What is Artificial Intelligence?

At a high level, artificial intelligence (AI) is a technology that allows computers to learn from
and make or recommend actions based on previously collected data. In terms of human resources
management, artificial intelligence can be applied in many different ways to streamline processes
and improve efficiency.

Uwe Hohgrawe, lead faculty for Northeastern’s Master of Professional Studies in

Analytics program explains that “we as humans see the information in front of us and use our
intelligence to draw conclusions. Machines are not intelligent, but we can make them appear
intelligent by feeding them the right information and technology.”

While organizations are adopting AI into their human resources processes at varying rates, it is
clear to see that the technology will have a lasting impact on the field as it becomes more widely
accepted. For this reason, it is important that HR professionals prepare themselves for these
changes by understanding what the technology is and how it is applied across various functions.

3 Top Applications of AI in HR
Among the numerous applications of AI in the human resources sector, some of the first changes
HR professionals should expect to see involve recruitment and onboarding, employee
experience, process improvement, and the automation of administrative tasks.

1. Recruitment and Onboarding

While many organizations are already beginning to integrate AI technology into their recruiting
efforts, the vast majority of organizations are not. In fact, Deloitte’s 2019 Global Human Capital
Trends survey found that only 6 percent of respondents believed that they had the best-in-class
recruitment processes in technology, while 81 percent believed their organization’s processes
were standard or below standard. For this reason, there are tremendous opportunities for
professionals to adapt their processes and reap the benefits of using this advanced technology.

During the recruitment process, AI can be used to the benefit of not only the hiring organization
but its job applicants, as well. For example, AI technology can streamline application processes
by designing more user-friendly forms that a job applicant is more likely to complete, effectively
reducing the number of abandoned applications.
While this approach has made the role of the human resources department in recruitment much
easier, artificial intelligence also allows for simpler and more meaningful applications on the
candidate’s end, which has been shown to improveapplication completion rates.

Additionally, AI has played an important role in candidate rediscovery. By maintaining a

database of past applicants, AI technology can analyze the existing pool of applicants and
identify those that would be a good fit for new roles as they open up. Rather than expending time
and resources searching for fresh talent, HR professionals can use this technology to identify
qualified employees more quickly and easily than ever before.

Once hiring managers have found the best fit for their open positions, the onboarding process
begins. With the help of AI, this process doesn’t have to be restricted to standard business hours
—a huge improvement over onboarding processes of the past.

Instead, AI technology allows new hires to utilize human resources support at any time of day
and in any location through the use of chatbots and remote support applications. This change not
only provides employees with the ability to go through the onboarding process at their own pace,
but also reduces the administrative burden and typically results in faster integration.

2. Internal Mobility and Employee Retention

In addition to improvements to the recruitment process, HR professionals can also utilize
artificial intelligence to boost internal mobility and employee retention.

Through personalized feedback surveys and employee recognition systems, human resources
departments can gauge employee engagement and job satisfaction more accurately today than
ever before. This is incredibly beneficial considering how important it is to understand the
overall needs of employees, however there are several key organizational benefits to having this
information, as well.

According to a recent report from the Human Resources Professional Association, some AI
software can evaluate key indicators of employee success in order to identify those that should
be promoted, thus driving internal mobility. Doing so has the potential to significantly reduce
talent acquisition costs and bolster employee retention rates.

This technology is not limited to identifying opportunities to promote from within, however; it
can also predict who on a team is most likely to quit. Having this knowledge as soon as possible
allows HR professionals to deploy retention efforts before it’s too late, which can strategically
reduce employee attrition.
3. Automation of Administrative Tasks
One of the key benefits of leveraging artificial intelligence in various human resources processes
is actually the same as it is in other disciplines and industries: Automating low value, easily
repeatable administrative tasks gives HR professionals more time to contribute to strategic
planning at the organizational level. This, in turn, enables the HR department to become
a strategic business partner within their organizations.

