Finding the right candidate is crucial to the success of companies and is one of the biggest challenges faced by HR departments and CEOs. Research has shown that the productivity of high performers can be 400-800% more than the average employee’s [1,2]. With hundreds of applications for a certain job, finding the right candidate becomes a task of finding a needle in a haystack. This is where AI solutions come in to support the recruitment committee. In this article, we shed light on 5 main benefits AI solutions bring along to a company.
1. Reduce Bias:
Human evaluations are affected by unconscious bias. Countless studies have reported bias towards gender, motherhood, age, religion, ethnicity, and even candidates’ attractiveness and hairstyle! For example, candidates with white names receive 50 percent more calls for interviews than those having African American names [3]. Such bias affects the reliability and validity of human judgment, leading to unfair assessments and discrimination. AI solutions, on the other hand, provide a structured interview process for all and provide consistent output, thus improving the decision-making process.
2. Increase Diversity:
AI-solutions promote a more diversified workplace, as they save companies from falling into similarity bias issues, where recruiters often favor candidates who are similar to them. Having a diversified workplace has proven to offer a wide range of benefits, including promoting creativity and innovation, achieving faster problem solving, boosting productivity and performance, whilst improving employee’s engagement, as well as achieving financial gains.
3. Reduce Time and Cost:
With an average of 250 applicants per job post, it would require weeks for recruiters to go through those applications. AI-solutions are able to evaluate hundreds of applicants and provide recommendations in a few seconds. Utilizing AI solutions have shown to achieve a reduction in screening time of up to 90% [4]. Speeding up the screening process consequently gives an edge in the war of talents.
4. Improve Quality of Hiring Process:
With the average screening time of a resume being 5-7 seconds, it’s no surprise that good applicants can be dropped through the recruitment process. AI solutions overcome this problem by allowing the recruitment committee to focus on evaluating the top candidates. AI solutions help boost the accuracy in the hiring process, where they are found to be at least 25% superior to human evaluations [5]. The efficacy of such solutions is further heightened in times of high unemployment, where humans become more prone to missing out on well-suited candidates.
5. Improve your brand image!
AI solutions can help improve candidates’ perceptions about the employer which in turn enhances your employer’s image. Besides carrying a fair evaluation and deploying latest AI trends, AI solutions can provide candidates who get rejected with feedback on their strengths and weaknesses suggesting areas of development. This adds on to the image of the company and leads to an improved experience for the candidates.
Why the need to rely on interview AI assessments?
Success is not only driven by technical competencies. Personality traits have shown to be important indicators of job performance. Therefore, it is crucial to integrate the dimension of personality in candidates’ evaluation. By looking into people’s competencies and traits, companies can make more informed decisions when selecting the right candidates. While it is not feasible to conduct interviews with all applicants, AI solutions can also be leveraged for this task. Recently, researchers have started working on AI systems that analyze videos to assess applicants’ personalities. Multiple researches have shown that it is possible to predict personality traits from several ques such as facial expressions, body gestures, tone, and language. This brings a new exciting dimension to AI-based recruitment, paving the way to more successful and promising hiring decisions.
References:
[1] O’Boyle Jr, E., & Aguinis, H. (2012). The best and the rest: Revisiting the norm of normality of individual performance. Personnel Psychology, 65(1), 79-119.
[2] Keller, S., & Meaney, M. (2017). Attracting and retaining the right talent. McKinsey & Company.
[3] Bertrand, M., & Mullainathan, S. (2004). Are Emily and Greg more employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A field experiment on labor market discrimination. American economic review, 94(4), 991-1013.
[4] Black, J. Stewart, and Patrick van Esch. “AI-enabled recruiting: What is it and how should a manager use it?.” Business Horizons 63, no. 2 (2020): 215-226.
[5] Kuncel, N. R., Klieger, D. M., & Ones, D. S. (2014). In hiring, algorithms beat instinct. Harvard business review, 92(5), p32-32