We have always perceived AI (Artificial Intelligence) as an enemy to humans that it is there to eliminate the existence of the human race and rule the humans to make them slaves. But as a data scientist and a person working in the AI space for many years, I don’t think romanticizing the idea of AI being a foe to us is right. AI is an entity that we define on how it is going to perform and what it is going to perform, can it outsmart a human? The answer will be yes on certain occasions, and we need to find those certain occasions to make AI work for us.
We have always recruited the personnel in business with a very rudimentary and slow-paced process but that has proven to us over time results matter. According to a recent study, people are not only looking for jobs but are looking for a job with the best (not even better) pay rate, living conditions, and a purpose to drive the organization. People are getting fired and at the same time resigning from their positions because they are unable to find a better match with their principles and the organization’s principles. We have always learned that leaders define culture and people make culture alive but if you don’t have people aligned to your culture, then there would be no one to drive your ideology and hence culture. AI can help organizations and people solve this problem. We have seen and known that every person in the world follows a certain trend – that might be anything ranging from how you walk to where you walk and when you walk, there is always a trend, it might be the most non-sensical trend, but it exists.
Artificial Intelligence is an algorithm that learns on data points over a while and as an output gives a result to a new situation based on past experiences. Now let’s say you are running an IT organization with 500 employees spread over 5 departments – sales, marketing, product, operations, and administration. Each department in your organization has specific needs and needs special talent (skills) to make magic happen. Usually, when a business needed new talent (people) in an organization, general practice has been to invite resumes from the people who want to join your firm and then scan through the resume to find out who and what matched your talent profile and shortlist some resumes whom you are going to invite for next rounds of interview. Usually, the process takes about 15-45 days depending on the volume of resumes received for the role and the number of profiles that you are hiring. But in retrospect, the process can have many errors caused due to human deficiency and with all good in my heart, I am not stating that someone makes some error intentionally but there may be many unbiased errors and sub-conscious bias that can arise due to process. If you will ask me – what are these errors and how they arise- it is very simple to understand and very complex to eliminate. Let’s assume you are hiring for some position and the applicant pool has only one candidate who is from your Alma Mater, your interest will tend to shift to that candidate, the same can be true for people from the same region, race, or color. This is how our brain has been wired and trained over years that trust similarity and eliminate outliers. This is subconscious bias and due to this, you might miss the genuine candidate.
AI can help you solve this riddle; it can find what kind of personas you currently have in your talent pool and then learn itself based on their behaviors. The question is what AI will learn from these personas – the algorithm will learn to form a boundary of behaviors and skill sets so that you can filter out all the candidates who don’t fit for the role that you are hiring without even adding any sub-conscious bias. AI runs on high-processing computers, that ensures the first layer of filtering is quick and unbiased, resulting in saving multiple days just scrolling through the resumes. Also, the behavioral analysis will give you a chance to identify the behavior of current talents in your organization and upcoming new talents, so that you can choose what kind of people you want in your organization and your decision will be based not just on their technical or hard skills, but on soft skills and personalities too. Isn’t it interesting?
AI eliminates human error and makes the process faster and more adaptable to the new hires or people who are trying to associate with your brand because they also know at the end of the day, their application won’t get rejected just because of someone’s personal bias that they even don’t know.
Being said that AI is never meant to run all on itself, it enhances and learns from what you have done and also, and it is just a matter of time before you can look at yourself as a metric of numbers and understand what is working and what is not working for you and your organization.