While the wonders of artificial intelligence are often overly hyped, AI-powered recruitment software offers real advantages to electronics businesses.
Businesses looking to attract top talent need to change their recruiting efforts to include the advantages of AI, says Evan Sohn, CEO of Recruiter.com, an AI-driven recruiting service. “The job market is very much tilted in the worker’s
Fortunately, AI tools already on the market offer electronics businesses the ability to use AI to automatically crawl the Web for the kind of job candidates they want, auto-interview them via text chat or video on-the-spot, and auto-schedule the most promising job candidates for follow-up interviews by the person who does the hiring.
Other AI apps enable firms to automatically rifle through resumes submitted at their Web site for candidates that have the exact qualifications they want.
And still others offer neuroscience games that job candidates can play -- enabling AI to assess the behavior of those candidates and glean people who exhibit the particular traits, skills and characteristics an electronics firm is looking for.
Katie Ebrahimi, chief human resources officer at Unisys, believes AI technology can be a valuable aid in identifying the right talent for a role and to help optimize a diverse pool of candidates and expedite the interview-to-hire process.
"We are constantly augmenting our recruiting platforms and integrating job boards through additional AI-based platforms for speed, efficiency, productivity, end-to-end cycle time reductions, and optimizing costs," Ebrahimi says.
Turing, a remote worker recruiter of software engineers for electronics and other industries, relies heavily on AI to run through resumes and rapidly match available engineers with businesses hungry for top talent, according to Deepak Tiwari, vice president and head of product at Turing.
One major advantage of AI is its ability to go well beyond keywords when assessing engineer resumes, Tiwari says.
"Instead of connecting engineers from other countries with resumes and canned information that includes their coding skills, education level and geographic location, the Turing AI vetting process is designed to get an overall picture of the areas of strengths and weaknesses,” Tiwari says.
"This removes the bias of human error and gives companies insurance on hiring a quality candidate -- and not someone who has fudged their resume."
AI recruiting tech
If your business is considering the use of AI recruiting, here's a representative sampling of the AI tech that's available:
Every outreach to a potential job candidate starts with a job description. Textio provides an AI editor that ensures the wording of your job ads and job descriptions is thoroughly inclusive and encourages diversity.
Competitor Talvista offers a similar service, using AI to help ensure your ads and job descriptions steer clear of disenfranchising applicants due to race, ethnicity or disability.
A successful AI-recruiting toolmaker, Paradox makes a conversational AI text chatbot, which interviews job candidates on your Web site or other digital property and then schedules the hottest prospects for a follow-up, human interview.
The bot, dubbed 'Olivia,' can also be customized to anticipate the questions job applicants typically ask about your specific electronics business -- rather than simply spout overly general questions. And Olivia is equally adept at interviewing top level talent -- or job applicants simply looking for hourly work.
A chatbot recruiter designed by a Russia-based company, Robot Vera can be embedded on your Web site to instantly interview people who submit resumes or apply for a job.
Core to the application is a self-learning neural network, which was initially trained to chat with people by reading Wikipedia, 'watching' TV shows and studying countless help wanted ads and job interview questions.
Each time Robot Vera interacts with a potential candidate for your business, it's programmed to learn from that experience and be smarter chatting with your next potential recruit.
Robot Vera can also automatically scan resumes on job sites where you advertise, phone candidates with the qualifications you're looking for and propose an interview on-the-spot.
Robot Vera is also relentless: It can make up to 10,000 phone calls simultaneously to bring in new recruits for your business.
(Robot Vera's Web site can be translated into English with Google Translate -- standard on Google Chrome.)
Similar to Robot Vera, VCV AI can screen hundreds of thousands of resumes directed to your electronics business to find the kind of workers you're looking for, then reach-out to those candidates, offering them either an online chat or phone call as an interview format.
Like Robot Vera, it can make hundreds of calls per minute. And it uses voice recognition technology to 'talk' with job candidates and fill-them-in on details about your job openings.
The system can also be programmed to use facial recognition -- combined with predictive analytics -- to evaluate the personal mannerisms exhibited by a job candidate during an online video interview.
