Technology & recruiting 101: how it works and where it’s going

Citation

Leong, C. (2018), "Technology & recruiting 101: how it works and where it’s going", Strategic HR Review, Vol. 17 No. 1, pp. 50-52. https://doi.org/10.1108/SHR-12-2017-0083

In recent years, the development of new technologies has allowed Human Resource (HR) professionals to automate and streamline business functions surrounding recruiting new employees for a company, including applicant tracking, onboarding, performance reviews, compensation management and career development.

Although we have seen a significant improvement in recruitment systems, many HR professionals still find the end-to-end cycle to be a tedious part of their daily activities. For example, recruiters are responsible for reviewing incoming resumes and applications, and then scheduling phone interviews to determine whether an applicant is qualified for an onsite interview. Depending on how many applications a recruiter receives, this process alone could take as long as two weeks. By removing some of the manual work required, automated systems allow recruiters to focus on bringing in quality candidates rather than spending their time with time-consuming administrative tasks.

More advanced technologies are currently making their way to the marketplace to help HR professionals eliminate even more menial work by tracking incoming applications, screening potential candidates’ resumes, sending out automatic emails and reminders, scheduling interviews, updating a candidate’s status as they move forward with the hiring process, sending out offers, closing the role, and finally sending out thank you notes once the role is closed.

In the near future, through the use of data analysis, companies will be able to leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology for recruitment. One way Fareportal has already started integrating this process is with the development of the “Resume Scorer”, an innovative tool which analyzes key content from a job posting, such as required skills or experience, and compares it against a candidate’s resume. With that information, it allows HR professionals – such as myself – to focus their efforts on connecting with the top-scoring candidates immediately, rather than having to sit and review resumes.

The next step in the development process will be to program the system to recognize and prioritize top-scoring candidates and to automatically send out a daily report of the top-scoring candidates and a dashboard on candidate status. This next phase, combined with The Resume Scorer, will save recruiters a significant amount of time that they currently spend sifting through resumes and preparing individual status reports for hiring managers on pending roles or on specific candidates in the interview process.

As an example, each recruiter at Fareportal manages a portfolio of approximately eight to ten positions they are looking to fill at any given time. Let us say it takes 20 s to skim through a resume that may not be a great fit and about 1 min to carefully look over a resume that might qualify for a phone interview. If a job posting receives 100 resumes in one day, this means the recruiter could spend nearly an entire day only reviewing resumes and accomplishing nothing else.

With the Resume Scorer, they are able to focus on the top-scoring candidates, give them more time to review the candidates with hiring managers. This also saves time for the hiring managers since they can feel confident that they are seeing the absolute best applicants.

AI also allows employers to gather real-time feedback from employees regarding their thoughts and opinions about the company. Whether a company has 30 employees, 300 employees, or 3,000 employees, the feedback AI is able to provide is impeccable. For example, Fareportal has more than 3,500 global employees – so to ensure that all of the company’s employees are satisfied with their role, supervisor, the work environment or their compensation and benefits, the system allows employees to provide anonymous feedback that is unbiased and unfiltered.

Ultimately, AI is becoming more instrumental as job recruitment is not just finding a suitable candidate, but rather it is about finding the absolute best candidate for the role and for the company. AI is no longer the future of the workplace; it is the present and is happening today.

What can be expected when it comes to AI in HR

In terms of recruitment, I see AI helping HR professionals by automatically sending out customized emails to candidates, providing them with regular updates on the status of their application, and also administering any tests required for the position. In Fareportal’s case, if an engineering candidate were to receive a top score by The Resume Scorer, the automated system would send a link to the technical assessments required for that position. The AI bots could then score the technical test, conduct an initial screening and schedule interviews for the recruiters. Additionally, AI will also help with preparing the reports, dashboards and analytics for the recruitment team which could cover the entire recruitment life cycle from scoring the resumes all the way to getting feedback from applicants on their overall experience.

Sometimes when a candidate does not get selected, they ask for advice on how they can improve their application to be considered for future opportunities at Fareportal. I think developers of recruitment tools will look at creating an interactive chatbot that would not only be able to provide general career advice, but could also give specific feedback based on a candidate’s resume or interview history with the company. The bot then might even match up the candidate with another role that is more suitable to their skillbase.

AI also has the opportunity to impact the onboarding experience. Currently, the recruiter is responsible for sending out informational emails prior to their start date, such as new hire paperwork to prepare ahead of time, what to expect on the first day and what to bring. This information could easily be sent out through an automated system.

HR professionals can utilize recruitment tools and HR Information Management Systems from one vendor, or they can be separated depending on their functions. Ultimately, where I see AI heading in the future will be to gather end-to-end candidate and employee data into one comprehensive tool. AI bots will provide HR professionals with the dashboards and trends from the time a candidate applies, interviews, receives an offer, joins the company and their overall experience with the company until they decide to move on.

Figures

Figure 1

Figure 2

Workload distribution before resume scorer

Figure 3

Workload distribution after resume scorer