Artificial intelligence (AI) is set to change the way the recruitment industry and organisations search for and acquire talent, according to recruiting experts Hays.
Automated technology can analyse the mountains of data that exist within an organisation and the wider job market, translating it into easily digestible formats. According to Alistair Cox, CEO of Hays, this will help humans make better recruitment decisions.
Alistair sees three key areas of recruitment that AI will revolutionise:
AI will bring more efficient and fairer candidate screening
“One simple job ad can elicit tens of thousands of responses, many of which may be wholly inappropriate applications, yet all must be screened in order to find the real stars,” says Alistair.
With the aid of AI, time consuming areas of recruitment, such as CV screening, drafting job descriptions and communicating with candidates, could instead take seconds. This will free up time to focus on the human aspect of recruitment and offer a more personal service to clients and candidates.
Hays has already taken its first steps in harnessing the power of AI with an external partner, Alistair states “This platform has certainly accelerated the shortlisting process for us, and it also enables our recruitment consultants to concentrate on assessing the individual candidates outlined by the technology to be the best fit for the role in hand, rather than pouring over a wider pool of hundreds of thousands who may not be suitable.”
AI will ensure a better candidate fit
The main cause of an unsuccessful hire is a poor cultural fit between employee and organisation. AI has the potential to overcome this. Online job boards already use algorithms to match their community of job seekers with available roles. For example, a LinkedIn job posting will rank the suitability of candidates by utilising the available information on their profile. As AI develops, these algorithms will not only take technical capabilities into account but will become more sophisticated and analyse a candidate’s likely fit to the organisation.
However, the human element will remain a key part of the process. As Alistair explains, “It remains incredibly difficult for any machine to analyse the soft skills that remain so crucial to modern business. I’m yet to see an algorithm that can read things like humour, temperament or enthusiasm as effectively as a person can. And let’s not forget that ultimately human oversight is still required to compile criteria – I certainly wouldn’t want a machine deciding the persona of my business, and I don’t think it would do a particularly good job yet.”
AI will help safeguard future talent pipelines
AI has the potential to improve employee retention and development. The retail sector has been harnessing customer data successfully for years, so they are able to target their customers with offers and rewards tailored to the individual. Alistair expects employers to follow suit, offering a more personalised approach to incentives. It’s also possible that AI could inform managers of when they are at risk of losing a member of their team, giving them ample time to intervene.
There is also the potential to supplement proactive human planning. Alistair explains “An organisation’s talent flow is essentially another data spread that a computer can analyse to spot upcoming trends, either assessing when future revenue growth will require additional staff, or analysing calendar patterns to identify which time of year employees are most likely to depart, for example,” Alistair says.
While these developments in AI will make the recruitment process far more efficient, allowing hiring managers to focus on higher value tasks, Alistair stresses the importance of not losing the human touch.
“Today people do business with people and I hope that never changes. Despite the excitement and fears around the rise of AI, talent management largely remains a contact sport, where gut feeling, grounded in thousands of tiny facets of human experience which are never captured as data, plays just as strong a role as hard data.”
For more, see Alistair’s latest LinkedIn Influencer blog.
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About Hays
Hays plc (the "Group") is a leading global professional recruiting group. The Group is the expert at recruiting qualified, professional and skilled people worldwide, being the market leader in the UK and Asia Pacific and one of the market leaders in Continental Europe and Latin America. The Group operates across the private and public sectors, dealing in permanent positions, contract roles and temporary assignments. As at 31 December 2016 the Group employed 9,600 staff operating from 251 offices in 33 countries across 20 specialisms. For the year ended 30 June 2016:
– the Group reported net fees of £810.3 million and operating profit (pre-exceptional items) of £181 million;
– the Group placed around 67,000 candidates into permanent jobs and around 220,000 people into temporary assignments;
– 22% of Group net fees were generated in Asia Pacific, 45% in Continental Europe & RoW (CERoW) and 33% in the United Kingdom & Ireland;
– the temporary placement business represented 58% of net fees and the permanent placement business represented 42% of net fees;
– Hays operates in the following countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Chile, China, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UAE, the UK and the USA