No more CV, no more cover letters, no more “interviews” and no more (human) recruiters. Through the means of Artificial Intelligence in smartphone applications, video interviews and assessment games, you are now basically hired by a Robot. Data-based recruitment is slowly gaining traction with some big employers such as Unilever, Walmart and Goldman Sachs, and it is changing how the recruitment industry functions.
Unilever’s assessment starts through the submission of one’s LinkedIn profile. Following the LinkedIn submission, the applicant then plays several neuro-science based games to determine one’s character and how a person would react in certain situations.
For the next step, Unilever has partnered with HireVue’s artificial intelligence powered technology to help conduct the video interview and assess the potential candidate. This technology focuses on factors such as body language, choice of words and mood, and thereby is able to predict how a potential candidate might react in certain situations, figure out when a candidate is lying, analyze how emotions change during the interview as well as evaluate the candidates’ general confidence level. This allows the company to find the person with the required traits for the company and the job.
Only after this entire process will a candidate be presented to the company for a day-in-the-life scenario to determine if the manager and the candidate are a suitable fit for each other.
It seems that companies which have implemented AI in their recruitment are very pleased with the outcome. For Unilever, the diversity of the job applicants increased and the time it takes to recruit a candidate decreased, hence allowing for a faster and better recruitment process.
While companies praise the implementation of artificial intelligence in the recruitment process, how do job seekers feel about being entirely evaluated by a computer?
Sources:
https://www.thegrocer.co.uk/people/your-career/what-unilevers-ai-hiring-experiment-tells-us-about-the-future-of-grocery-recruitment/554493.article
Interesting topic! While I also believe that more and more companies will implement AI in one way or another for their recruitment activities, I believe that the capabilities of AI are a little overrated – at least with the technological possibilities that we have today.
The recruitment process that you discussed in your blogpost seems to be a suitable approach for vacancies with a high demand. Meaning, if you get 100 applications, AI saves hiring recruiters a great deal of work – which is awesome. They can let the ‘robots’ do the filtering and focus on the remaining, most promising candidates.
However, I think that this approach doesn’t work when it comes to recruitment in areas where good candidates are scarce – such as the IT sector or engineering positions – or when companies are looking for senior candidates. In my view, it is especially in these situations that you need the humane component for attracting the people that your company needs. Since these employees in certain areas/levels of seniority are harder to find and convince, they are the ones holding the upper hand. I think that these candidates will rather be discouraged from entering your firm if they realize that they are being sent through various computer generated tests while their skills/salaries/experience have created a certain level of security and self-confidence. All in all, I think that the job of the recruiter will always require the establishment of personal relationships and assessments that will be done by humans.
Hi Lena, thanks for sharing! I think this is highly interesting for all of us, considering that we will all soon be starting in our professional lives. This feels like the next logical step, coming from first delivering your application as a hard copy to filling out questionnaires online and uploading all your documents, and now this. If I understood correctly the video interviews do not include a “real” person from the hiring company, correct? I feel like this is definitely something that might increase the pressure on and stress in applicants, although I see the advantages to the companies. I’m keen to see how this trend develops in the future!
Hi Lena,
I was working few years ago with a recruiter from Unilever and when they told me about exactly what you wrote there, that they were using AI for the interview and CV screening process, I was really surprised and afraid at the same time, meaning that a robot decides if I get hired or not is kind of like a scary thought. It feels like you would have to beat the robot in order to get the job you want… However, I had a discussion with other recruiters from different companies and asked them about the future state of hiring, their opinion was that everything will be digitized and with the use of AI, applicants would not even need to apply but the companies could reach out to high qualified individuals directly. It could scan via LinkedIn, profiles that could match with the job description and then a recruiter/AI could reach out to the candidate. In either case a robot is doing most of the hard work for the recruiter. It is very interesting, maybe this could even become standard practice in the future?