Written by shr 
Tools in Recruitment: Recruitment Made Easy for All Parts
Our new team member Elif Kocapehlivan wrote a blog post about recruitment tools to kickstart her learning process at sHR. We wish you a good reading.
Human is at the heart of Human Resources (HR). Although AI is on its way to replace many jobs, HR is said to be not one of them. This is especially true for recruitment; but there’s always room for improvement. People will admittedly fail at certain tasks that AI can tackle better, increasing job productivity, efficiency, yielding better results.
Can AI change the human experience, what a person can offer to recruitment? A recruiter’s ability to create great candidate experience and build human connection, really understanding somebody’s potential is irreplacable – as of now at least. Other practices, however, can easily be automated, or enhanced by AI. So the answer is, partly.
Certain tools are developed to improve some shortcomings in HR. These tools help us immensely. They are particularly useful to maintain objectivity – which matters a whole lot when evaluating a candidate for a position. The costs of wrongly evaluating can range from mild to disastrous for all parts: The company, the recruiter and the candidate.
Here, we inspect 3 major ways that AI can help improve recruitment experience.
1. Automating Screening
[Photo from humanresourcesonline.net]
I bet you’ve heard of the “6 seconds” rule. Basically, it is the idea that it takes a recruiter 6 seconds on average to judge a CV. And pretty much all of us believe that it enables unfairness, and that it’s not an objective way of evaluating a candidate.
While this is true, the problem may not reside in the method itself, it has to do with how much you can express yourself with a CV. After some practice of looking at various CV’s, recruiters have a sense of knowing where to look according to their criterias. 6 seconds on average to judge a CV seems normal then.
But what if you could reduce that time to 0 when it comes to unfitting CV’s? After all, a simple ATS (Applicant Tracking System) can filter through CV’s and bring the ones with the fitting criterias to forefront. When integrated with an Automated Screening Software, the past hiring decisions are used as patterns to dictate what a good candidate looks like (1). This enables a recruiter to focus on better fits, reducing hiring costs and time spent to find the ideal candidate.
2. Validate Candidate Skills
Interviews are effective when it comes to understanding the candidate, but they can go so far with validating their skills.
[Linkedin]
And recruiters agree. Linkedin surveyed 9000 recruiters to determine the shortcomings of interviews. Assessment of soft skills was the most voted choice. (3) Considering that the soft skills are #1 talent trend of 2019 (3), the results show a great discrepency between what-should-be and what-is.
Testing for soft skills is rather difficult to do in person. A CV doesn’t capture them very well. Compared to soft skills, technical skills can be assessed during an interview as well – although, partly.
In order to evaluate clients more objectively, some really effective strategies have been developed. So much so that when you learn about them, you get excited and want to use them immediately, to see what it will convey about you – that you just can’t express or prove in a CV.
This is where online tests and games come into play.
[Photo from Pymetrics]
Who would have thought you’d play a game on your phone to get the job best fitting to you? Somebody did, and it was a brilliant idea, as it quickly became the trend. Companies like Linkedin and Unilever are already on board with it.
When it comes to skills, it is often difficult to evaluate ourselves. Cognitive games measure very specific cognitive skills, and the scores are evaluated.
The candidate can even realize some of the skills he didn’t know he had – perhaps he is quite detail oriented; or realize that he wasn’t as good as he thought with his task speed. This is the main point of these games – to compensate for lack of awareness & biases.
From a recruiter’s standpoint, it is much easier and more reliable to get an honest, objective profile where he can compare with other profiles on an equal footing.
The candidate gets to represent himself/herself better; the recruiter’s choice becomes easier. Everybody wins.
3. Increase Diversity, Decrease Discrimination
Having skills aside, AI can help diminish the discrimination factor. People, as part of our humannes, have unconscious biases. Unconscious bias is an important topic in recruitment (1). It is understandable, and even expected that we have biases. Even if we aren’t discriminative, we have preferences, certain things that we avoid which all come from our past. This aspect of us is usually better off when it is aided by tests. This is one of the critical factors where it may be better to leave an AI do the job for us.
[TalentLyft] Diversity is an increasing value among candidates and workforces. (2) If you would like to learn more about it, you can proceed to TalentLyft’s blog post about diversity.
Diversity is among the top trends of recruitment. And there is a good reason
for it – and it’s not just ethics. Having a global mindset at work means every
unique individuals brings what he/she has to the table – a different
perspective, an idea, an approach to name a few. This process ends up
increasing productivity, creativity, and problem solving; and the list goes on.
Meaning, creating a diverse work environment is one of the best things that a company can do to improve itself.
[Screenshot from video] The percentages of recruiters who say that diversity is a top trend that affects their hiring choices. (4)
This trend can be seen in Linkedin, Facebook and the like. Unsurprisingly their employee experience is among the best.
This is possible by removing inevitable biases of recruiters. This is done
simply by setting up a tool that uses AI to process only related information –
which is not gender, race, looks or age. These are the factors that a recruiter
can’t unsee when evaluating candidates.
It’s important to note that not all the tools prevent bias. The previous tool mentioned in screening automation screens CV’s based on previous hires. It learns from a recruiter’s choices. If the recruiter’s hires are biased, AI will also yield biased results. Because, yet again, it simply learns from a given input without judgement. Human is what creates these algorythms, after all.
If you’d like to see how this happens, theres a game called Survival of The Best Fit that enables the player to be in the position of a recruiter that eventually uses AI so that hires are automated, and you gain insight on how it may turn out.
[Survival of The Best Fit]
There’s a heated debate towards these tools. Their use raises suspicion about their effectiveness in the long run.
Given all the costs and benefits, we have to arrive at a conclusion ourselves. We hope to see a more fair, efficient and enjoyable recruitment process for all parties – for the recruiter and the candidate, with the use of these tools.
Now I raise the question; as a candidate or as a recruiter; which tools do you find beneficial? Would you like using them – and do you see yourself using them in the future?
SOURCES
1. 6 Best Recruiting Tools Of 2019 [Infographic]
2. Top 10 Benefits of Diversity in the Workplace [INFOGRAPHIC INCLUDED]
3. The New Way Companies Are Evaluating Candidates’ Soft Skills (and Discovering High-Potential Talent)
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