Tuesday, October 17, 2017

AI / HR SPECIAL ......YOU ARE HIRED

 YOU ARE HIRED


How artificial intelligence is reshaping recruitment, and what it means for the future of jobs

Anuj Agrawal, 35, has dabbled in the recruitment industry since 2005. With 100 employees and two offices in Noida and Bengaluru, his firm Zyoin offers recruitment and con sultancy services to over 300 companies, including Ama zon, Goibibo, Play Games and PayU. But there were some constant niggles. Like parsing resumes. With no universal template around which resumes are written and struc tured, mining and matching thousands with job positions was a huge task. Available parsing technologies were ba sic and didn't sort and match well. Also, the resumes in their database would often get dated.
Last year, Agrawal got a cold email from Anand Kumar, founder of Bengaluru-based Skillate, an artificial intelli gence (AI)-based recruitment solution platform that helps companies read and match resumes. Early this year, SAP Labs picked Skillate as part of their incubator programme.


Agrawal tested Skillate's platform for a month and figured his staff 's efficiency rate improved sharply -while earlier they were vetting 500 resumes to get 10 right profiles, they were now averaging 50. “Their resume parsing and matching technology was very good. Our search began to throw up more relevant candidates,“ says Agrawal who is among Skillate's growing list of loyal customers. He is now looking forward to Skillate's next feature -scanning candidates' profiles and posts on social network platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and GitHub to automatically update old resumes. “The feature for automatic resume updation is ready. We are now trying to automate both updation and matching,“ says Kumar.


AI or artificial intelligence is the new buzzword in the corporate world. In the networked digital era amid proliferation of smart devices and surge of Big Data, AI -or smart machines that can think intuitively and make intelligent sense of the vast data -is the new battleground that is roiling multiple sectors, disrupting companies and stoking new rivalries. Serious enough for tech world's two titans -Tesla's Elon Musk and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg -to spar over it. Digital giants Google and Amazon are now duelling with their AI-based virtual assistants. Think of driverless cars and robotised assembly plants that are disrupting the automobile industry and the manufacturing sector.


Meet the New Hiring Manager


That disruption is now shaking up the world of work, too.


The coming job losses is only part of the story. Automation (largely driven by AI) threatens 69% and 77% of jobs in India and China respectively, says a recent World Bank research.

It will reportedly take away 30% of the jobs in the banking sector globally. But that's just part of the story.“Tools and processes involving AI will proliferate and as they do, jobs will evolve. I think `Robot Process Automation' is the next big thing, which means everything that can be automated will be automated,“ says Jim Stroud, global head of sourc ing and recruiting strategy, talent innovation centre, Rand stad Sourceright, US.

AI will also dramatically change the way candidates seek work and employers discover them. Thanks to a slew of mushrooming AI-based startups like Skillate, both in India and overseas. Bengaluru-based three year-old Belong scans a range of social networks and databases -from LinkedIn to Facebook to GitHub and ResearchGate -matching a company's hiring history and position requirement to candidates' profiles, many of them passive jobseek ers. Belong claims to save 15-20 hours of a recruiter's work every week. Clients have few qualms endorsing the startup. “Belong has helped us reach out to candidates otherwise not available. Its very personalised emails going to candidates is a unique feature,“ says Karthik Purushotham, India talent acquisition leader for PayPal, which has been a Belong customer for a year now. Adds Ameya Ayachit, head of talent acquisition, Directi Internet Solutions: “Belong's engagement piece through personalisation has increased the percentage of responses we get from candidates. We have had lot of candidates write back appreciating those customised emails.“

In another southern city, Hyderabad, Hari Krishna M set up Stockroom.io in 2015. Since then, the curated platform for developers has helped organise over 115 coding challenges and hackathons for 32 companies, including Amazon and Microsoft, to hire top-end product development talent. Last year Hari Krishna cofounded Param.ai, which automatically pre-screens resumes that land on the company's careers' page. “Param tells the company if the candidate is good, bad or average depending on its past hiring patterns. It automates initial screening,“ he says.

It has another product called Retarget that mines the company's database of resumes, and sends out automatic messages asking candidates to update them; this helps keep the database fresh and current. Next up is Param 2.0, where it is developing chatbots that will automate features like prescreening candidates. The programme will ask and answer some basic queries in audio files, which will automatically be converted into text files for recruiters to take forward.


Mumbai-based Klimb.io, founded in 2015, wants to tackle the problem of `no shows', where candidates take the job offer and don't join. Founder Prashanth Thiruvaipati wants to use AI to combine past data, candidate psychology and engagement analytics to predict the likelihood of a candidate dropping out.


With AI, Pankaj Bansal, cofounder of onestop HR consultancy firm PeopleStrong, has seen dramatic improvement in productivity in his firm. Thanks to AI-based tools, last year his revenues went up 60% but the headcount just 5%. Earlier, each of his employees would take 20 minutes to sort and download relevant resumes for each position. Now they do it in two minutes. What is interesting this time is “recruitment trends in India are not very far off from what's playing out in Silicon Valley. I have a feeling this time we are building startups that are originals,“ he says.


View from the Valley

The US is seeing a surge in AI-based startups taking a stab at a range of issues that the job market is grappling with. In August, job platform Indeed -which claims to be the world's No 1 jobs site -acquired a 12-employee startup called `Interviewed', which helps companies with its AI-based candidate assessment tool. For example, its automated phone screening, machine learning and natural language-processing capabilities help construct a psychological profile of the candidate and judge cultural fitment. It claims to whittle down a database of 4,000 candidates within days to shortlist the top 2-3%.

