AI is revolutionizing many areas of the workforce including recruiting candidates. Companies are relying on AI-powered platforms to engage with candidates and to find the best candidate suited for the job.
Recruiting Employees with AI
Companies (like Job.com) are using AI to make real-time job suggestions, leveraging OSINT data helping make job application suggestions closer to employees’ desired next step and at a time closer to when they’re open to hearing them. They’re using AI to identify adjacent skills between roles helping companies and markets utilize existing talent more effectively. E.g., Did you know that the core skills and capabilities of a bookkeeper have tremendous overlap with those of a paralegal, only a paralegal pays more and has better job growth prospects across the next 10 years? Win/win for the employee, the market, and employer.
They’re using data from video interviews to help identify personality attributes that lead to better team composition and job fit. They’re tying job search data to social networks making real-time customer networking suggestions for candidates that can accelerate application review and give candidate insights from current employees of the companies that candidates are applying to. They’re enabling job matches to replace job search, so candidates can focus their time on personal development, career discovery, and exploring company brands rather than combing through pages of postings.
The net of a lot of this is like many applications of AI – helping users work with existing processes but improve their ability to manage the unmanageable amounts of data in those processes … and while they’re at it adding in delightful experiences that make users feel “seen, known, and anticipated”.
Evaluating Candidates with AI
This application tends to be concentrated in video. The user experience for this application can be polarizing. It still results in a fairly synthetic interaction between the employer and the candidate. Companies like HireVue are endeavoring to validate personality assessments based on observable behavior, but there is further research needed. For example, an “in real life” interview is a dialogue, and a video interview is an extemporaneous speech. This feels unnatural if you anticipate an interview experience and not a speaking engagement. Career centers are spot on to prepare graduates for the many factors that will enable them to perform their best in what is currently an unfamiliar communication vehicle. I expect that the use of 1-way video (asynchronous) will evolve towards is helping companies place desirable candidates better rather than screen out undesirable applicants and towards helping TA departments (recruiters) advocate for their candidates better. E.g., a video interviewing platform Wedge is exploring “storytelling” as a user experience to help recruiters produce short highlights for interviewers on the candidates hiring managers will be meeting.
Challenges With AI In Hiring
Descriptive analytics and matching are becoming more mainstream while producing novel and unexpected suggestions or insights buried in the heaps of data and user interactions are becoming the focus of next-stage technology. For example, the single most likely job an Accountant will get next is an Accounting job. Unsurprising. But according to job.com’s 60 million career records, although the single most likely job will be an Accountant – 70% of the time, an accountant will do something completely unexpected and not in accounting.
AI can help candidates explore what those unforeseen paths in the 70% look like and help them pursue them on purpose rather than by accident. AI is also helping organizations look at match and alignment from a team rather than merely an individual lens. The performance of most organizations is less tightly tied to the presence of the right people in the right job and more tied to the right people in the right jobs on the right teams. As rates of job change continue to rise and the value of “basic cognitive” (as McKinsey refers to it) capabilities decrease, predicting team cohesion will be more important for organizational performance in the next ten years than it ever has been.
Could AI Replace Humans?
AI probably is not going to replace humans in recruiting. However, it will pick up and automate low complexity tasks allowing time to be reallocated to very human activities such as generating agreement, persuasion, and work requiring creativity. Besides, it will restore the impact of existing teams in areas where data overload has eroded influence.
In the past five years, the average number of applicants per job and applications submitted by candidates has risen while simultaneously companies bemoan not being able to find the right talent and job seekers the right job. Some of this is captured in talent shortages, sure. We all know the STEM and nursing talent markets are imbalanced. But that doesn’t entirely explain the headlines. We also have decision overload hurting process efficiency, and AI is helping address this problem and restore fidelity to existing processes.
AI in the Future
The future holds several opportunities in recruitment.
- Allowing companies to redeploy their workforce just in time-based on adjacent skill models and current workforce predictions.
- Companies knowing in advance a team will gel and enabling that to occur faster. Providing transformation roadmaps to executives highlighting talent strategies that differentiate based on specific enterprise data for acquisition, retraining, and redeployment.
- Allowing the candidates to tell their career stories in more engaging and agile ways (instead of rewriting ten different resumes).
- Helping candidates navigate the new career lattice that has replaced our fathers’ career ladder and develop themselves in a workplace where skill demand and job titles are evolving rapidly, and helping labor markets more efficiently leverage their talent populations keeping work impactful and workers doing rewarding activities as AI comes alongside them in the workplace.
Author: Steve O'Brien
Original Article Found Here