YOU ARE HIRED
How
artificial intelligence is reshaping recruitment, and what it means for the
future of jobs
Anuj Agrawal, 35, has dabbled in the recruitment industry since
2005. With 100 employees and two offices in Noida and Bengaluru, his firm Zyoin
offers recruitment and con sultancy services to over 300 companies, including
Ama zon, Goibibo, Play Games and PayU. But there were some constant niggles.
Like parsing resumes. With no universal template around which resumes are
written and struc tured, mining and matching thousands with job positions was a
huge task. Available parsing technologies were ba sic and didn't sort and match
well. Also, the resumes in their database would often get dated.
Last year, Agrawal got a cold email from Anand Kumar, founder of
Bengaluru-based Skillate, an artificial intelli gence (AI)-based recruitment
solution platform that helps companies read and match resumes. Early this year,
SAP Labs picked Skillate as part of their incubator programme.
Agrawal tested Skillate's platform for a month and figured his
staff 's efficiency rate improved sharply -while earlier they were vetting 500
resumes to get 10 right profiles, they were now averaging 50. “Their resume
parsing and matching technology was very good. Our search began to throw up
more relevant candidates,“ says Agrawal who is among Skillate's growing list of
loyal customers. He is now looking forward to Skillate's next feature -scanning
candidates' profiles and posts on social network platforms like Facebook,
LinkedIn and GitHub to automatically update old resumes. “The feature for
automatic resume updation is ready. We are now trying to automate both updation
and matching,“ says Kumar.
AI or artificial intelligence is the new buzzword in the
corporate world. In the networked digital era amid proliferation of smart
devices and surge of Big Data, AI -or smart machines that can think intuitively
and make intelligent sense of the vast data -is the new battleground that is
roiling multiple sectors, disrupting companies and stoking new rivalries.
Serious enough for tech world's two titans -Tesla's Elon Musk and Facebook's
Mark Zuckerberg -to spar over it. Digital giants Google and Amazon are now
duelling with their AI-based virtual assistants. Think of driverless cars and
robotised assembly plants that are disrupting the automobile industry and the
manufacturing sector.
Meet
the New Hiring Manager
That disruption is now shaking up the world of work, too.
The coming job losses is only part of the story. Automation
(largely driven by AI) threatens 69% and 77% of jobs in India and China
respectively, says a recent World Bank research.
It will reportedly take away 30% of the jobs in the banking
sector globally. But that's just part of the story.“Tools and processes
involving AI will proliferate and as they do, jobs will evolve. I think `Robot
Process Automation' is the next big thing, which means everything that can be
automated will be automated,“ says Jim Stroud, global head of sourc ing and
recruiting strategy, talent innovation centre, Rand stad Sourceright, US.
AI will also dramatically change the way candidates seek work
and employers discover them. Thanks to a slew of mushrooming AI-based startups
like Skillate, both in India and overseas. Bengaluru-based three year-old
Belong scans a range of social networks and databases -from LinkedIn to
Facebook to GitHub and ResearchGate -matching a company's hiring history and
position requirement to candidates' profiles, many of them passive jobseek ers.
Belong claims to save 15-20 hours of a recruiter's work every week. Clients
have few qualms endorsing the startup. “Belong has helped us reach out to
candidates otherwise not available. Its very personalised emails going to
candidates is a unique feature,“ says Karthik Purushotham, India talent
acquisition leader for PayPal, which has been a Belong customer for a year now.
Adds Ameya Ayachit, head of talent acquisition, Directi Internet Solutions:
“Belong's engagement piece through personalisation has increased the percentage
of responses we get from candidates. We have had lot of candidates write back
appreciating those customised emails.“
In another southern city, Hyderabad, Hari Krishna M set up
Stockroom.io in 2015. Since then, the curated platform for developers has
helped organise over 115 coding challenges and hackathons for 32 companies,
including Amazon and Microsoft, to hire top-end product development talent.
Last year Hari Krishna cofounded Param.ai, which automatically pre-screens
resumes that land on the company's careers' page. “Param tells the company if
the candidate is good, bad or average depending on its past hiring patterns. It
automates initial screening,“ he says.
It has another product called Retarget that mines the company's
database of resumes, and sends out automatic messages asking candidates to
update them; this helps keep the database fresh and current. Next up is Param
2.0, where it is developing chatbots that will automate features like
prescreening candidates. The programme will ask and answer some basic queries
in audio files, which will automatically be converted into text files for
recruiters to take forward.
Mumbai-based Klimb.io, founded in 2015, wants to tackle the
problem of `no shows', where candidates take the job offer and don't join.
Founder Prashanth Thiruvaipati wants to use AI to combine past data, candidate
psychology and engagement analytics to predict the likelihood of a candidate
dropping out.
With AI, Pankaj Bansal, cofounder of onestop HR consultancy firm
PeopleStrong, has seen dramatic improvement in productivity in his firm. Thanks
to AI-based tools, last year his revenues went up 60% but the headcount just
5%. Earlier, each of his employees would take 20 minutes to sort and download relevant
resumes for each position. Now they do it in two minutes. What is interesting
this time is “recruitment trends in India are not very far off from what's
playing out in Silicon Valley. I have a feeling this time we are building
startups that are originals,“ he says.
View
from the Valley
The US is seeing a surge in AI-based startups taking a stab at a
range of issues that the job market is grappling with. In August, job platform
Indeed -which claims to be the world's No 1 jobs site -acquired a 12-employee
startup called `Interviewed', which helps companies with its AI-based candidate
assessment tool. For example, its automated phone screening, machine learning
and natural language-processing capabilities help construct a psychological
profile of the candidate and judge cultural fitment. It claims to whittle down
a database of 4,000 candidates within days to shortlist the top 2-3%.
