Employees and artificial intelligence: emerging technologies in Human Resources
In 2020 the world has significantly changed so that many of CEOs have started searching for new solutions to interact with the employees working remotely. But, and that is also worth mentioning, emerging technologies have been preparing the shift to the new dimension of interaction within the company, erasing physical boundaries and conventions, for many years already. In this article we’re going to tell you about some interesting cases of AI and other “smart” solutions implementations in the field of HR.
In most cases people would rather repeat their usual routine actions than change the situation for the better in some way. We can clean up the house, cook, learn or even work absolutely ineffectively if we still have enough time and energy for our habitual approach. Before the Covid-19 crisis micromanagement was widespread in many companies: micromanagers manually controlled a whole range of processes related to the employees’ workflow management. For instance, it used to be the norm to physically control the presence of the employees at the desk, to assess their productivity “spying the monitor”, to conduct job interviews in person with all candidates without prior screening etc.
The so-called micromanagement requires a huge amount of time and resources, taking it away from creative people and justifying the salaries of those who are unable to think outside the box. But as world-renowned technology expert from the Netherlands, Mark van Rijmenam, said in his interview to RBC Pro, the massive shift to remote work “will put an end to micromanagement. And this is good”. In the remote mode it is simply impossible to control all sorts of minor details the old-fashioned way, and new technologies appear to solve the problems related to human resources, workflow management, onboarding and recruitment.
Assistance in CV screening
Finding a candidate suitable for a position can be challenging today. On the one hand, there are so many different CVs available online. But recruiters find it difficult to choose the right one among them. Why is that so? Some candidates turn out to have another job, CVs may be outdated, and sometimes a person writes several resumes considering the possibility of finding a job in different fields.
Candidates face challenges as well. They might send their CVs to different companies through various services and end up getting no feedback because the position has already been closed or due to the fact that managers lack time or resources to process the applications etc.
Artificial intelligence has already been used by leading recruiting services. For instance, well-known HeadHunter portal sorts jobs and resumes not only by key skills matching, but also using a range of other criteria — more than one hundred, as the company’s representatives claim. Thus, applicant’s scoring key points include the evaluation of how active the applicant is, how often the CV is updated and how quickly the applicant responds.
And as for employers, the number of people invited for job interviews, presence or absence of communications are evaluated. The worse the score, the lower your position in the list of employers will be for the next user.
However, data analysis and artificial intelligence allows companies to assess the candidates on their own. Thus, any company is able to use algorithms in order to analyze CVs and profiles available on the open websites and to match this information with the data from social networks and other sources. For instance, when applying for a position in Danone candidates first take some tests, then after the preliminary selection they record a video interview and artificial intelligence assesses it all together taking into consideration the past achievements, including the results of academic Olympiads and competitions.
How to price a job
Another problem in HR managing is determining relevant salaries. Actually, $ N may be acceptable for people in the region and in the capital proper salary would be $ 2N. Uncertainty in finances sometimes leads to the fact that companies miss the right and much-needed employees, because the wages “do not reach” the competitive level. And as for the employees, they fail to find the right job, because they overestimate their value in the region where the company is located.
It’s quite a challenge to figure out a relevant pay scale manually as all the CVs are diverse and are not made based on one template. AI has been successfully used to solve this problem.
Just at the end of last year we were running the Salary2.me project, which helps find out the real pay scale of an IT-employee in Moscow, Kiev, Minsk and many European cities.
We’ve come up with an AI tool of market salary instant analytics based on CV profile, uploaded to Salary2.me by the user.
To tell you the truth, even the AI training at this stage was challenging.
We had to elaborate the approaches to recognition and structuring of the relevant data. But we made it!
Anyone can get salary evaluation based on one’s skills, work experience and location.
The results are based on neural networks trained on the existing database. It is only in beta mode now (for software industry only), but in future it is going to be a powerful career tool for job search and recruitment. It can give you the idea that you need to move to another place in order to find the right salary or it’ll let you know that you should either recruit in regions or raise salaries. In future it is to be updated: wider range of analytics criteria, more fields, analytics for other cities. But even now the tool is being successfully used by recruiters and job seekers, thus, Salary2.me was one of the top products on Producthunt.
Automated job interviews
Recruiters traditionally spend a huge amount of time preprocessing thousands of applications, and at the same time it often happens that the right candidates are not being noticed and are not even called for an interview. Hunting becomes inefficient because of its high costs and insignificant outcomes.
The fact that since the beginning of the pandemic all job interviews have shifted online prompted companies to somehow automate this process. But the AI technologies for automated job interviews have already been evolving for several years!
Unilever uses a special chatbot which communicates with the candidate while AI recognizes the unconscious reactions to the questions based on the candidate’s facial expressions. If it is stated in the application that the person is ready to relocate but during the interview the candidate doesn’t feel comfortable about it then this is not the right person for a shift position.
Russian systems integrator CROC, for their part, applies AI to sort candidates for student projects and competitions. We’re talking about over 300 applications before each event, the processing used to be extremely time consuming. The implementation of video interviews has made the process twice as fast as before and recruiters now receive recommendations from AI on each candidate.
Setting up the office
In his interview Mark van Rejmenam pointed out that Dutch businesses have been working remotely for a long time already. It has been 10 years since a notion of “ a new way of working” appeared. And when in March the government announced that they should switch to remote work, “most of the companies did it at the flick of a switch”. Of course, the situation was not like that everywhere, and for many companies the transition from the usual schedule “from 8.30 till 5.30” was quite painful. But it also means that we can use the expertise of our Dutch neighbours in managing flexible offices where people do not show up regularly.
For instance, Mark van Rejmenam specified that many companies in the Netherlands use big data analytics for workspace optimization. So-called “smart offices” are equipped with sensors. The detectors track how many people are in the building in different parts of the day, and the data collected this way may be used for ongoing AI analytics. Simple algorithms allow us to predict the number of desks and computers required, as well as to choose the right lightning based on the weather and on the number of people in the premises, to set up the heating, air conditioning and ventilation. That helps the company cut their expenses and create comfortable working conditions.
Behaviour analysis
Finally, many executives worry about the very fact of shifting to remote work.
Who is going to control the process? At this point it’s good to remember that in many companies UBA (User Behaviour Analysis) has been used to monitor the workflow even in the office.
AI based solutions are able to monitor any additional activity from the working station, launching of any non-job related programs, keystrokes intensity, frequency of sending and receiving emails or messages via messengers and even employee’s gaze tracking during the work day. Thus, you’re able to receive ongoing information about your employee’s activity in a given period of time.
For instance, a similar system managed to find out that an employee of company X used to come to the office and just…. sleep there! Besides, AI in charge of the workflow monitoring helps promptly reveal any viruses, possible security leaks or declining employee loyalty.
AI will help you
Smart HR work — from recruitment up to workflow management — is not some kind of fantasy, here in SmartCoders we are developing such algorithms right now. Any modern business is able to benefit from the technologies, rely on big data and enhance the efficiency recruiting in any format — for online, office or flexible jobs. Eventually, micromanagement’s era has come to an end and we all seek for new working environment.
