Artificial Intelligence in HR
In this series of blogs, we will try to understand how AI can contribute to the area of HR and makes life of HR easy.
Artificial Intelligence is something that has started entering in all fields, be it at home or at office. Now that we look for automating the regular activities and make them better every time AI has come to us as blessing.
What is Artificial Intelligence? Artificial Intelligence or AI is an ability of a machine or a system of learning, computing, relearning, correcting itself and behaving like human. AI consists of Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Text Analytics, NLP, Speech recognition, image processing and many more. Python is the widely used programming language in developing AI.
What is HR? HR is a division within business which deals with Recruitment & Selection, On-boarding, Performance Management, Learning & Development, Employee Engagement, Risk management, Compliance, Reporting and Retirement. Basically, HR is an important function of any business which deals with its Resources.
AI (Machine Learning) in HR: Thinking of AI in HR? We will see HR wearing AI lens. AI can help in making important decisions in various aspects of HR.
AI in recruitment
In this blog we will talk about benefits of AI in recruitment and Challenges. AI can come in handy right from sourcing the profiles to making an offer to a selected candidate. It helps in streamlining and automating the entire recruitment & selection process, which are generally monotonous and high in volume.
Sourcing and screening the Profiles: Hiring requirements increase every quarter, that does not mean adding more recruiters will help. Adding more recruiters every quarter is not realistic and may not help considering various reasons. That means recruiters have to do more with less. Also, generally it has been experienced by most of the recruiters that the profiles received or search engine generated are mostly irrelevant and only around 15% are relevant as per the job description. Almost 90 % of time is consumed in sourcing and screening the profiles. Here comes the role of AI in recruitment which can speed up the sourcing and screening process given the job description without compromising on quality as it looks for accurate matching. It can also rank the profiles considering the percentage of match between profiles and the job description.
I recently used a small python program to shortlist the profiles where I was looking for screening the profiles for an off-campus recruitment drive. I would have spent an entire day screening around 100 profiles manually. Technology made the job easy. It not only screened the profiles but also gave me a spread sheet with the details I was looking for in just 2–3 minutes. It ranked profiles based on the JD provided.
This will help in reducing the errors and unconscious bias but cannot be completely zero.
Scheduling interviews: There are lot of AI tools or AI chatbots already being used for recruitment. These tools can contact the shortlisted candidates and schedule the interviews. Chatbots can ask questions to collect required information for the position the person is interested in applying for.
AI powered digital interviews: Image processing, speech recognition and NLP help in identifying the right candidate for the job.
AI (image processing) powered interview applications analyse the muscle movement of the candidate. It has been proved that the body muscles do not support if the person is not speaking the truth or not confident about what s/he is saying. Such body language can be treated as negative.
Also, a person may demonstrate negative or aggressive body language during the interview or use the wrong choice of words.
Ex: Having frown while talking about previous work experience
These applications (speech recognition) also help in identifying whether the candidate is excited about the new responsibilities or not. If not excited then the chances of accepting the offer are less. Even if the offer is accepted chances of honoring the offer are even more less.
The AI powered technologies help the recruiters to save on time and utilize saved time in building the relations with the offered candidates which will make the candidate more comfortable and increase the chances of honoring the offer.
This process also generates a lot of data which can be used for any sort of analysis/analytics for making decisions.
Ex: With analytics we can find out how many offered candidates will join or who will not join.
Challenges:
- Any analysis requires a lot of quality data. Since AI completely depends on past data, insufficient or bad quality data may lead to prolonged hiring process as the results generated may not be suitable to the requirement.
- Since it relearns from previous patterns of data, one should be conscious that the data used is not biased as the AI (machine learning) powered applications continue yielding biased results.
Summary
- AI has capability to influence the decisions in HR
- AI Can source profiles as per the JD. It can contact the candidates and conduct initial interviews over chat/call to collect required details. Also ranks the profiles based on the match ratio between JD and profiles and present best suitable profiles.
- AI agents or applications can conduct the interviews and can capture the body language of the person to provide feedback with analysis of the interview.
- It can predict and tell us who will join and who will not. It can also tell us about the performance of employees.
- It requires lot of quality data to build the working models with more accuracy to provide desired results. Wrong data may yield wrong results.
In the next blog we will understand the role of AI in learning and development with examples.
