With the average time to fill a position in manufacturing now at 100 days and the shortage of skilled workers expected to grow to 2.4 million unfilled jobs over the next decade, human resources (HR) and recruiters are facing a new reality.
In sectors with high-volume hiring, manually sorting and shortlisting millions of job applications per annum is an impossible task, and often means that organizations miss out on finding the best available candidates.
Enter artificial intelligence (AI). In recent years, tech companies have developed sophisticated robots that can scour hundreds of online resources — including personal websites, chat rooms, and social media platforms — to pull dozens of data points on potential candidates.
DeepSense, for example, will analyze a candidate’s online presence to create a report on “role fit” (learning ability, stability, attitude, autonomy, teamwork and so on), then assign scores for personality using common HR measurement tools, including the DISC assessment and the Big Five (OCEAN) personality analysis. These scores are then measured against the characteristics exhibited by the recruiting organization’s past data on successful candidates in order to come up with best-fit recommendations — much like the recommendation engines powering Netflix and Amazon.
Social activity is analyzed to create a personality profile by looking at linguistic patterns (such as positive versus negative words). It does not look at subject matter that may lead to bias in the recruitment process, such as politics or religion. Subjective human biases are also removed through the AI, ignoring factors such as age, race, and gender, concentrating instead on role fit and personality.
Recruitment AI isn’t perfect, but like most artificial intelligence, it will grow better as it learns. As of now, the tools available are unhelpful for finding candidates without a significant online presence, and any language-analysis bot will have trouble understanding online slang, irony, sarcasm, or words out of context.
For now, though, AI can be used to greatly speed up the initial “sifting” process, in which thousands of applications are shortlisted, narrowing them down to a manageable selection before human professionals take over. Recruitment AI is also proving invaluable in identifying high-quality “passive” candidates, who currently have a role but may be open to moving to a new organization.