How managers can use AI to find the right people
Marjorie, an HR professional, receives a seemingly impossible mandate. She is asked to recruit six Spanish-speaking, front-end programmers with at least 10 years of experience, able to relocate to Miami, in southeastern United States, all within a month. Not so many years ago, this would have been impossible. Today, she feeds the requirements into her AI-enabled recruiting system, which immediately prospects for candidates across the key job aggregators, like Indeed, and all major social and professional media sites, including Facebook and LinkedIn. It also combs through the firm’s database of past job applicants.
The system generates over 1,000 active and passive candidates in literally a hundredth of the time it would have taken a dozen, experienced recruiters. The system determines whether to put up a banner for a particular candidate to click on or to send a personalised email to them. It does that in waves, analysing candidates’ responses and adjusting its approach for the next batch. Interested candidates only need minutes to complete the application because the AI-enabled system has prefilled many sections based on their social media and professional network profiles.
The system’s chatbot interacts with candidates, answering their questions regarding salary, benefits and job profile. It also asks candidates various questions, such as their earliest available start date. Less than 70 percent pass the initial application screening and are instructed by the chatbot to take a set of cognitive games and coding challenges. AI analyses their responses to determine intelligence, character and coding skills.
The chatbot then invites the top third of the remaining candidates to do a webcam interview at their convenience within a several-day window. The AI tool that conducts these interviews lets candidates re-record each answer before submitting the final one. It then analyses the content of candidates’ answers, their word choice, their voice intonation and their micro-facial movements and compares them to high-performing employees and specified ideal profiles.
Less than two weeks after receiving her mandate, Marjorie has ten candidates to invite in for final-round face-to-face interviews and evaluations. Eight of the ten finalists are offered jobs, and seven accept. Along the way, the chatbot keeps all candidates informed on their application status. Although nearly 99.4 percent of the candidates did not make it to the final round, a follow-up survey reveals that 89 percent of the candidates had a fair and positive experience and would recommend the company to friends and colleagues.
[This article is republished courtesy of INSEAD Knowledge, the portal to the latest business insights and views of The Business School of the World. Copyright INSEAD 2024]