domain. AI removes bias and increases the productivity of the organization. In recent years, major firms such as Hilton, Humana, AT&T, Procter & Gamble, and CapitalOne adopted AI and ML to source candidates, schedule interviews, perform an initial screening of candidates, and other processes related to recruitment.
Here we will be discussing, what effect AI and Machine Learning will have on talent acquisition.
1. Candidate Experience
When recruitment firms compete against each other for similar roles, candidate experience is the difference between them. AI with Machine Learning will improve the candidate experience and add value. Using the AI, the interaction will be smooth, and all the queries raised by the candidate will be resolved.
For example, recruiters will not be available 24*7. Using a chatbot or live chat will provide essential information to the candidate’s role, and recruiters might take off from there and add more value to the conversation with the candidate.
AI and Machine Learning will attract and engage candidates during the early stages of the interview process and increase the overall candidate experience. AI and Machine Learning will boost the candidate’s confidence to stick with the recruiters, and it can also provide new roles that were previously not considered by the candidate.
Global cosmetic firm L’Oréal adopted AI in its recruitment process to improve its candidate experience. The AI and ML removed non-value-added tasks and relevant assessments given to the job seekers.
2. Predictive Hiring
According to the 2017 Glassdoor Report, by 2020, one in three millennials plan to quit their job. Of course, with the current COVID-19 situation, the number of millennials leaving the job will fall less than stated in the report. But when a similar situation arises when people are planning to leave the firm, how does the organization get to know and prepare for the future.
AI with Machine learning can improve the candidate and employee experience by using predictive analytics. AI platforms can predict whether a new candidate can fit into the company’s culture or not. Better prediction leads to more chances of the candidate working in the same organization for a more extended period.
3. Speed up Candidate Sourcing
As mentioned earlier in this article, candidate sourcing is one of the most formidable recruiters’ tasks. Organizations are looking for ways to speed up the sourcing of candidates, and implementing AI and ML can be one of the fastest way around. Recruiters can move away from tedious tasks such as candidate sourcing by adopting to chatbots.
Chatbots such as Helena perform various recruitment tasks such as screening candidates, collecting required information from the candidates, scheduling interviews for shortlisted candidates and even conducting an initial round of interviews before the organization’s actual interview process is started.
Artificial Intelligence Tools for Talent Acquisition Process:
To assist the Talent Acquisition teams, many start-ups and established firms have developed AI tools. The Talent Acquisition teams will benefit from using these tools to decrease the cost and time to hire the candidate and increase their productivity.
In this article, we have listed essential AI tools that can be used by the Talent Acquisition teams and stakeholders in the recruitment process.
1. AI Tools for Candidate Sourcing
Sourcing of right candidate from the right channel is one of the most crucial steps in recruitment sourcing. The talent acquisition teams have different channels to source candidates, but using AI tools will quickly help get their desired results.
- Entelo
Entelo is an AI tool developed to source candidates. The search engine developed by Entelo allows recruiters to find prospective candidates with requires skills. Entelo gathers information on the candidate from various social media websites. Furthermore, recruiters can identify candidates based on different criteria, such as race, gender, and veteran status.
The tools use predictive analytics and Natural Language Processing, and it is useful to recruit passive candidates. Some additional features include job posting, allowing candidates in the software or company’s website. Major brands such as Lyft, PayPal, and Target uses Entelo to hire highly skilled candidates.
- Hiretual
Hiretual is an AI sourcing tool to find the best available talent in the market. The talent acquisition team can source candidates from more than 30 different platforms. Recruiters can find any candidate’s email id and phone number using the Hiretual tool. One of the tool’s advanced feature is converting any job title or job description into a smart Boolean string. The AI powered tool is used by well know companies such as IBM and Intel.
- Arya
Arya is a recruitment automation platform designed to empower recruiters with AI. The Arya tool uses AI and behavioural pattern recognition to analyze 130 million+ social profiles to provide the right candidates and predict move probability. Arya is currently used by firms such as Kimco Services, Headway workforce solutions, Personify, and others.
2. AI Tools for Candidate Screening
Once the recruiters have identified potential candidates from a large pool of databases, the next step is to screen candidates and shortlist them for the first round of interview.
As mentioned earlier, screening candidates is a tedious task; the talent acquisition team can use AI tools for resume parsing. Some of the AI tools that can be used for candidate screening are listed below.
- Pomato
Pomato is an AI tool used for IT and technical recruiting. Pomato’s Resume-Analyzer and Job-Matching engine can deep dive and find the right candidates in a shorter time. According to the company, it can perform over 200,000 computations and provides a visualization of the candidate to determine, do they fit in that particular role or not. From there, talent acquisition can develop custom interview questions based on the job description.
- CVVIZ
CVViZ is an Artificial Intelligence powered, cloud-based online recruitment software solution for talent acquisition teams. Machine learning and NLP based algorithm help recruiters to find the most suitable candidates in the quickest time. Machine learning goes beyond the simple keyword-based search as it screens resumes contextually, learning from the recruiter’s hiring process to identify the best candidates. The AI-driven tools also knows the kind of candidates an organization engages in its interview process. It understands the type of candidates an organization hires. Based on such and multiple other parameters, it matches the right candidates with the right opportunities. CVVIZ’s significant clients include Alstom, Societe Generale, Headsnminds, and Iglobus.
