Hello — I’m a bot. I’ll be interviewing you

Hello, my name is HARRI — I am your interviewer.

As some of you might know, HARRI is the name of the robot designed by HR Robix.

No, no, HARRI cannot interview you…. yet.

But HARRI can answer basic HR and payroll-related questions. HARRI is the first of its kind and is powered by artificial intelligence and emotional response technologies. And of course, it is incapable of being biased.

The rise of artificial intelligence is changing the recruiting funnel.

The recruiting funnel is evolving. We used to have a more simple funnel. But with the advances in technology, the recruiters have more arsenals at their disposal.

The 20th century recruiting funnel was simple, but it had its flaws.

In 1990s and early 2000s, the recruiting funnel has been fairly standardized. The hiring manager wrote the job descriptions and the recruiters got to work. But comparing to today, the recruiting styles were more passive. Recruiters tend to post jobs on job boards such as Monster, Indeed and their company’s website. All they had to do was to wait. Usually resumes would flood in.

Upon receiving the resumes, the recruiters would “painfully” go through them, rank them as needed and the “good” ones were brought in for an interview. During the interview day, the focus was primarily on technical and hard-skills. Usually soft-skills were not the primary focus. Managers used their judgement-calls on the candidate’s’ personality and abilities. And the rest was history.

With the rise the AI, hiring managers’ expectations have also increased.

The 21st century recruiting funnel is very different. With more advancements in people analytics, predictive validities and the need for soft-skills, the funnel has evolved into a more “360-style” format.

Hiring managers expect a more “360-style” reports before making a decision.

The talent war is on. Companies are willing to pay top dollars for the best of the best. But the expectations are also higher — starting with the recruiting process.

First and foremost, resumes are practically dead. Your online footprint is more important than your resumes. If anyone ever asks me for my resume, I would just redirect them to my LinkedIn profile. It is more accurate than anything I can write in a one-pager.

Recruiters do not just post a job description and wait anymore. They go on a hunt. I have yet to see a technical recruiter that does not get on Github and Bitbucket, or use services of companies such as Dice to find a talent before even contacting them to apply for a position.

Candidates are quickly filtered based on their hard-skills. Bots can crawl through our LinkedIn profile and quickly find what skills we have and do not have. Candidates can take assessments to prove their technical skills directly on most job-boards. These assessments could be as simple as answering a few multiple choice questions or as complicated as writing a paragraph (for content marketing positions) and a piece of code (for technical roles). The bots can even grade most of such tests without the interference of recruiters.

Hard-skills are not enough. Soft-skills are as important.

In most cases, the technical or hard-skills are the 1st set of qualifications that candidates must pass. But up to 89% of employee turnovers is due to attitude, not hard-skills. Organizations care about the culture of their organizations and their employees’ engagement.

Hiring managers are looking for candidates who are highly creative, have the right personality and can also fit within the company’s culture. While there is sometimes skepticism around such assessments, these science-based assessment tools have been established as a far more reliable way to make recruitment, development, and promotion decisions than human judgement alone. Given the current labor market and the pressure for companies to get hiring and leadership development right, it is no longer a question of whether to use talent assessments or not. SparcIt measures your creative abilities. CPP, CEB and Hogan measures various personalities. Plum finds the candidates that fit the company’s culture. Again, in all such cases, the recruiter’s role is very limited and the bots are doing the assessments.

Some companies even take this a step further by analyzing how you talk and communicate. A company called HireVue is pioneering some of the work in video interviewing. HireVue allows the hiring managers to post questions, record and watch the candidates as they answer them.

Throughout this whole journey, a bot found your online profile, a recruiter contacted and asked you to apply to a job, a bot tested your knowledge and hard-skills, another bot tested your soft-skills. The hiring manager was given a “360-style” report and s/he did the final round of interviewing. And (hopefully) we are hired.

Approximately 65–70% of the work was done by various bots. So, it is not — by any stretch of imagination — out of question that in a not-so-far future, a bot such as HARRI will even do part of the interviewing.

In a not-so-far future, we will have robots even doing part of the interviewing for us.

About SparcIt: SparcIt is a technology company with a focus on combining psychological constructs with large-scale semantics analytics. Our flagship product is our well-researched and well-known SparcIt’s Creative Thinking assessment. Unlike traditional assessments, SparcIt’s unique feature is in the use of open-ended exercises and automated scoring. Using a Watson-like engine, SparcIt’s patent-pending engine, accurately and efficiently grades the participants’ responses and provides a detailed report to the participants and the test administrators. Hence, it eliminates the major factors for not using such assessments.

SparcIt’s Creative Thinking assessment is fun, fast, automated, affordable and scalable.