Artificial intelligence is making its way into every aspect of our daily lives and technologies.
AI knows what news we’ll find interesting online and on our social networks, what’s likely at the top of our shopping lists, if someone other than us is using our credit cards and which movies we’ll want to see when we plan a cozy evening at home to “Netflix and chill.”
So it’s absolutely no surprise that AI has something to say about the way we manage our recruiting efforts, too.
Talent acquisition teams are facing a fantastic future: a recruiter posts a job, publishes it (through a single portal) to job boards around the web and gets a couple hundred candidates. Then AI takes over, sorting through this stack of prospective new hires and highlighting the top 10 best fits for the job, the company and the team.
This dream is rapidly becoming reality. IBM announced in September that they are launching Watson for recruiting, a tool that will add an intelligence layer on top of a recruiting ATS or CRM system to rank candidates based on a fit score, and Google is launching a new Cloud Jobs API in partnership with CareerBuilder and Dice. And this only represents the tip of the iceberg.
SmartRecruiters recently hosted a Hiring Success meetup and invited recruiting industry experts to share their thoughts on the future of AI and talent acquisition. Here are some of the overarching themes that came out of the event.
AI is here to stay
Recruiters and talent acquisition teams should develop a strategic approach to supplement their work with machine learning technology. Machine intelligence will not replace—but will enhance—recruiters’ ability to identify the best matches for any job.
Quality data is key
The difference between the success of machine learning technology today and the failures of machine learning technology 10 years ago is the convergence of data quality, server infrastructure and the maturity of machine learning algorithms.
There is a lot of opportunity in this space, but access to structured, quality data traditionally owned by an ATS or other systems of record will be a deciding factor for machine learning startups to achieve scale.
AI will take away the drudgery
Human beings are not tuned into perform boring repetitive tasks.
Computers, on the other hand, are designed with an endless capacity for repetitive computations. In cases of high-volume recruiting for professions with clearly defined skill sets, machines can help recruiters to be more efficient and productive.
A perfect partnership?
AI will not take over; rather, the relationship between human recruiters and AI will be symbiotic.
Machine learning models are only as good as the data and the feedback loop that they receive. These models always need a constant flow of training data in order to get better. The signals for successful machine intelligence are a mixture of the perceived quality of candidate from the recruiter and the ultimate hiring decision made by the recruiting team.
Recruiters should take advantage of the technology to optimize their processes while keeping in mind that machines and recruiters—working together—will identify the best talent.
Contributed by: Jerome Ternynck, CEO, SmartRecruiters. Jerome is responsible for product at this ‘product-first’ company. He’s an entrepreneur with his heart in recruiting and soul in technology. Jerome envisions a world where recruitment is transparent, and hiring is so easy that his grandma can do it. He’s passionate for what he does, hates the status quo, and loves innovation especially when it reaches disruption. Jerome’s goal is to bring the economy to its full potential by removing friction in the labor market and eradicating unemployment.
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