The thing which I have learned from my experience in Human Resource, it's that the technology keeps on upgrading constantly but the fundamentals and basic concepts remain the same. In one of my discussions with a veteran of the HR industry he surprised me by throwing an answer to my question. My question was to know his thought on what HR professionals especially recruiters, have failed at in the past 20 years and his answer was “being organized” and it's high time as the technology is getting advanced and professionals should also adapt to the advancements.

Nothing to be surprised about, but coming from a person who spent most of his career dealing with the notoriety of unionism. My curiosity made me plunge into a deeper discussion where the idea of being organized from an HR professional perspective was explained at lengths. The changing dynamics of success stories moving from initiatives to sustenance of the tacit knowledge of human resource has been missed and from time to time the technology advancement is taking place and there lies the future challenge as per him, but hands-on to the latest technology with some smart approach can bring in the change and this is where AI is playing the vital role in the industry especially in the recruitment function.

If we focus on Talent acquisition, it can be a very tedious job; out of 10 calls made in a day maybe only 2 are looking for a change keeping aside their interest in the job description. Not only this but also it has tough deadlines and narrow requirements, and especially not to mention the heaps of resumes and applications -- indeed, tough for any recruiter. 

The growing HR technology in last few years across the globe has reduced many of these disappointments which have ultimately improved the quality hire.

The Consumerization of Technology

For quite a while, the main individuals utilizing HR programming were HR individuals. That implied that a ton of organizations could escape with making items that weren't anything but difficult to utilize. In any case, now we have applications for everything, including candidate following frameworks, talk with input programming, date-book applications, benefits administration programming and everything else you can envision. 

The fact of the matter is, if the HR and recruiting products made today is not easy to use as the applications on our mobile phones, candidates may not use them. At the initial only every HR related Company or an IT company (vendor) has to create such products whose user interface is easy to use any any recruiters, hiring managers, applicants and can use it easily- thus it can bring the huge change.

AI is the today and tomorrow

Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and other “brilliant” technological advancement are never again something in the far away future. In fact, they are already been implemented and used by many firms.

All of the repetitive, cumbersome and time-taking processes are gradually being automated, due to which recruitment team is becoming more strategic and are able to depute more time in other important work.

Impact on recruiters in AI era?

AI is at the highest point of the buildup cycle at this moment. You can ask Alexa what the atmosphere is and it tells you. Regardless, all that it did was investigate the atmosphere on the web, change that data into words and shared it to you.

AI is under the continuous improvement, most of the AI devices are additionally updating. So there is no risk to recruitment specialists as the technology is at the continuous transformation and advancement phase.

"It's a system that takes a colossal measure of information and crunches it into something one can without much of a stretch decipher, investigate or interpret. In the hiring context, I will look at the probability of the patterns that come closer to recruiter input or search and will prompt the best results.

That's basically what recruiters do in their heads now when considering candidates, weighing some attributes more than other attributes, maybe at a subconscious level which at times lead to wrong selection.

It's in crunching the large unstructured data where AI is playing the important role. All of us use structured data, like figures on a excel sheet that can be easily counted, multiplied and analyzed. Let us assume 'we interviewed 35 people, made 14 offers and had 5 accepts,' that's expressing or deriving the results from structured data. Artificial Intelligence tools are able to look at what the candidate writes and understands to make decisions based on it, such as in reviewing resume online—that is something known as using unstructured data. This where Artificial Intelligence is attempting to do better than recruiters do.

AI can also process in few second in comparison to any human mind. But before analyzing any results it needs a lot of data so that it can juice up valuable information. "The bigger the data you have, the better decisions your recruiters will get. You may need thousands of data points or keywords to get accurate predictions or results. If you're only using hiring data from 100 or 150 people, you're getting highly skewed results which may lead to invaluable results."

How AI Will Affect Recruiting

Chatbots are an example of emerging AI on the market the easy example can be taken from social media messaging apps be its LinkedIn or Facebook messenger where application automatically reply to your message and most of the time delivers accurate response(yes but it does take user consent before replying). For the initial candidate interaction the basic chatbots can be helpful which can improve career site retention.

"All they do is read and interpret a list of FAQs. The basic chatbots can easily schedule interviews and screen candidates with basic interaction. Where the advance chatbots can further yield positive results."

AI in coming time will enhance the workforce planning, that’s where AI can be vastly helpful, in finding the patterns among data. "AI will digitally transform the recruitment era from largely a transactional function—scheduling, interviewing, clerical routine and time-consuming stuff—into something that will really adds value to the organization."

Few more Challenges need to address:

If we ignore the AI then the quality issues of the hires coming from our education system also, discussing openly it happens to be the next source of worry. The tying up of corporates with the fine balance of time relevant education practices lies as an opportunity which is rarely being demonstrated by the HR fraternity, leaving some honorable exceptions aside. Employee retention naturally is also tied up to the same framework. The other aspect of the same issue is to move to the more unconventional forms of hiring. Contract is going to be the next big thing in the Indian job market and the change management is tough. Proactive work on Compensation and rewards is the right solution to this upcoming trend. There are organizations which have  found some success in this space but the learning needs to be shared, as it is being concentrated in limited industries and remains to be seen a popular choice with future employees and executives.

Globalization in its youth has benefitted a lot of economies, but the essence of the continuity lies in addition and improvement. Constant environment changes are leading to newer demands and several issues in HR domain. We are working in a compact yet globalized ecosystem where the need is to influence the input at our end matching it with the output from the ecosystem thus influencing the output that we further want to achieve which can be searched in organization vision. This can be managed when we have a technologically advances and informed HR which is “organized” and is serious for its next role as influencer to the initial line of quality resource from where it starts.