There has been a huge spike in the traffic to the ‘careers page’ of Genpact — in July-August 2019, it attracted 58,000 applications, as against 3,170 applications in the corresponding period last year.
And the lion share of the credit goes to a ‘conversational bot’, which seems to function with “a mind of its own”, thanks to artificial intelligence-based technology.
The bot takes the candidate-visitor through the vacancies at the company. Based on the candidate’s inputs about their skill sets, experience and expectations, the bot launches an auto match and recommends jobs to the candidate. It then passes the information to the recruiter.
Akhilesh Nair, global recruitment leader, Genpact, says, “From 200 applications on our career page, if we are getting more than 1,000 a day now, it is because technology has converted passive browsers into active applicants by answering queries and finding the right role for the user.”
The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in hiring is still at a nascent stage in India, but it seems set for a quick growth.
According to a study by Mercer Mettl on ‘Tech Hiring and Technology Adoption trends 2019’, Indian companies that use Applicant Tracking System (ATS) and AI tools have registered 69% success rate. Use of these tools has also helped reduce the average hiring time by almost a week.
Background verification
At Mindtree, around 20 bots run background-verification checks on resumes. The bots work with various applications, and their work includes downloading and sharing candidate details to initiate background checks, following up on the documents, updating records and sub-contracting the background checks. This work by the bots has reduced human errors and freed the recruitment division of monotonous, time-consuming tasks.
Skill assessment
RBS India has deployed intelligent technology for skill assessment at “lead levels” in tech roles, and plans to extend it to “operations clerical” roles. Candidates can take a skill-assessment test at their convenience, and proctoring is built into the system, ensuring fairness.
Kanwal Kaul, director – Human Resource, Head of Group Resourcing for RBS India, says this system ensures right match between skills and roles.
Yes Bank and Salesforce India are among other companies that use AI technology to hire talent across its functions.
Personality reports
Talocity, a Gurgaon-based startup, works with large- and medium-sized companies, helping them save time and resources on interviews, in recruitment to certain jobs. With machine learning and AI tools, a personality report is generated for every candidate, and lets the company know of the candidate’s suitability for a job. Ketan Dewan, co-founder, Talocity, says the platform identifies close to 48 attributes of a person, some of which are difficult for a human being to identify.
So, what’s the future of recruitment?
Nair says AI will be used to augment existing recruitment processes and not replace them.
The human-machine combination in recruitment is indispensable.
