AI and not losing the human touch

Lawrence Knowles, Chief Product Officer at OrangeHRM talks about the ever growing importance of using the right tools to recruit the right talent. He explores the relationship between Artificial Intelligence and recruitment, and explains how personality matching can aid decision making. Artificial Intelligence and recruiting has been one of the most talked about topics in recent months. With the advent of robotics and automation, the link between humans and machines is ever growing - from chatbot’s guiding people through service processes to full scale human augmentation, and even replacement through both machines and algorithms. There is barely a day that goes by without a new report on which jobs will be displaced and in what timeframes and the impact on the economy - these often vary and make disturbing reading. What we are also seeing at the same time is that hiring volumes are increasing but the budget given to the recruitment teams are either the same as before or reduced. This is further driving the automation around intelligent resume parsing, matching skills using taxonomies against job descriptions, eliminating the need to waste time manually screening unqualified candidates.

Further still, there are now online solutions allowing detailed background checking which is often an extremely intensive manual process, with major inefficiencies around paper based workflow. Throughout the introduction of such systems there is naturally a debate on bias, well we are sure there has been natural bias within recruitment for decades, but this shouldn't be an excuse for not implementing best practice and efficiency moving forward. One new area we have been exploring at OrangeHRM is that of personality trait matching. We are in no doubt the solutions described above are valid, but believe they need extending. How often a candidate has been seen by someone during the recruitment process and that innate human ability to understand their personality and how they would fit into an existing team environment. OrangeHRM have collaborated with IBM, using their Watson technology, and created a fully integrated solution that allows recruiting managers to view the personality match of the candidates against the team they are being recruited into. We believe this offers another dimension in what today is a candidate-driven market and offers a critical tool to help you to both attract and compete for talent, ensuring you make the right hire.