Tackling subjectivity in hiring with AI and machine learning

Speed and accuracy are of the essence when it comes to hiring. When there’s an open position on the team, managers want to fill it fast, and they want to make sure the person they’ve hired is a good fit. But achieving both is tricky.

After all, it’s not enough that potential hires have the necessary skills. Their personalities, working styles, and whether they fit in with the company culture are also important considerations. Plus, it’s hard to tell how someone will actually perform on the job – many folks do great in the interview, but fall short when push comes to shove.

And given that making the wrong hire has pretty significant consequences for businesses, affecting finances, productivity, and even morale, it’s no wonder a lot of effort is devoted to the hiring process.

“Recruitment is a resource-hungry function,” says Nina Alag Suri, founder and CEO of AI-powered recruitment platform X0PA AI. “There’s a lot of time, effort, and money that goes into it.”

Even so, hiring in its current form is flawed.

The hassles of hiring

The typical recruitment process goes something like this: Interested candidates fill in an application form or submit their resumes, and then recruiters and human resources (HR) personnel filter through these documents and extract the relevant ones for hiring managers to sift through.

According to Suri, this process poses a fundamental problem.

Nina Alag Suri, founder and CEO of X0PA AI / Photo credit: X0PA AI

“There’s a gap between the job description provided by the hiring manager and what HR thinks meets the requirements,” she says. “There’s subjectivity from the start, in that regard.”

Additionally, when recruiters are inundated with resumes, the tendency is to resort to keyword searches in order to make the shortlisting process easier. For example, recruiters might look out for the words “data science” when hiring for the data team. While this is not an entirely ineffective strategy, it does screen out candidates who may have relevant experience but do not use the specific keywords in their resumes.

The fact of the matter is HR personnel are only human. Factors such as tiredness or distractions may affect their judgment.

And even after candidates are shortlisted, human subjectivity still comes into play. Interviews are often conducted in silos, with little communication between the different interviewers. In some instances, each person may have a different – and clashing – take on a candidate.

“As much as you might say that you are a non-biased person, there’s no such thing if you’re a human being,” shares Suri. “You have biases that have been formed in your brain through your experiences.”

Unconscious biases are a recurring problem faced by companies in the hiring journey, leading to great candidates being screened out and not-so-great candidates making it into the pool. Not only does this hinder a firm’s search for talent, it also affects the company’s diversity because people tend to hire candidates similar to themselves.

Where machines can make a difference

In Suri’s view, emerging technology such as artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) can make a tremendous difference in recruitment.

Photo credit: Van Tay Media / Unsplash

“You need to make sure that subjectivity is avoided, and with functions that can be digitized, it’s easy to do that with technology,” she explains.

X0PA AI aims to help companies recruit more effectively through the use of its platform, which is powered by AI and ML. The company’s algorithms, which were built on top of the data that came from Suri’s previous venture, helps businesses with recruitment right at the top of the funnel.

The platform is able to analyze resumes and sort them for relevance to the job in question based on parameters set by the recruiters. This brings the process beyond the confines of a simple keyword search.

When hiring for data teams, for example, the platform uses natural language processing and other tools to identify not just resumes from data scientists but also those that indicate experience in related fields, such as statistics and data modeling. The algorithms can also be trained to look out for certain terms and qualifications, helping streamline the search journey.

The platform then runs predictive analysis on candidates with regard to two key metrics: loyalty and performance. By analyzing every aspect of a candidate’s resume – such as educational background, hobbies, and past work experience – the platform is able to compare the individual with similar applicants in its database and make assessments on these metrics based on the data.

X0PA AI’s algorithms also take a lot of unique cultural factors into consideration when computing these metrics. For example, company loyalty in Japan looks different from that in Singapore, and certain industries – such as oil and gas – tend to have different rates of career progression compared to fields such as tech.

“In this process, recruiters get a perspective in the larger picture, and the candidate can be benchmarked against a lot of external factors – not just internal factors,” shares Suri.

The use of AI and ML also helps to reduce the time spent on actually sifting through resumes in search of relevant candidates. According to X0PA AI, the use of its platform has helped some companies reduce their time to hire by 80%. This frees up HR teams and hiring managers to focus on the important part of hiring: actually learning about the people who could be potential colleagues.

“Instead of trying to go through 100 CVs, the algorithm recommends 10, and you can really focus your energy on those 10,” Suri explains. “As a human, you want to focus on things that matter, not on things that can actually be outsourced to the machine.”

The changing face of recruitment

As useful as AI and ML are to the recruitment journey, Suri emphasizes that tech is only able to make recommendations – the final hiring decision must always come back to a human.

“Ultimately, the machine isn’t the one working with the candidate – the human is,” she says.

What technology does is streamline the course of hiring and empower HR personnel and hiring managers with access to data, allowing them to make more informed, unbiased decisions.

It also enables them to focus on what really matters in the recruitment journey, such developing connections with potential candidates and assessing them accurately. And with the ability to sieve through large amounts of information in a fair and unbiased manner, AI and ML can also give companies access to a wider pool of relevant talent.

“If used correctly, AI can really bring in equal opportunities for everyone because it puts everyone on equal footing,” Suri concludes.

X0PA AI is an intelligent software-as-a-service platform that aims to achieve the highest level of objectivity in the hiring process, maximize talent loyalty and retention, and predict the best cultural fit between company and individual.

Learn more about X0PA AI on its website here.

This content was produced by Tech in Asia Studios, which connects brands with Asia’s tech community. Learn more about partnering with Tech in Asia Studios.