Recruitment is one of the most cumbersome processes that involve multiple levels of marketing, several rounds of interviews, profiling, analysis, and so forth before finally filling in a particular vacancy. A good hiring decision surely has its worth weighed in gold, but what happens when you hire a bad recruit? According to a survey conducted by Harris Interactive, it can cause losses to the tune of Rs 20 lakh to your company.

The survey, that was conducted a few months ago across Brazil, France, China, the US, India, Italy, Japan, Germany, Russia, as well as the UK and involved 400 to 2,611 HR professionals from each country, revealed that 84% companies in India were affected by bad hiring decision last year. 29% of Indian companies reported that this bad hiring decision generally cost them more than Rs 20 lakh ($37,150). Such recruitments had their toll on the company in terms of productivity, loss of revenue, employee morale, and client relations.

But can technology become a game-changer in this scenario that affects nearly every business enterprise operating within our country? Yes. As a matter of fact, it already has. Let us find out how.

AI: Bringing the Touch of ‘Intelligence’ to the Game of Recruiting

Today, disparate forward-looking technologies, including Artificial Intelligence, have been leaving their footprints across all walks of life and, thankfully, HR departments are not untouched by this development. Here are some of the ways that HR professionals, especially the ones catering to the Indian startups, have successfully been incorporating the technology to enhance their recruiting process:

1. Resource Optimization: The integration of AI at the most fundamental level is through optimization of the existing resources. Modern startups are doing this by allocating tedious and recurring manoeuvres to AI-driven systems, thereby increasing the bandwidth of professionals across the board. This two-pronged approach, on one hand, enables these working professionals to accommodate other processes that cannot be automated, on the other hand, enables HR managers to fill the resource void by tapping the company’s existing workforce.
2. Applicant Tracking Systems: With every recruitment that a company makes, it generates a considerable amount of data vis-à-vis the candidate as well as its own internal processes. But none of this data is ever collated or referred to during future recruitment drives. Every company nearly starts from the scratch and loses both in terms of time as well as actionable insights that can enhance the quality of recruitment. This challenge is being overcome by using AI- and NLP-driven Applicant Tracking Systems that score and sort resumes based on their alignment to a particular job opening.
3. Screening and Assessment: It is beyond doubt that CVs do not paint the true picture of an incoming candidate. While they’re often misleading, it is also relatively difficult to gauge the true potential of a person or to substantiate the claims. Forward-looking HR professionals are now also leveraging the AI technology for screening and assessment of candidates. This screening and assessment directly confirms whether a candidate is suitable for a given job or not. For instance, if you are recruiting a software developer, is it not better to let the candidate design a job-related module within a given timeframe, and then check the efficiency of his or her coding, rather than screening them through a ‘certified course’? Same goes for other job roles, giving rise to novel assessment techniques using AI.
4. Eliminating Predispositions: Since every recruiter is essentially a human, this characteristic not only gives rise to human-related errors and omissions, it also makes the inherent biases of the recruiter to reflect in the recruitment process. The increasing involvement of AI is helping eliminate such predispositions as well as factual miscalculations in talent acquisition. 
5. Video Interviews: Lately, as mobile recruitment has picked up pace, more recruitments are being done via video conferencing. However, video conferencing also leaves a significant scope for acts of deceit during the interview. Some recruiters are now turning towards AI-driven platforms that can automatically detect anomalous events during online interviews, such as constantly staring away from the screen or a voice overlap in the background, which signify potential use of visual aids or a third person’s assistance over the phone. They also help ask dynamic questions to counter this challenge.

Artificial Intelligence, today, has become more than a mere buzz word with its increasing role in all-embracing processes. With the true enabler that the cutting-edge edge technology has lately become, it also finally seems to be alleviating the game of recruitment for HR professionals.