Smart technologies can automate processes such as the administration of benefits, pre-screening
candidates, scheduling interviews, and more. Although each of these functions is important to the
overall success of an organization, carrying out the tasks involved in such processes is generally
time-consuming, and the burden of these duties often means that HR professionals have less time
to contribute to serving their employees in more impactful ways.

Deploying AI software to automate administrative tasks can ease this burden. For instance,
a study by Eightfold found that HR personnel who utilized AI software performed administrative
tasks 19 percent more effectively than departments that do not use such technology. With the
time that is saved, HR professionals can devote more energy to strategic planning at the
organizational level.

Artificial intelligence will help determine if you get your next

job

AI is being used to attract applicants and to predict a

candidate’s fit for a position. But is it up to the task?

We’re not there yet, but recruiters are increasingly using AI to make the first round of cuts and to
determine whether a job posting is even advertised to you. Often trained on data collected about
previous or similar applicants, these tools can cut down on the effort recruiters need to expend in
order to make a hire. Last year, 67 percent of hiring managers and recruiters surveyed by
LinkedIn said AI was saving them time.
But critics argue that such systems can introduce bias, lack accountability and transparency, and
aren’t guaranteed to be accurate. Take, for instance, the Utah-based company HireVue, which
sells a job interview video platform that can use artificial intelligence to assess candidates and, it
claims, predict their likelihood to succeed in a position. The company says it uses on-staff
psychologists to help develop customized assessment algorithms that reflect the ideal traits for a
particular role a client (usually a company) hopes to hire for, like a sales representative or
computer engineer. That algorithm is then used to analyze how individual candidates answer
preselected questions in a recorded video interview, grading their verbal responses and, in some
cases, facial movements. HireVue claims the tool — which is used by about 100 clients,
including Hilton and Unilever — is more predictive of job performance than human interviewers
conducting the same structured interviews.

AI can pop up throughout the recruitment and hiring process

Recruiters can make use of artificial intelligence throughout the hiring process, from advertising
and attracting potential applicants to predicting candidates’ job performance. “Just like with the
rest of the world’s digital advertisement, AI is helping target who sees what job descriptions
[and] who sees what job marketing,” explains Aaron Rieke, a managing director at Upturn, a
DC-based nonprofit digital technology research group. And it’s not just a few outlier companies,
like HireVue, that use predictive AI. Vox’s own HR staff use LinkedIn Recruiter, a popular tool
that uses artificial intelligence to rank candidates. Similarly, the jobs platform ZipRecruiter uses
AI to match candidates with nearby jobs that are potentially good fits, based on the traits the
applicants have shared with the platform — like their listed skills, experience, and location —
and previous interactions between similar candidates and prospective employers. For instance,
because I applied for a few San Francisco-based tutoring gigs on ZipRecruiter last year, I’ve
continued to receive emails from the platform advertising similar jobs in the area.

Platforms like Arya — which says it’s been used by Home Depot and Dyson — go even further,
using machine learning to find candidates based on data that might be available on a company’s
internal database, public job boards, social platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, and other
profiles available on the open web, like those on professional membership sites.

Arya claims it’s even able to predict whether an employee is likely to leave their old job and take
a new one, based on the data it collects about a candidate, such as their promotions, movement
between previous roles and industries, and the predicted fit of a new position, as well as data
about the role and industry more broadly.

