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TECHNOLOGY AND SERVICES
TECH & TOOLS IN FOCUS:
In artiļ¬cial intelligence we trust? BY SUE WEEKES
rtiļ¬cial intelligence (AI) has been building momentum in the recruitment technology world for many years and is increasingly being used to help match candidates to roles, surface top talent and predict performance. But the big question remains: are recruiters ready to trust it? Robert Newry, CEO and co-founder of Arctic Shores, which was set up to challenge the way companies identify potential candidates, says the answer is probably not, but adds, āif they donāt, they will soon ļ¬nd themselves in declineā. He believes that they are more in a dilemma about āhowā to use it. āIf it means a faster search of a database to shortlist candidates against a client brief, then happy days. It makes their lives easier,ā he says. āHowever, we have a digital skills crisis, so itās no longer economically sensible to keep
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hiring based on experience and skills in circumstances when they are in such short supply.ā Indeed, while one of the beneļ¬ts of AI is to reduce time to ļ¬nd and shortlist candidates, it has so much more to give. And when used with other techniques and technologies, it can create a powerful hybrid that falls somewhere between ļ¬ltering and assessment. Arctic Shores, for instance, claims to be able to unveil a candidateās true potential in 45 minutes and uses a combination of neuroscience, AI and algorithms. āCompanies are looking to open up to a broader talent pool who have transferable skills, which can be trained,ā says Newry. These sentiments are echoed by Jack Davies of AI recruitment technology ļ¬rm AssessFirst, which has developed a predictive hiring solution that makes use of behavioural assessment. He believes that what weāre seeing playing out in the job market is the
result of employers attempting to attract candidates that simply no longer exist. āThey have moved to new employers, new industries or have shifted their work-life balance in such a way that they arenāt viable employees for the environment in which they once worked.ā This is applying pressure on recruiters to diversify and search for candidates in different industries or who have atypical backgrounds to the current workforce. Davies adds: āWhether organisations or individual recruitment leaders are ready or not, this operational pressure is forcing their hand to acknowledge that AI is perhaps the only mechanism by which this challenge can be tackled at scale.ā
Undertake due diligence It is important that recruiters do their due diligence when picking a supplier and Newry urges them to ask vendors for validation studies and proof cases as well as talk to
JUL/AUG 2022
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29/06/2022 15:03