As suggested by Andrew Ng a few weeks earlier, there is a lot of hype about AI and its use cases in the industry. Only a certain set of jobs which needs even less than one second of thinking can be automated with the currently available technology. Almost all of AI’s recent progress is through one type, in which some input data (A) is used to quickly generate some simple response (B). Some of the industry influenced by its implication are web search, advertising, e-commerce, finance, logistics, media and more.
Why recruitment industry will not be affected substantially:
- Human Touch: It plays a major role to lure a candidate to work in a company and vice versa.
- Sinusoidal Hiring Trends: Depending upon limited resources and the uncertainty of the future requirement enterprises are quite happy to outsource their work to third parties. They have to spend only when their requirement has been fulfilled.
- Cultural Fit: Many companies now want to check whether a candidate is culturally fit for the company. None of the programs / algorithms can say much about this with the help of current technology.
Where AI can bring an impact with the current technology:
- Candidate Relevancy: Finding top 10 candidates out of 1K people applied for a particular position in a company.
- Social Profiles Aggregation: Aggregation of different social profiles of a candidate and recommending them as per the requirement in an enterprise.
- Web Assessment: Analysing social profiles to find whether the candidate is looking for a job. Passive hiring is becoming mainstream in hiring process on the niche profiles like Data Scientist and Full Stack Developers.
- Chat Bots: AI chat bots in between recruiters and candidates.
- Engagement Score: Engagement of the candidate with the company can be analysed and given a weightage, how much likely the candidate is going to join the company even if the candidate is hired.
Where AI can bring an impact say a decade (5 to 10 years) down the line:
- Interview Assessment: Programming and design assessment through the program itself while hiring a candidate.
- Gesture Recognition: It can help in a video interview with a candidate to know the confidence and interest level of the candidate.
- Natural Language Processing (NLP): It can be used to analyse the telephonic / email conversation that happens between a recruiter and a candidate.
- Decision Influencer: Help in decision making for a hiring manager to close a position depending on the feedback received by 3 recruiters for a particular position.
- Candidate Review Platform: Glassdoor for candidates and mapping their behaviour with the skill sets.
- Background Verification: Candidate verification once each required data is available on the cloud and accessed by the desired organisation.
In all walks of life, we are seeing the technology is increasing the efficiency of the humans and not making them obsolete. Technology has influenced every bit of our personal / professional lives and recruitment is no another. Consider local servers and cloud a decade earlier, how many support guys have discontinued their jobs. Now even SMB’s are willing to adopt it and everyone is happy with its implication. Some jobs have gone but it does not mean all the guys who were in the support business has returned to their native place and doing traditional businesses or agriculture. As technology is evolving so are the humans and especially their mindsets. Now everybody is eager to learn and experiment new things. Some are curious, others are happy and some have a fear that if they will not update themselves they will become obsolete. But everyone is doing their bit to remain in the business.
There should be no fear that all humans will become obsolete with time and all the jobs will be done by the program itself. To maximise the efficiency of humans and today’s diversity in nature of business in any area, humans needs to collaborate with programs to give the desired result with utmost efficiency and accuracy. Let the machine do all possible work which are repetitive tasks and requires less effort and we humans will be more focused on the quality work and time within and outside our professional lives. :)