How Artificial Intelligence Can (And Can't) Take The Headache Out Of Talent Recruitment Posted on : Mar 09 - 2018

Searching for people to fill jobs requires a lot of research. Experience, skill sets, salary expectations, coordinating interviews, and numerous other issues must be addressed to match worker to employer.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are making all of those calculations easier, and the future of hiring will likely only get more streamlined due to those technologies.

“One very specific example of this is coordinating and scheduling for incoming (job) candidates,” says Dr. Andrew Chamberlain, chief economist with Glassdoor.com, a job search and salary information platform with 50 million online visitors per month. “There are companies like X.AI who now offer chatbots that handle scheduling totally.” That program, he explained, allows recruiters to shoot out meeting invites to multiple prospective job candidates and automatically fills in calendar spaces as they respond—essentially acting as an AI personal assistant. For a company that hires hundreds of new people per year, that’s a real time-saver.

Other companies, like Entelo—a San Francisco software firm whose recruitment products are used by the likes of PayPal, Target and Capital One—are using technology to help recruiters and HR personnel zero in on candidates that fit specific roles, based on skills, experience and predictive analyses that suggest whether a job candidate is more likely to be open to changing jobs, based on past behavior. “It’s supposed to make a recruiter have super powers,” says Chamberlain.

Such software can allow recruiters to overcome biases in the recruitment process. Human recruiters have shown a tendency to place perhaps too much emphasis on schools candidates attended, or even what their names are, explains Chamberlain. Software eliminates these biases. “That’s one area where these tools that do the first pass can help surface candidates based on their merit.”

Glassdoor also uses AI to help suggest the most relevant positions to job seekers, based on their search criteria, says Heather Friedland, the company’s chief product officer, which can make recruiters’ jobs easier. “We find that employers win because they are getting better-qualified candidates applying to their jobs on Glassdoor,” she explained.

Another service seeking to update the headhunting space is Talenya, a recruiting firm co-founded by Gal Almog, co-founder of recruitment tech company RealMatch (now called PandoLogic). Talenya’s technology hunts for talent by scouring the web for public information about professionals from various sites, including career destinations like Indeed.com, LinkedIn or Glassdoor; developer platforms like GitHub, online tech communities like Stack Overflow, social networks like Facebook, or even from press releases or industry articles, says Rafael Cosentino, the company’s senior vice president of development. Gathered data include job histories, job titles, location, possible salary expectations, skills, industry experience, companies worked for, and the likelihood a professional may be open to switching jobs, based on past behavior, says Cosentino. “We unify it and we create very rich profiles that we can then match with jobs.” View More