Once interviews are complete, Robot Vera sends videos of what it considers to be the most promising candidates to your HR department for final processing.
An AI-powered video interviewing platform, Clovers is designed to integrate seamlessly into commonly used video meeting software like Zoom, Google Hangouts, and Webex.
In practice, the interview 'feels' like a typical video meeting and includes a highlight reel -- which Clovers generates -- that features key takeaways from each interview.
Another video and/or text interviewing solution, HireVue uses AI to evaluate applicants during the interview process. Kevin Parker, CEO at HireVue, says the company currently processes more than 30,000 interviews every day for its clients.
One especially noteworthy product feature in Hirevue: Its Builder tool enables HR to easily create structured interviews that are designed to mine for the key skills your electronics business is looking for with any given job description.
The tool -- which is also designed to promote fairness in hiring -- was recognized by Human Resources Executive Magazine as a Top HR Product for 2021.
The key component of software from Entelo is an AI-driven Web crawler, which looks into every nook and cranny of the Web -- including LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter -- to find candidates that match the kind of people your electronics business needs.
Entelo also automatically sorts, analyzes and ranks a candidate's eligibility for an open position across several attributes, including job title, work history, skills, likeliness to leave, their current role and more.
Promising candidates are directly contacted by Entelo -- either automatically, or on a schedule that is designed by your HR department. And Entelo's follow-up messaging helps ensure HR stays in contact with the most promising prospects.
One of the largest online employment marketplaces in the U.S., ZipRecruiter offers an AI component that can be used to surface the most promising candidates on its board.
The feature works by studying how employers in specific industries -- including electronics -- rate the people applying for work in that industry on ZipRecruiter.
Those insights are used to amalgamate the traits, skills and other characteristics exhibited by highly rated candidates in each industry -- enabling ZipRecruiter to look for those same characteristics in new candidates applying for jobs at your business.
Arya has a slightly different AI spin than ZipRecruiter.com. It studies the successful traits, skills and characteristics of people who are already employed at your electronics business -- and then crawls the Web for job candidates who exhibit similar profiles.
The program also gets smarter over time about the people you're looking for by continually studying the performance of your existing employees.
Performance metrics Arya uses for this analysis include written performance reviews, the speed at which specific employees are promoted and the length of time they stay at your business.
A multifaceted AI recruiting tool, Hiring Solved puts a major focus on enabling you to maintain a running analysis on the job applications you have on-hand.
Plus, it also features search tools you can use to drill down into that database to easily find your best prospects for any given job.
HiringSolved also auto-notifies your HR department in advance when the contracts for your key people are up for renewal, so HR can potentially work with valuable talent to keep them engaged at the company.
Some AI recruiting caveats
While the emergence of all these new AI-powered hiring solutions promises to save electronics businesses significant amounts of time and money, the tools do come with caveats.
The first: While AI may be great for initial candidate searches and preliminary pre-screening of job candidates, you'll most likely find the human factor still is critical to a quality hire.
Also: some advocates of equal opportunity in employment argue that some of the algorithms powering some of these AI solutions could result in biased hiring.
Their reasoning: Algorithms are written by humans. And sometimes human biases -- which may exist consciously, subconsciously or unconsciously in the minds of software developers -- have a way of creeping into code.
Among the federal agencies taking this risk of bias very seriously is the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission .
The takeaway: You'll want your in-house counsel to stay current on the EEOC's moves when it comes to AI and hiring -- and ensure that any AI or automation tools you use comply with U.S. federal employment laws.
Says Charlotte A. Burrows, Chair of EEOC: "Artificial intelligence and algorithmic decision-making tools have great potential to improve our lives -- including in the area of employment.
"At the same time, the EEOC is keenly aware that these tools may mask and perpetuate bias or create new discriminatory barriers to jobs. We must work to ensure that these new technologies do not become a high-tech pathway to discrimination."
Joe Dysart is an internet speaker, tech journalist and business consultant based in Manhattan. Contact him at [email protected] or via his Web site.