'The human involvement at the top of the funnel will go down,' says expert
Artificial intelligence (AI) is coming into the talent acquisition and management field at the most opportune time, according to one expert.
“The technology couldn't have come at the right time,” says Sekhar Garisa, CEO of foundit, which was formerly Monsters.com. “Because without this, the talent acquisition process was becoming increasingly inefficient.”
And the technology is now part and parcel of the talent acquisition and management practice, he says.
“From the candidate’s perspective or from the employer’s perspective... I cannot think of any workflow where we don't use AI at the moment. It's that ubiquitous.”
And this is helping make recruiters more efficient, Garisa says.
“It allows them to make the process better, from a perspective that the technology can do all the routine, mundane tasks, leaving a lot of time for the recruiters to spend with the candidate.
“In the near term, I only see a lot of advantages that technology will bring in more automation. We would see that companies are able to hire more people, get more productivity gains that lead to people working with [less] talent management.”
More than half of jobseekers globally are using AI tools in their job search, according to a previous report.
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What is the future of AI in talent acquisition?
Looking into the next five years, Garisa believes that there will be a greater deal of automation within the recruitment and talent acquisition process.
“The human involvement at the top of the funnel will go down.”
Recruiters would use AI to reach out to and screen candidates and narrow their list of possible hires to a small number.
“What I see is recruiters’ time per candidate will go up, but they won't be needing to spend time with a lot of people,” he says.
Also, with AI, recruiters will then reach talent “where they are,” Garisa says.
“That whole active hiring is coming down, and passive hiring is going up. So, the candidates expect the job conversations to [come] to them, to happen with them, irrespective of where they are. It's not necessarily on an app. It's not necessarily in an email. It will definitely be multimodal.”
Also, skills-based hiring will be the norm, says Garisa. This means that, using AI, recruiters will be able to assess how good a candidate is against what they claim on their CV.
“It will all be validated.”
Also, full-time employment may no longer be the norm in the near future, he says. “The nature of employment, in terms of contracting between the candidate and the employer, keeps changing.”
With all these changes, talent acquisition and management practitioners cannot do away with AI, says Garisa.
“All of these factors need to be considered.
“To be able to manage this complexity, you will need to use technology at scale. And that is going to be absolutely imperative.”
More than half of organisations in Singapore are using AI in their HR practices, according to a recent report.
How can we prevent bias in AI systems?
With the need for widespread adoption, it’s important for employers to ensure that they prevent bias in their AI systems.
That is something that should start within the organisation, Garisa says.
“AI and machine learning helps you optimize by looking at the past, understanding how you make decisions, and helps you make decisions in the future.
“But if you were making biased decisions in the past… that's how AI can potentially perpetuate biases, if you are not careful.”
The key is human safeguarding, he says.
“With a good governance mechanism, with a good architecture, AI can help eliminate, mitigate, reduce a lot of biases.”
And the technology can help with that, says Garisa. Bias comes in because of human involvement, he says.
“Some people might have some gender bias, some people might have language bias, some people might have bias towards background, but not skills.
“So from that perspective, what the technology can help you do is to anonymize the candidate and help you just make the selection of screening crosses only based on what the job requires. If the job description says, ‘I need 12345,’ then technology can help you assess which of those candidates have 12345, without really getting into the details that are not relevant for selection.”
Almost all C-suite executives in Singapore believe that there are still barriers to generative AI adoption in their organisation, according to a previous report.