Recruiting talent by leveraging AI and computer vision

Companies across industries have made artificial intelligence (AI) a central focal point of their digital transformation objectives over the past year, with industries from manufacturing to hospitality looking into it after a year of rebuilding. Recruitment and staffing is no different, AI and computer vision technology are being harnessed to automate time-consuming tasks like candidate screening and interview scheduling, among other things.

The desire to enhance productivity efficiencies across the enterprise, even to the extent of streamlining human resource processes, has become a major aim for larger firms. After all, many are interviewing a larger stable of applicants today, following a significant amount of talent movement in the aftermath of the pandemic.

Some are doing better than others in their adoption of efficiency enablers like automation and computer vision. Adecco Group India is a great example of a major enterprise that leverages artificial intelligence and computer vision to eliminate repetitive tasks and improve productivity.

“We have a huge capability to invest and work with the latest technologies. To transform internally as a part of our digital transformation, we look at tech as the enabler and not as the end goal,” says Ramesh Alluri Reddy, the director of managed services & professional services at the Adecco Group India.

A big internal productivity booster for enterprises would be to identify key performance aims of its employees, and see how their aims are aligned with the company’s digital roadmap. In the case of Adecco India, the company wanted to give its employees and customers the best storage and access to key data resources – which for the HR department, involves real-time access to sets of resumes, as well as the ability to sort through them easily and quickly.

Reddy says Adecco asked itself, how can technology assist in cutting down manual work processes? Digital solutions like AI-powered engines supplied the answer, whereby powerful and non-invasive machine learning algorithms automate the sorting process, freeing up the human recruiter to focus on the final filtering only.

“Since we majorly interact with three people, our perspective was 3-fold,” he says. “One for our internal employees, one for the associates, and the third for our customers.”

“From a customer perspective, we don’t want our customers to float tenders, look at an RFO [reason for outage] and come to us and ask us how many people do we have for a particular skill set, and how can we help them. So we have created a portal and an application for our customers,” Reddy explains. “We are trying to integrate it with our database where we may not want to share all the details but at least give them a dashboard, or give them a chatbot, or NLP [natural language processing] engine where they can ask and get answers.

“So when the customer types in, asking how many people do we have for XYZ skill, the bot can tell them that we have a certain number in these many locations and the conversation goes on seamlessly,” he said.

The focus on a seamless and efficiency-focused experience for not just internal staff and customers, but also for affiliates and remotely-located associates, Adecco India built both mobile- and desktop-focused applications, to enable connectivity regardless of location and limitations.

“When a candidate uploads his or her resume and profile in our database, it is seamlessly integrated with our ATS [applicant tracking system] and there are alerts and AI engines which help them find the right match for the kind of job they are looking for.”

Reddy says computer vision will be the subsequent big company project, and the digital transformation projects will be periodically updated every quarter, to ensure seamless and accessible integration. But computer vision will be prioritized first, as it can facilitate more efficient filtering of faulty or fake data.

“When the recruiters take assessments or interviews online today, there could be some wrong practices being involved. There are a lot of issues with lip-syncing, fake resumes, or someone trying to give a proxy from behind. So computer vision can actually help in identifying the body language to see if the person is scared or if the movement of lips match with his voice. This is a project we are working on,” he concluded.

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