Search and selection: when to employ artificial intelligence

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, for the recruiter and the HR department or, in smaller businesses, for the owner and the administrative office, it is not always easy to carry out the selection. This is because while it is necessary to make 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 be a support in carrying out 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 – who is looking for a job – starts an active search for opportunities in line with their profile.

On a daily basis, recruiters are therefore confronted with countless applications (this is amplified for employment agencies who are 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, after uploading their CV, candidates can take advantage of the AI function that allows the recognition and self-completion of the application form fields. 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 simply to speed up the addition of data into the database.

Screening and selection of candidates

Throughout the whole recruitment process, from screening to hiring, recruiters are consistently confronted with two important factors that affect the search: speed and time. And here artificial intelligence can ve 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, too long, unclear, lacking necessary information or requiring time and effort to be viewed and evaluated. This leads to the risk of speeding up the evaluation process and not paying the right attention to really interesting 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.

CV Parsing and information extraction techniques simplify the collection fo 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 also identifying candidates that are similar to the one found at the end of the search.

Employee Onboarding

Artificial Intelligence technologies are equally useful in the onboarding phase as the search and selection phases.

Artificial intelligence is particularly beneficial for its ability to carry out predictive analysis on the behavior and performance of selected candidates. Sentiment Analysis tools are used to analyze the behavior 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 to the performance that can be expected from a candidate once they are in the company.

The advantages of artificial intelligence in the search and selection process

As we know, for 2020 artificial intelligence has established itself as one of the most relevant and promising recruiting trends. The stand out 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