Artificial Intelligence to lead the way for Smart Recruitment?

In an ideal workplace scenario, every employer wants to hire the ‘right’ candidate. With success in today’s market hinged on having the right talent on board, organizations cannot afford to hire average or low performers. Getting the right talent on-board, and also in a cost and time-effective manner is a task that is getting more complex with steady rise in the number of applications for each job and the sophisticated nature of the competencies required for various job roles.

A typical recruitment process today post sourcing revolves around shortlisting a candidate through his/her resume, interaction with a couple of line managers and pre-hiring checks. These interactions, however, do not guarantee any quantifiable indicators of the skills and competencies of a candidate or his/her ability to do a specific job. Without effective benchmarks or parameters to assess the many applicants entering workforce every year, identifying the right talent can never get easy.

Artificial Intelligence or AI (read Machine learning) is now increasingly helping automate and simplify the recruitment process by helping organisations save cost, time and resources that would have been otherwise spent in a typical recruitment process. So, can a machine automatically evaluate coding skills, English skills, sports and soft skills? Yes, they can. AI driven assessment mechanisms can create significant value by offering objective and accurate predictions about a candidate’s suitability, job performance, personality and more.

In fact, there are sophisticated evaluation tools available today which offer automatic evaluation of computer programming skills, communication skills, interpersonal as well as spoken English skills which are often overlooked, but are critical in several fields. Aspiring Minds Research has regularly published in global publications the effectiveness of such tools.

While assessments is one aspect of job matching getting revolutionized by machine learning, other aspects such as resume parsing and matching, job matching for job boards and automated interviews are other aspects seeing dramatic value creation with this new age technology. The job recommendation engine of Linkedin.com or on myAMCAT.com are examples where AI is being tested to help people find the right jobs for them!

Interestingly, assessment is not the only aspect where organisations can benefit from Data Analytics but it can also cater to the other aspects of the recruitment cycle such as retention. The vast amount of unstructured data like resignation patterns, common features of exiting employees, job satisfaction levels etc. can generate powerful insights and can help build a more robust recruitment ecosystem in today’s increasingly competitive landscape.

AI and Predictive Analytics can help employers understand the workforce better and offer a much better experience both during screening and recruitment as well as post hiring. While these issues were earlier unquantifiable and unstructured, adopting technology can change the way organisations can benefit from this data.

So, while learning and assessment is a relatively new domain which is seeing the AI invasion, structuring the vast amount of data can benefit not just organisations but also the talent ecosystem on the whole. Investing in the next level of innovative assessment technologies should be a priority for enterprises as the data-driven insights will be key for organisations to identify and retain the right talent to build sustainable businesses.

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