AI in recruitment. Will we need humans?

Every Human Resource professionals need to select the right people from a big pool of applicants. Every company needs people to function and also there are 3 key challenges,

• How to have a large pool of passive candidates?
• How to ensure such passive candidates are engaged with the organization?
• How to reduce either our time to hire or our efforts to hire?

This article helps to discover how companies around the world have used AI to solve these key challenges & what outcomes they have experienced.

Company #1:-

The Volvo group used AI to pre-screen & shortlist candidates and ranked them based on their,

1. Basic technical knowledge
2. Ability to Communicate or their Interaction Skills
3. Body Language & Facial Expressions

The AI ranked each candidate’s fitment to the job profile and the HR managers then shortlisted about 500 of them based on rankings and had regular interviews, discussions & finally took 200 of them within 10 days of time. The number of hours & efforts saved as AI did the Pre-screening & rankings.

Company #2:-

At Unilever, they recruit about 30,000 people a year and receive around 1.8 million job applications worldwide. They have been using AI to screen their Entry-Level Employees since 2017 & have experienced significant cost efficiencies along with lower time to hire. It’s a mainstream process not only at Unilever but many such companies – like Randstad, Goldman Sachs, etc. In fact, one of the studies claims that about 65% of Fortune 1000 companies use AI somewhere in their recruitment process.

Here, Akash would like to share his thoughts on using AI in recruitment through this article.

The recruitment process consists of  the following stages:

1. Sourcing
2. Screening
3. Evaluation
4. Selection leading to Offer

#1 Sourcing & #2 Screening:-

AI is best at the sourcing and screening process because it helps to automate low-level tasks. In-Sourcing, it can be used for maintaining a passive candidate pool at a scale that is very difficult for humans to do. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is also that can be used to read resumes & candidate profiles.

In Screening, irrespective of the positions, AI can undertake basic criteria match of the candidate & job description. For Eg. Language, Communication, Aptitude, etc – All are objective steps that are done best by AI.

#3 Evaluation & #4 Selection:-

The evaluation and selection should happen through humans because we will be able to assess candidates at a much deeper and emotional level, check for cultural fitment & situational awareness.

AI is not perfect. It has its fair share of issues & challenges. A few years ago, Amazon revealed how its AI engine was biased towards preferring men over women, due to incorrect inputs.

A significant number of experts have also cautioned that relying too much on AI may actually be counterproductive. These are yet to be resolved but he ensures that will happen in the future. The Volvo Group and Unilever are use-cases even when we have a handful of employees like conversational AI bots & sourcing localized talent pool.

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