Another use of AI is to screen through application materials, like résumés and assessments, in
order to recommend which candidates recruiters should contact first. Ideal is a platform utilized
for this and searches résumés for relevant keywords. For instance, Ideal can learn to understand
and compare experiences across candidates’ résumés and then rank the applicants by how closely
they match an opening.
But AI doesn’t just operate behind the scenes. If you’ve ever applied for a job and then been
engaged by a text conversation, there’s a chance you’re talking to a recruitment bot. Chatbots
that use natural-language understanding created by companies like Mya can help automate the
process of reaching out to previous applicants about a new opening at a company, or finding out
whether an applicant meets a position’s basic requirements — like availability — thus
eliminating the need for human phone-screening interviews. Mya, for instance, can reach out
over text and email, as well as through messaging applications like Facebook and WhatsApp.
Another burgeoning use of artificial intelligence in job selection is talent and personality
assessments. One company championing this application is Pymetrics, which sells neuroscience
computer games to job board platforms for candidates to play (one such game involves hitting
the spacebar whenever a red circle, but not a green circle, flashes on the screen).
These games are meant to predict candidates’ “cognitive and personality traits.” Pymetrics says
on its website that the system studies “millions of data points” collected from the games to match
applicants to jobs judged to be a good fit, based on Pymetrics’ predictive algorithms.
Proponents say AI systems are faster and can consider
information human recruiters can’t calculate quickly
These tools help HR departments move more quickly through large pools of applicants and
ultimately make it cheaper to hire. Proponents say they can be more fair and more thorough than
overworked human recruiters skimming through hundreds of résumés and cover letters.
“Companies just can’t get through the applications. And if they do, they’re spending — on
average — three seconds,” Mondal says. “There’s a whole problem with efficiency.” He argues
that using an AI system can ensure that every résumé, at the very least, is screened. After all, one
job posting might attract thousands of applications, with a huge share from people who are
completely unqualified for a role. Such tools can automatically recognize traits in the application
materials from previous successful hires and look for signs of that trait among materials
submitted by new applicants.

Even if companies are using the same AI-based hiring tool, they’re likely using a system that’s
optimized to their own hiring preferences. Plus, an algorithm is likely changing if it’s
continuously being trained on new data.

Another service, Humantic, claims it can get a sense of candidates’ psychology based on their
résumés, LinkedIn profiles, and other text-based data an applicant might volunteer to submit, by
mining through and studying their use of language (the product is inspired by the field of
psycholinguistics). The idea is to eliminate the need for additional personality assessments. “We
try to recycle the information that’s already there,” explains Amarpreet Kalkat, the company’s
co-founder. He says the service is used by more than 100 companies.

Proponents of these recruiting tools also claim that artificial intelligence can be used to avoid
human biases, like an unconscious preference for graduates of a particular university, or a bias
against women or a racial minority. (But AI often amplifies bias; more on that later.) They argue
that AI can help strip out — or abstract — information related to a candidate’s identity, like their
name, age, gender, or school, and more fairly consider applicants.

AI tools reflect who builds and trains them

These AI systems are only as good as the data they’re trained on and the humans that build them.
If a résumé-screening machine learning tool is trained on historical data, such as résumés
collected from a company’s previously hired candidates, the system will inherit both the
conscious and unconscious preferences of the hiring managers who made those selections. That
approach could help find stellar, highly qualified candidates. But Rieke warns that method can
also pick up “silly patterns that are nonetheless real and prominent in a data set.” For
instance, Reuters reported last year that Amazon had created a recruitment algorithm that
unintentionally tended to favor male applicants over female applicants for certain positions. The
system was trained on a decade of résumés submitted to the company, which Reuters reported
were mostly from men. “You have to have a way to make sure that you aren’t picking people
who are grouped in a specific way and that you’re only hiring those types of people,” he says.
Ensuring that these systems are not introducing unjust bias means frequently checking that new
hires don’t disproportionately represent one demographic group.
Who regulates these tools?
Employment lawyer Mark Girouard says AI and algorithmic selection systems fall under the
Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures, guidance established in 1978 by
federal agencies that guide companies’ selection standards and employment assessments.
Many of these AI tools say they follow the four-fifths rule, a statistical “rule of thumb”
benchmark established under those employee selection guidelines. The rule is used to compare
the selection rate of applicant demographic groups and investigate whether selection criteria
might have had an adverse impact on a protected minority group.

https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/12/12/20993665/artificial-intelligence-ai-job-screen