Another startup Entelo mines data and social media presence to predict which applicants are likely to switch jobs. HireVue's AI-based platform analyses interviews on the basis of facial expressions, words being used, voice inflection and micro gestures to assess a candidate. For example, it draws inferences from candidates' usage of active verbs such as `can' and `will' or negative words like `can't'.

Talent Sonar's algorithms help write job description that improve gender diversity.SkillSurvey, used by Adidas and Reebok, helps predict an individuals' turnover and performance. There is Mya Systems, which has developed an AI recruiter -a chatbot -that can evaluate resumes, screen candidates and schedule meetings.Another startup Headstart uses an AIbased matching system to transform the recruitment process for graduates on campuses. Besides qualification and experience, it creates a `fingerprint' for each candidate factoring in his interests, personality, skills and the like.

The space has so much potential that Google has entered the fray with a programme called Cloud Jobs. Scanning millions of job openings to understand patterns and connections, it uses machine learning to understand both job content and intent of job-seekers, resulting in better job site engagement. Google also has an internal hiring tool called qDroid. Indentifying traits that its research shows are critical for specific positions, qDroid parses data to draft questions for interviewers.


End of Job Portals?


AI is shaking up the recruitment industry.But clouds have been gathering for a while now. Last year HR consultancy firm Randstad acquired online job portal Monster for $429 million, sending ripples across the recruitment industry.

Founded in 1994, Monster heralded a new era of job-seeking and hiring just when internet usage was gaining both volume and depth globally. It spawned copycats including in India, like Naukri. Earlier this year, another job portal CareerBuilder got acquired by a group of investors led by private equity firm Apollo Global Management. More recently it laid off 120 employees, 4% of its staff. Sale of professional networking platform LinkedIn to Microsoft last year too made headlines.

Multiple issues have bogged down job portals. The biggest is that they were born in the era that preceded the social network. Facebook was founded in 2004. A plethora of online social and professional networks have emerged, from Facebook to Twitter, GitHub (for software engineers) to Kaggle (for data scientists), which offer easy and accessible platforms for professionals to interact, network, collaborate and seek-and-offer jobs. A CareerBuilder report says that 70% of the employers today use social media to screen candidates before hiring, a sharp surge from 11% in 2006.

Other changes too are afoot. Cheap handheld devices, rising internet access and falling data tariffs have democratised the digital world. Not to forget the structural shifts in the economy, which are making the employer-employee relationship complex and layered as millennials entered the workforce.Companies like Uber, Airbnb and WeWork are bringing in new pay-per-use models in both products and services. In sync, there has been a sharp rise in freelance workers who are seeking project-based work in the growing gigs economy. Projections show that 43% of the US workforce will be freelancers by 2020.

Job portals have struggled to keep pace amid this growing complexity. In an era of interactivity, jobseekers often complained of job sites becoming black holes for their resumes.Many jobseekers complained of recruiter ghosting -no update or feedback after their interviews. This is where AI-based recruitment tools using big data and analytics are changing the game. Bansal of PeopleStrong says traditionally the recruitment industry had three broad verticals around which companies did business -ATS or the application tracking system (like Oracle Taleo), matchmaking and sourcing of talent. “In the era of Big Data, the three have converged,“ he says. And companies from Indeed to Randstad to even PeopleStrong have been acquiring firms to prepare for the converged world even as new niche AI-based startups have mushroomed.


Tread with Caution


India is still at an early stage of adoption with the IT sector, digital startups and multinational R&D centres leading the AI wave in recruitment. But expect rapid growth. And, like in other sectors, AI promises to be at the vanguard.


There are concerns, the biggest being invasion of privacy. While most AI-based platforms assure that they only track data in the public domain, boundaries may be blurring. For instance, the political views of candidates could potentially bias an employer's decision-making, especially in these politically-polarised times. “In India, we do not have robust privacy laws and things are still evolving. Hence, we have set our own gold standards on these issues: like, we will not scan data that is private or track political views of the candidates,“ says Rishabh Kaul, cofounder, Belong.co.

Increasingly, in a networked world, a candidate's digital footprint will gain significance. So remember that vitriolic tweet or a picture of drunken revelry on Facebook will have deeper implications for those in the corporate world. Conversely, in the machine-dominated recruitment world, potentially-employable candidates, who are not very active online, may often fall under the radar and miss out on opportunities.

“Our product isn't a silver bullet. This (AI-based program) is something an employer will apply alongside a suite of other tools to make a hiring decision,“ says Ben Mones, cofounder of US-based startup Fama, which helps companies spot candidates who may have a violent streak or are racists or misogynist. “It is not always a question of what is legal. The bigger question is if people will be comfortable with it.New technology in the wrong hands can also be used in a wrong way,“ he adds.

On the one hand, machine-based screening is expected to help remove human biases that often creep in the hiring process. But the verdict on this is fuzzy as bias mitigation tools could also worsen it. For example, because the AI algorithm factors in historical data it can easily replicate past human bias. A recent study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University reveals that online ads for high-paying jobs are shown more often to men than women. “My hope is that you recognise the dangers of unchecked algorithms,“ cautions Stroud of Randstad.

Tesla's Musk has warned that competition for AI superiority could trigger a World War, but those engaged in combat for talent may be harboring few such apprehensions.

Malini Goyal
 Oct 08 2017 : The Economic Times (Mumbai)


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