Among the daily activities carried out by companies, search and selection is one of the most important and, at the same time, most complex. The process begins when a company needs to hire new personnel to expand their team, to come with company growth, to replace leaving employees, for temporary or permanent positions and so on. The same happens for an employment agency that manages the selections on behalf of a client company (outsourcing).

In all these circumstances, it is not always easy for the recruiter and the human resources department or, in smaller contexts, for the owner and the administrative department to carry out the selection. This is because while making the application journey a positive experience for the candidate, it is also necessary to maximize the chances of success and carry out the search and selection correctly. It is, therefore, essential to use the right tools. This is where artificial intelligence comes in: it can support various activities throughout the recruitment phases.

When and why to use artificial intelligence for personnel search and selection

Artificial intelligence is configured to be the ideal ally for every recruiter because, with its specific techniques, it can be applied to all of the different phases of the recruitment process, allowing the recruiter to focus his time, skills and abilities on providing value to the candidate.

Attraction and application

These are the first stages of the recruitment process. The moments in which, faced with an internal requirement, the recruiter creates, publishes and shares a job advertisement in Multiposting and on social networks (including vertical ones for the requested sector). Simultaneously, the candidate – looking for a job – actively searching for opportunities aligning with their profile.

Daily, recruiters are confronted with countless applications (this is amplified for employment agencies carrying out multiple searches for multiple clients). Meanwhile, candidates find themselves mechanically filling in numerous application forms, which, if too long, can lead them to abandon the process.

This is one of the factors that artificial intelligence is committed to improving with a positive impact on the candidate experience. In the case of online applications, candidates can take advantage of the AI function that allows the recognition and self-completion of the application form fields after uploading their CV. Recruiters can also use the information extraction and CV Parsing features to speed up the process of extracting data and filing it in their database. With the addition of Computer Vision techniques, they can also extract and digitize information even with a simple photograph or scan of the CV, a highly recommended operation at Career Days, recruiting events or trade fairs, or to speed up the addition of data into the database.

Screening and selection of candidates

Throughout the recruitment process, from screening to hiring, recruiters are consistently confronted with two important factors affecting the search: speed and time. Artificial intelligence can be of specific benefit: speeding up processes and saving time, even in the most advanced recruitment phases.

The recruiter often comes across CVs that are not in line with the Job Description, are too long, unclear, lacking necessary information or require time and effort to be viewed and evaluated. This leads to the risk of speeding up the evaluation process and not paying the proper attention to exciting applications. In addition to this, by archiving applications too quickly, they take the risk of not evaluating a candidate’s full potential for ongoing or future searches.

The introduction of semantic algorithms and other artificial intelligence technologies serves precisely to solve these difficulties.

V Parsing and information extraction techniques simplify collecting necessary data for search purposes (e.g. years of experience gained in a particular field). In addition, semantic search keeps track of the talent in the database by allowing for searches with specific keywords or words that are semantically close to the starting keyword. The AI is also committed to the success of the ongoing search and selection process. This is possible with its systems of ranking and matching job applications. In the first case, each candidate is assigned a score of compliance with the advertisement; in the second, the correspondence between a CV and the Job Description of the advertisement is identified and confirmed. Just as Inda does, candidate matching can be further refined by identifying candidates similar to the one found at the end of the search.

Employee Onboarding

Artificial Intelligence technologies are equally valuable for the onboarding phases.

Artificial intelligence is particularly beneficial for its ability to conduct predictive analysis on selected candidates’ behaviour and performance. Sentiment Analysis tools are used to analyze the behaviour of candidates outside the working world, for example, interaction on social networks with posts, comments or reactions, and movements during a video interview. At the same time, artificial intelligence gives an insight into the performance that can be expected from a candidate once they are in the company.

The advantages of Artificial intelligence in the recruiting process

As we know, in 2020, artificial intelligence has established itself as one of the most relevant and promising recruiting trends. The standout benefits of AI (artificial intelligence) in the HR sector include:

• reduction of costs and recruiting times
• automation of repetitive tasks
• speeding up activities
• punctuality and adequacy of processes
• validity of the results