AI in talent-opportunity space: What we see is just the tip of an iceberg

Every time there is a tech buzzword, there is the inevitable rush to adopt it. Remember the ‘everything dot com’ phase in the early 2000’s and the e-commerce boom of about last decade where every shop was turned into an online marketplace. It is little surprise that with AI and machine learning emerging as the newest trends, every other company has been rushing to put together AI blueprints. Almost every industry has seen a flurry of use cases in AI adoption – and the HR space has not been lagging. The AI enterprise space is estimated to reach an overall 6000 million USD and a sizeable chunk of enterprise AI applications is likely to be in HR.

There are a number of applications in various stages of the HR process from chatbots used in onboarding to applications that sort through CVs or monitor employee performance. However, with deeper researches happening in AI and its related areas, far more use cases will emerge in the HR space. And, it promises to go beyond the standard resume sorting to applications that blend cognitive thinking, deep learning and smarter self-adaptive programs. Here are five impact areas that the Rimjhim Ray (co-founder, Spotle.ai) thinks will see AI being harnessed to fuller potential in the talent-opportunity space.

Potential Predictors:

We hire for potential, we have heard a lot of managers and recruiters say this. But how do you do that? Are 30 sec CV scans enough to gauge potential? Probably not. What can help here is benchmarking potential candidates with your highest performers and base your decisions on pattern matches. Possibly a background in NCC and not high grades is what distinguishes most of your top employees. If you are scanning and rejecting CVs based on grades here you are losing out on your highest performers.

Sentiment Analytics :

AI is being used more and more to gauge sentiments and construct personality maps based on the humongous amount of social media content we create everyday. Sentiment analytics can also be applied to resumes, cover letters and at the risk of sounding pervasive to emails and chat messages. Understanding sentiments and personalities help going beyond the standard grade and experience based fitment and look at deeper aspects like cultural fits.

Goodbye CVs. Hello, Faces (AI + AR):

If the last 5 years was about multiple disciplines like AI and AR emerge as strong independent drivers, the next 5 years will see many more cross-disciplinary applications. In an inter-connected social world, one dimensional CVs are increasingly getting replaced by social graph – a matrix of your digital footprints. Superimpose that with a person’s face and a person can just walk into an interview with his best face forward, get scanned by an intelligent camera and the interviewer will see possibly the person’s last tweets or his Github ratings floating over him. This we can confirm is not Sci-fi. Face recognition can also be used to understand emotions and offer predictive counselling. Obviously like with any use of tech, what is doable has to be balanced by what is acceptable. A lot of people may find machines scanning your faces and getting a low-down on your background or mood pretty intrusive.

Empathetic Counsellors :

Workplace stress is the single biggest killer of productivity. With increased impacts of modern life and work styles on mental health, psychological disorders have emerged as the costliest condition in many economies including the US. The cost or even the effort to deploy human therapists for all staff may be prohibitive however advancement in AI means you can have virtual therapists which can simulate first-level counselling. The anonymity of talking to a digital therapist also could be helpful for employees in a country where mental health is a taboo. AI-based counselling can also be deployed in career counselling where a chatbot can guide you on your competency paths.

Personalised Coaches:

Combine gamification and AI and you can build fantastic career coaches for your employees. Take the examples of fitness apps – they have used gamification in a novel way to help people attain their fitness goals. A virtual career coach can set adaptive goals for your employees, build learning paths for them, dish out rewards all building engagement while making appraisal processes less tedious.

— Rimjhim Ray, Co-founder, Spotle.ai