Another startup Entelo mines data and social media presence to
predict which applicants are likely to switch jobs. HireVue's AI-based platform
analyses interviews on the basis of facial expressions, words being used, voice
inflection and micro gestures to assess a candidate. For example, it draws
inferences from candidates' usage of active verbs such as `can' and `will' or
negative words like `can't'.
Talent Sonar's algorithms help write job description that
improve gender diversity.SkillSurvey, used by Adidas and Reebok, helps predict
an individuals' turnover and performance. There is Mya Systems, which has
developed an AI recruiter -a chatbot -that can evaluate resumes, screen
candidates and schedule meetings.Another startup Headstart uses an AIbased
matching system to transform the recruitment process for graduates on campuses.
Besides qualification and experience, it creates a `fingerprint' for each
candidate factoring in his interests, personality, skills and the like.
The space has so much potential that Google has entered the fray
with a programme called Cloud Jobs. Scanning millions of job openings to
understand patterns and connections, it uses machine learning to understand
both job content and intent of job-seekers, resulting in better job site
engagement. Google also has an internal hiring tool called qDroid. Indentifying
traits that its research shows are critical for specific positions, qDroid
parses data to draft questions for interviewers.
End of
Job Portals?
AI is shaking up the recruitment industry.But clouds have been
gathering for a while now. Last year HR consultancy firm Randstad acquired
online job portal Monster for $429 million, sending ripples across the
recruitment industry.
Founded in 1994, Monster heralded a new era of job-seeking and
hiring just when internet usage was gaining both volume and depth globally. It
spawned copycats including in India, like Naukri. Earlier this year, another
job portal CareerBuilder got acquired by a group of investors led by private
equity firm Apollo Global Management. More recently it laid off 120 employees,
4% of its staff. Sale of professional networking platform LinkedIn to Microsoft
last year too made headlines.
Multiple issues have bogged down job portals. The biggest is
that they were born in the era that preceded the social network. Facebook was
founded in 2004. A plethora of online social and professional networks have
emerged, from Facebook to Twitter, GitHub (for software engineers) to Kaggle
(for data scientists), which offer easy and accessible platforms for
professionals to interact, network, collaborate and seek-and-offer jobs. A
CareerBuilder report says that 70% of the employers today use social media to
screen candidates before hiring, a sharp surge from 11% in 2006.
Other changes too are afoot. Cheap handheld devices, rising
internet access and falling data tariffs have democratised the digital world.
Not to forget the structural shifts in the economy, which are making the
employer-employee relationship complex and layered as millennials entered the
workforce.Companies like Uber, Airbnb and WeWork are bringing in new
pay-per-use models in both products and services. In sync, there has been a
sharp rise in freelance workers who are seeking project-based work in the
growing gigs economy. Projections show that 43% of the US workforce will be
freelancers by 2020.
Job portals have struggled to keep pace amid this growing
complexity. In an era of interactivity, jobseekers often complained of job
sites becoming black holes for their resumes.Many jobseekers complained of
recruiter ghosting -no update or feedback after their interviews. This is where
AI-based recruitment tools using big data and analytics are changing the game.
Bansal of PeopleStrong says traditionally the recruitment industry had three
broad verticals around which companies did business -ATS or the application
tracking system (like Oracle Taleo), matchmaking and sourcing of talent. “In
the era of Big Data, the three have converged,“ he says. And companies from
Indeed to Randstad to even PeopleStrong have been acquiring firms to prepare
for the converged world even as new niche AI-based startups have mushroomed.
Tread
with Caution
India is still at an early stage of adoption with the IT sector,
digital startups and multinational R&D centres leading the AI wave in
recruitment. But expect rapid growth. And, like in other sectors, AI promises
to be at the vanguard.
There are concerns, the biggest being invasion of privacy. While
most AI-based platforms assure that they only track data in the public domain,
boundaries may be blurring. For instance, the political views of candidates
could potentially bias an employer's decision-making, especially in these
politically-polarised times. “In India, we do not have robust privacy laws and
things are still evolving. Hence, we have set our own gold standards on these
issues: like, we will not scan data that is private or track political views of
the candidates,“ says Rishabh Kaul, cofounder, Belong.co.
Increasingly, in a networked world, a candidate's digital
footprint will gain significance. So remember that vitriolic tweet or a picture
of drunken revelry on Facebook will have deeper implications for those in the
corporate world. Conversely, in the machine-dominated recruitment world,
potentially-employable candidates, who are not very active online, may often
fall under the radar and miss out on opportunities.
“Our product isn't a silver bullet. This (AI-based program) is
something an employer will apply alongside a suite of other tools to make a
hiring decision,“ says Ben Mones, cofounder of US-based startup Fama, which
helps companies spot candidates who may have a violent streak or are racists or
misogynist. “It is not always a question of what is legal. The bigger question
is if people will be comfortable with it.New technology in the wrong hands can
also be used in a wrong way,“ he adds.
On the one hand, machine-based screening is expected to help
remove human biases that often creep in the hiring process. But the verdict on
this is fuzzy as bias mitigation tools could also worsen it. For example,
because the AI algorithm factors in historical data it can easily replicate
past human bias. A recent study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University
reveals that online ads for high-paying jobs are shown more often to men than
women. “My hope is that you recognise the dangers of unchecked algorithms,“
cautions Stroud of Randstad.
Tesla's Musk has warned that competition for AI superiority
could trigger a World War, but those engaged in combat for talent may be
harboring few such apprehensions.
Malini Goyal
Oct 08
2017 : The Economic Times (Mumbai)
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