Less bias, better hires: why AI could transform recruitment for SMEs | Work Redefined

[Pelican Press 0]

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

Less bias, better hires: why AI could transform recruitment for SMEs | Work Redefined

Artificial intelligence is trained on real intelligence – in other words, content created by humans. Theoretically, if you want AI to ***** out fiction, you train it on novels and if you want AI to write job specs, you train it on job descriptions written by people. But there’s a problem here. No matter how hard humans try to be unbiased, we all have some. And an AI that has been trained on human work will take on some of these human biases. Indeed, overcoming biases is one of the biggest challenges in AI.

“In recruitment, bias is everywhere and comes from a baseline of most recruitment processes being run by humans,” says Kevin Fitzgerald, *** managing director of Employment Hero, a global employment management platform that is using AI to make doing business easier for SMEs. “The underlying bias that recruitment teams have is there in the process already.”

So how does AI deal with this? Fitzgerald says that recruiting tools such as Employment Hero’s

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

can remove many sources of bias. “We take out gender, age, and the visual cues – and we look at the capabilities and skills the individual has. Then we make sure they’re matched properly to the business that is hiring.”

This, he explains, helps eliminate many of the biases in more traditional methods of job searching – such as using LinkedIn (where profile photos can reveal details such as age and ethnicity) or using CVs (where hints of identity are often visible).

AI can help businesses tackle bias when screening CVs. Photograph: Fiordaliso/Getty Images

But there is another concern related to the way humans process information: namely, while people may have unconscious biases, they are really quite good with shades of meaning and subtlety. The worry is that algorithms and reductive keyword matching lack nuance and often miss out on people’s soft skills. Humans, the thinking goes, can read between the lines, AI less so. These issues are further exacerbated by candidates using AI to help them write CVs. You can wind up with an AI-written CV being screened by AI – effectively AI marking its own homework.

SmartMatch deals with this by looking at a candidate’s entire profile to assess the full scope of their experience. This also gets around other problems such as job title inflation and referees giving only positive references. It provides a far more holistic view of the candidate and drills down into their career. “By the time our client [the SME] has finished writing a job description, we are serving up talent from inside our system, which has a database of a million candidates,” says Fitzgerald. “They can see profiles of people who are active jobseekers, connect with them and set up interviews. They don’t have to wait two weeks for responses and then trawl through hundreds of CVs.”

This sophisticated matching process works both ways. Employment Hero also builds up a very detailed picture of the SME that is doing the hiring and what it needs. “The AI tools that we’re using are also looking at your organisational chart and understanding the type of people that you’ve hired previously, and what you need in terms of skills and capabilities in this role,” says Fitzgerald. These tools can even anticipate future staffing needs based on previous hiring.

By building up an understanding of an SME’s needs and hiring history, SmartMatch is able to introduce candidates with the right capabilities. Photograph: Westend61/Getty Images

For jobseekers the value doesn’t end when they’re in a new role. Employment Hero also allows candidates to hold on to their Employment Bureau profile. “This is the first step in building what we’re calling an employment passport,” says Fitzgerald. “They can then use that passport and profile because it has been validated by us. They can also add to it – they can pull in ratings from performance reviews, an anonymised screenshot of where they sat in the organisational chart, promotions and passing probationary periods.”

In a world where employers still struggle to identify the best candidates and jobseekers are often unaware of new roles that may be attractive to them, platforms such as Employment Hero represent a new, far more sophisticated way of bringing the two together.

“This really unlocks value for both sides,” says Fitzgerald. “Employees get to validate their experience, but employers get more validation in terms of the capabilities of somebody that they’re about to hire.”

Good matching is particularly important for SMEs because bad hires disproportionately affect them. If an SME is a 20-person business and it makes two hiring mistakes, that’s 10% of its workforce. Nor is the cost just the bad hire. Rather, it is the cost of letting the bad hire go, the cost of recruiting someone else, the poor work the employee does – and the negative effect that person may have on the existing workforce and even customers. Getting it right is incredibly important. In the past, SMEs could not afford sophisticated search and hiring support. “Now, they can access the kind of software solutions that previously only large corporations could pay for,” says Fitzgerald.

Reimagine what’s possible. See how

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

can transform the way you work

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

#bias #hires #transform #recruitment #SMEs #Work #Redefined

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up