Artificial Intelligence is a hot-button topic right now. In every industry, people are talking about how AI might impact their jobs. Will it make life easier? Harder? Will AI make them redundant?
In fact, my colleague Katt Silver and I recently spoke at a local SHRM chapter meeting about this very topic. Human Resources professionals are having the same conversations, but with one big difference. We have been using AI for a long time now—especially in recruitment and talent management.
Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), which support the recruitment process for most organizations, already have some sophisticated Artificial Intelligence features, such as the ability to interpret a resume and send personalized messages to candidates. HR professionals have been using these AI features for years. And we’ve learned that AI has some advantages… as well as some drawbacks.
First of all, let’s define what we mean by AI. The official definition from the US Department of State is:
A machine-based system that can, for a given set of human-defined objectives, make predictions, recommendations, or decisions influencing real or virtual environments.
In practice, Artificial Intelligence is something of an umbrella term, covering a lot of different technologies. Some common forms of AI include:
All of these tools can be helpful in HR, especially in the area of recruitment.
All of these systems described above can help improve recruiting. For example:
Our colleague, Tom Daly, at NFP wrote a great article on the Case Studies of AI in HR: A Glimpse into the Future of Human Resources. I wanted to highlight a couple of examples he included:
Unilever is a multinational company that receives thousands of applications each day. They faced two major challenges: processing applications in a timely manner and reducing bias within their hiring process.
In 2019, Unilever turned to AI to deal with both issues. They developed an AI tool that could analyze video interviews for entry-level positions. The AI used machine learning and predictive analytics to identify candidates most likely to succeed if hired.
Unilever credit AI with saving their recruitment team over 100,000 hours per year. Meanwhile, Unilever has won several awards for diverse hiring, including the 2019 Best Places to Work for Disability Inclusion.
Nestle is a well-known and one of the largest food and beverage companies in the world. They faced a major challenge in trying to hire large volumes of employees for their various global locations, which was a huge lift on their talent acquisition teams, in particular the task of scheduling interviews.
Nestle brought in conversational AI to help automate candidate screening and interview scheduling tasks. As a result, they saw a 600% increase in interviews and automated nearly 8,000 hours of recruiting work, answering 1.5 M candidate questions in the process, and scheduling 25,000 interviews.
However, not all such efforts end in success. In 2018, Amazon implemented a similar AI system with a goal of hiring new engineering talent. Amazon’s AI was trained on the library of all resumes received in the past.
There was one problem with this approach—engineering applicants were overwhelmingly male. Amazon’s AI was trained to believe that all engineers were men, so it automatically rejected female applicants. The system was soon shut down and Amazon apologized to affected candidates.
As we see from the examples above, Artificial Intelligence can be extremely helpful, but it’s not perfect. If you’re making a decision about using AI tools, you need to be aware of the pros and cons.
Artificial intelligence has been part of recruiting for a while, and the next generation of AI tools will hopefully make hiring even easier by freeing up your teams from administrative and repetitive tasks to focus more on strategic initiatives.
That said, you will always need skilled recruiters and hiring managers on your team; AI should be used as an enhancement to your team, not a replacement.
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