The Growing Role of AI in Enhancing Talent Assessments

Talent Acquisition (TA) remains one of the top challenges faced by businesses. Acquiring and retaining the best talent requires that TA should align first with business strategy, so that recruiters can connect with the right professionals when needed. Organizations need to be proactive to hire the best talent. Candidate sourcing requires screening of thousands of profiles at a time, and Recruitment Managers have to be able to reach a wider audience and improve hiring efficiency.

A shrinking world and a mobile workforce means that potential candidates expect a pleasant hiring experience. Processes for background screening need to meet compliance and legal requirements. Besides that, vigilance is needed to ensure there is no personal bias, a common anomaly in recruitment. Maintaining a human-connect, while assessing many candidates at the same time demands more recruitment resources.

To a large extent, technology and Artificial Intelligence (AI) can mitigate some of these challenges, and help companies use their resources more efficiently. While use of AI during recruitment is not new, we now see a huge difference in the extent to which it is used at all stages of the recruitment process, right from candidate sourcing and initial screening to hiring and onboarding. The COVID-19 pandemic has given an impetus to remote hiring and made virtual assessment centres, remote interviews and online assessments the norm.

TA – Transforming with AI

Businesses rely on data all the time for taking decisions. The recruitment process generates a huge volume of data, which are put through data analytics to refine candidate engagement and outreach programs. Using this data efficiently will improve hiring efficiency and help get the best people on board.

AI can play a key role in many areas of Talent Assessments, leading to a transformation of traditional hiring.

Candidate sourcing

Candidate profiles are available across a variety of sources – social media, career portals of companies, via referrals and job sites, to name a few. The inflow of profiles for a single position could be in thousands. If there are multiple openings, there is an exponential increase in the volume of profiles requiring screening. This is where AI comes into play.

AI-based applications can automate screening from multiple sources in mere seconds, saving valuable time for recruiters. This reduces the time to hire, especially when 75-80% of resumes that come in for a specific job description do not meet the criteria. AI applications can help build a strong talent pipeline, which recruiters can turn to when needed.

Candidate Engagement

Virtual recruitment assistants can be used to gather candidate information and engage them by providing information about the company and its work culture, give virtual tours and even offer career advice.These chatbots are available 24/7, and can update the candidate anytime, providing an enhanced candidate experience.

Besides this, the entire onboarding process can be seamless and automatic, right from document collection, verification and even planning and organizing relevant induction sessions.

Candidate evaluation

Video interviews can be enhanced with facial and speech recognition software. AI can be used to analyze body language, tone, and voice modulation, to determine fitment. Online assessments, both technical and soft skills, can deliver precise results. AI-powered platforms can be used to detect fraud and conduct ID verification of candidates to check if the interviewee is the registered candidate.

Proctoring platforms enable fraud-proof online assessments and interviews. This can be done with or without human intervention. Auto-detection of suspicious behaviour and live automated warnings reduce or eliminate fraudulent behaviour during online tests.

HirePro offers AI-powered video interviews and proctoring platforms to prevent impersonation and fraud during tests.

Predictions related to future performance

Finding the right candidate is just the beginning, and one of the key questions in every HR Manager’s mind is “How do I ensure continued employee success?” Predicting performance is tricky at best, and there is no set formula. While using AI for predictive analytics related to candidate performance is still in the nascent stage, certain tools can co-relate job application requirements with applicant characteristics, suggesting how a candidate might perform at work and whether they are likely to complete a tenure.

Reducing personal bias

Humans are prone to personal bias, and using AI-generated system data in tandem with human intuition helps to minimize any unintentional personal biases during recruitment.

Ramp up with AI

While AI is driven by data, the human-connect in recruitment is crucial to its success. Recruiters must learn to use AI applications optimally, and not replicate what they do. Here are some recommended practices on effective use of AI in talent assessments:

Identify your business needs, and focus on one or two key areas. For example, do you conduct coding assessments for hundreds of candidates at a time? HirePro’s coding assessment platform enables screening tests, capability assessments and hackathons, and is powered by AI to detect fraud automatically.

Use AI applications to gather tactical and strategic results. For instance, for the role of a medical assistant, AI-based evaluations could throw up candidates who demonstrate empathy. This is more difficult to pick up in direct human interactions, but a relevant set of AI-based tests and evaluations could give recruiters relevant results.

Improve the quality of hire with AI by using meaningful training data sets and updating them continuously.

Standardize data collection processes for every candidate, so that an AI application can understand and recognize patterns

Ensure that data from AI applications integrate with your recruitment workflow so that the experience for candidates and recruiters remains seamless. HirePro’s onboarding platform does precisely this and ensures that new employees settle in with ease while taking care that all HR compliance needs are met.

AI Innovations in Recruitment

Recruitment involves large volumes and precise decision-making. Both of these aspects can be powered by AI. Using physical interview bots to assess personality traits and soft skills is under research. AI can be used for conversation analytics to understand if interviews are standardized and consistent, as well as to check if key competencies are being evaluated.

Time-consuming tasks such as background and reference checks, identification of internal candidates, and connecting with the internal talent pool are other innovative uses. The employee onboarding process can have bots to guide new hires, making it faster and easier to integrate them into the organization.

The Changing Role of the Recruiter

In the not-so-distant future, AI applications and Human Resources will co-exist and complement each other. Recruitment teams will use Augmented Intelligence to make themselves more efficient and effective.

The use of AI will let recruiters focus on the tasks that need a human connect with the candidate. They would be able to spend time on hiring strategies rather than the mundane day-to-day high-volume operations. The quality of hire is expected to improve, and recruiters will be able to share hard data as evidence to justify hires.

Talent acquisition stands to benefit from AI, right from pre-screening tests to employee onboarding. Recruiters need to apply AI to the right stages in order to gain the best benefits from it.

To know how HirePro optimises its AI powered assessment platform, please visit, Hirepro Coding Assessments.
For queries regarding how it works, call us at 080 6656 6000 or write to us at sales@hirepro.in for a demo.