Artificial Intelligence is a technique that is becoming more and more widespread across many industries. The principles of AI date back many years, but it is only recently that that the power of computers have allowed them to be deployed more widely.
Artificial Intelligence – Delivering More for Less
Artificial Intelligence uses huge amounts of data to ‘train’ computers to carry out certain functions. We’re all used to the idea of on-line retailers presenting us with products that ‘other people like you’ look at or buy. This has been achieved by allowing computers to review data collected over years to spot trends and then use these trends to help customers look at products they might otherwise not have seen.
AI is still an emerging technology in the world of recruitment. It has great potential to make the search and selection of candidates more effective and efficient. In other words, AI should be able to make it faster to find the best candidates, thereby reducing cost and delivering better results.
Two areas where AI can be used effectively in the world of Emerging Talent are candidate education, and talent pool searches.
Candidate Education
Emerging Talent requires a different mindset to traditional recruitment. The job is often to share information about roles, companies or even sectors with young people who would otherwise not have considered them. This is the ideal application for AI. By considering the profile of candidates, including interest in careers and the subjects they have studied, it is possible to use AI to suggest ‘Other people like you also looked at…’ Using a combination of a large volume of application data it is possible to use AI to do just this. When combined with a candidate or talent pool database and email / notification engine, the solution can be deployed at scale.
Candidate Search
AI is ideally placed to review the data of those that have applied and been successful in roles and apply that knowledge in the search for future talent. Unlike Human Intelligence, where we typically build up a shortlist built on layers of selection, AI can apply multiple filters simultaneously to come up with a great shortlist in seconds. As a result, AI allows the search process to be both more effective – ensuring that potential candidates are not missed – and far more efficient, as a process that can take hours is reduced to seconds.
Where AI is used to support the recruitment process, it can also be integrated seamlessly rather than requiring the wholesale adoption of new processes.
AI – The pitfalls?
So, if this all sounds too good be true it’s worth understanding some of the limitations. These limitations do not mean that AI shouldn’t be used, but they do mean that AI needs to be understood and used intelligently.
- Learning from History
AI can only learn from the information that it has been provided with. In that way, it is very similar to the way in which people learn. As a result, AI has limitations when it comes to doing ‘new’ things. Should a ‘new’ career type be created where no-one has ever applied in the past, AI’s view of historical data would not allow it to suggest things it doesn’t know about!
- Bias
AI has the potential to be a useful tool for removing bias from the attraction and selection process. The limitation here is that if the data that was used to train the AI was based on biased information from human selection processes, then AI will simply repeat this. Human Intelligence still has a major role to play, both in designing the AI datasets to remove this bias where possible and using AI intelligently. This is often known as ‘Supervised AI’.
AI – the Future of recruitment?
The ability to use AI to automate and improve recruitment has huge potential. Over time, the benefits are likely to be:
- More effective pro-active searching for best fit candidates, rather than administrative screening of applicants
- Intelligent promotion of opportunities to potential candidates to inform and educate them, improving the quality of the talent pool
- Time saving across the recruitment process through automation of time consuming tasks
- More time to spend with best fit candidates to educate and inform, establishing cultural fit (those things that AI can’t do yet..)
Recruiters believe their approach to hiring will need to evolve as AI and automation become more prevalent. Here at TheTalentPeople we know that integrated AI technology has huge potential and by using automation to improve recruitment, we are advancing to include this technology. It will not only benefit the recruiter but intelligent promotion of opportunities to potential candidates to inform and educate them, improving the quality of the talent pool.
AI meets candidate attraction and emerging talent, coming soon...