3. AI Tools for Candidate Assessment
The recruitment teams need to assess whether the candidate applied for a particular role is suitable or not. Fortunately, the talent acquisition team need not spend much time on the candidate profile to decide he/she is a good fit or not.
Instead, they can opt for AI tools that will provide instant results and save time for recruiters, we have analyzed AI-driven candidate assessment tools and listed them below.
- Mya
Mya is a chatbot built using Natural Processing and Machine Learning. Mya offers a conversational AI platform tool that enables computers to simulate real human-like conversations. The engagement with candidate increases as Mya can create emotions and trust among the candidates. While engaging with the candidate, Mya can also create candidate screenings and help the recruiters understand whether they are fit for the position.
Mya offers its services to hundreds of top enterprises and agencies, including 52 of the Fortune 500 and six of the eight largest global staffing firms.
- Harver
Harver is an AI driven pre-employment assessment and predictive hiring platform. Harver’s proprietary AI algorithm uses IO Psychology and Data Science to predict a candidate’s chance of success in the organization. By measuring the candidates’ aptitude, culture fit, soft skills, and more, the talent acquisition teams will have the necessary data to make hiring decisions.
Harver offers customized assessment modules on candidate cognitive aptitude, culture fit, personality, multitasking capabilities. The candidate is asked to take a situational judgment test with potential workplace scenarios, where the candidate needs to choose a response or rank them accordingly.
- Talview
Talview is an AI-powered candidate assessment platform to remotely screen, interview, and test top talent. Talview offers video interviewing, remote proctoring, and advanced assessment solutions, leveraging NLP, Machine Learning, Computer Vision, and Video Analytics. Talview tool enables anytime and anywhere interviewing using its video interviewing platform.
The tool also integrates the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) and Learning Management System to help the recruiters and talent acquisition teams to automate their routine tasks and find the right candidates for their organization.
Talview AI-powered tools had assisted top organizations such as Amazon, Deloitte, Swiss Re, Cognizant, and Sephora in finding top-notch talent.
Artificial Intelligence Reshaping Talent Acquisition Process:
Artificial Intelligence is bringing radical changes in the talent acquisition process. The AI program collects and analyzes a large set of data (candidate’s information) and lets us know what should be done with that data (suggest the talent acquisition team do they need to hire the candidate or not).
In the Talent acquisition space, AI is already in use as an assessment tool, but that’s not all; there are many other areas where AI can do. Below we have listed some of the major areas where AI can improve in the Talent Acquisition process.
1. Chatbots – Answer for Basic Queries
Chatbots are already used for recruitment purposes by large organizations such as Sutherland using Bot called Tasha, which will answer candidates’ queries. But in the future, more organizations will start using chatbots to resolve the candidate’s questions.
Furthermore, chatbots can be used as a tool to guide the candidate in the recruitment funnel. When the candidate arrives on the organization’s career webpage, bots will have a conversation with the candidate and drive them to the funnel. Bots can spot the candidate’s skills in their resume and give a clear picture to the recruiter on which role the candidate fits.
2. Streamline Recruitment – Finding Highly Qualified Talent
Let us consider that an organization hires 200 employees per year, and on average, 100 applicants apply for each of these positions. The talent acquisition team needs to go through 20,000 resumes per year, which is a daunting task. The talent acquisition team must process these applications, review the candidates, shortlist the best candidate, and schedule the interview which is time-consuming and expensive.
One of the most severe difficulties for the organization is that out of the 100 applicants, the top 10% will be available in the market for less than two weeks. Using the manual process will make it difficult for the recruiters to identify the top talent and hire them. One way to overcome this challenge is to implement AI that will cut down the manual tasks performed by recruiters.
AI tools can find candidates, analyze the resume, and gather information on the candidates from multiple social media websites. AI tools can mine candidates based on skills, years of experience, previous job titles, and based on the job description; the AI tool will decide if the candidate right fits for the role or not?
The talent acquisition team can do what they do best, engage with the best-fit candidates, and hire for the open-position and build a talent database.
3. Remove Bias in Hiring – Selecting Candidates based on their skillset
Many candidates would have come across unconscious bias while they come across an interview. Unconscious bias happens when a hiring manager or recruiters form an opinion about candidates based solely on first impressions. The unconscious bias does happen ever before the face-to-face interview.
Recruiters can solely judge the candidate’s resume picture, name, age, gender, or even based on their hometown could influence their opinion. So how does an organization remove the bias while hiring a candidate? Well, it can be done by implementing an AI tool.
AI tool is a bias-free platform and doesn’t choose the candidate based on their demographics, style of the resume, or reject the resume if it founds any typo errors. Rather the AI tool will judge candidates based on their skills, previous experience, salary, and other relevant parameters.
4. Facial and Speech Recognition Software
In a typical face to face interview, the interviewer can’t judge the candidate facial expression (the candidate is positive or nervous), the correct choice of words, and tone. However, when it comes to AI, the Natural Language Processing and Facial Recognition software can judge facial expression, choice of words, gestures, tone, and capture the interview transcript for further evaluation.
Apart from these, AI can analyze massive chunks of data from different video interviews and find patterns that otherwise were not visible by the recruiters or hiring managers. Companies such as HireVue offer video interview software that judge the candidate’s body language, tone of voice, stress level, and more.
5. Identity Best Fit Candidate – Hire only Top Talent
AI tools can identify the best fit candidate for the organization with better accuracy. The AI tools are programmed to tweak the job descriptions and add new keywords to search the profiles, resulting in additional profiles not founded by the recruiters.
For instance, if a recruiter is searching for a java developer, they will use keywords like java, java developer, etc. However, some software engineers or software developers might also have experience in java, which the recruiters omitted. In such cases, AI will list profiles where the candidate had java experience.
AI can study the shortlisted candidates and find what variables do they have. For example, Java developer worked in startups; java developer worked in any FAAMG companies (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Google).
6. To Find Passive Candidates – Searching Candidates for Tomorrow
Recruiters can find the candidates for the open position on various job boards or social media websites. On the other hand, to make sure you build a talent database for the future and have the best talent for the future, AI can perform such tasks.
AI in the future can help organizations to find the best-fit candidates whom they can approach when there is an open position. The AI can source candidates from websites such as LinkedIn and Xing and analyze different pointers such as how to job the candidate worked in a position when he/she got promoted and can also gather additional information on how the company is performing and what is the current turnover rate. Based on such parameters, an organization can list such candidates who might join in the future when a suitable position is open for them.
Will Article Intelligence be the Future of Recruitment?
The current COVID-19 pandemic had forced us to adopt new routines such as working from home for months or even forever. The COVID-19 pandemic had forced organizations to adopt AI faster than ever. According to a McKinsey survey in June 2020, the pandemic has accelerated digital technologies’ adoption for several years across different industries.
In the post-pandemic world, once the economy picks up and the organization starts various pools of candidates in large number, screening, and sourcing candidates in the old-fashioned method by the recruiters will no longer work. AI will be adopted on a large scale by all organizations of different sizes to overcome these challenges and make the recruiters and talent acquisition team concentrate on their core job.
The million-dollar question across the industry is, does AI will be the future of the recruitment? With the increase in AI adoption during the pandemic, it is clear that AI will stay in the recruitment industry and will play a significant role in hiring the candidates.
When we step into the future, it is more likely that only one AI tool will perform all the tasks such as screening candidates of resumes without any bias, sourcing candidates, have a conversation with the candidates when they enter the website, identify a job for the prospective candidates, and rank the best-fit candidates. This might be the future that many recruiters and HR managers imagined, making their lives easier and simple.
But somewhere down the line, the AI tool is not the virtual assistant for the recruiters, and it even might replace them. We are already reading about how AI might end up taking our jobs, and the possibility is real, be it the driverless cars, driverless trains, or robot miners. In the recruitment industry, AI can learn to perform various recruiters’ tasks in a faster way without any errors.
If AI runs the recruitment process in the future, how does the organization gets benefited? According to Chase Wilson, Vice-president of Product Innovation for Monster, Organizations get benefited by developing their brands and the recruitment process’s speed. If all the recruitment firms are using the same set of AI tools, then the firms’ challenges will be different from the crowd.
In a nutshell, AI will be part of the recruitment companies in the future, and more organizations will understand the benefits of AI and embrace AI. Future without AI in recruitment is unimaginable.
Final Thoughts:
Artificial Intelligence is playing a vital role in the recruitment industry and redesigning candidate hiring. Recruiters are no longer required to spend hours together to check all the resumes in their inbox and find the right candidate. Recruiters need not search for matching resume in the job boards using the Boolean strings, or the organizations must hire more recruiters to make sure that they answer all the queries raised by the candidate.
AI tools can perform tasks such as sourcing, screening, chatting, and even shortlist best-fit candidates. In other words, all the manual tasks performed by recruiters can be given to AI, and recruiters can do what they are best at “engage with candidates and hire them.”
Many AI tools are available in the market that performs some tasks that the recruiter handles and implanting such tools will increase the recruiters’ productivity. On the other hand, organizations will be benefited as these AI tools will decrease the cost and time to hire the new candidate and build a database of passive candidates for future hiring.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic hit us, no one predicted when the AI tools would be implemented. Pandemic has accelerated AI implementation by several niches, and the recruitment industry is one of the early adopters. Interviews are no longer conducted face to face, and some of the organizations are using face and speech recognization software for the interviews.
So, in the future, we might see a single AI tool perform all the recruitment tasks and even conduct the first round of interviews. The job of recruiters will become more comfortable, and all they need to have is conversations with the candidates and hire highly skilled candidates.
