BIG DATA and AI TOOLS FOR HUMAN RESOURCES SELECTION

The world of work is changing fast, because, in many industrial sectors, there is a disproportion between offer and demand of job; in other words, for every job role, we have a very large number of candidates. This involves difficulties both for the applicants and for the recruiters; in fact, applicants must increase their creativity to make their candidacy emerge among a multitude of competitors, while recruiters must use every valid tool to speed up the search and selection process with the objective of reaching quickly the optimal candidate.

A first tool, consolidated and widely used by recruiters, is the filing system of candidates. It is a database containing a number of CVs, on which the recruiter carries out his personal search based on appropriate keywords concerning the main skills of the job place they want to fill.

This filing system evolves over time, based on spontaneous applications and CVs received in response to research carried out, and can start from hundreds of CVs up to tens of thousands of candidates.

A second tool is based on active research: a series of activities with the objective to identify new talent, by exploiting the main social networks. In this context, the use of powerful search engines to extract profiles of candidates, by aggregating large quantities of heterogeneous data from the web, is synonymous with Big Data technologies. These search and analysis algorithms, as well as being based on the professional competences of the possible candidate, also verify compatibility with the predominant corporate values.

A third tool, increasingly used by recruiters, is the gaming: short tests with a playful background have the objective to highlight the candidate peculiar character and his social and emotional traits. In this context, it is important to have an algorithm that can give indications about capabilities, attitudes, and potential. With regard to technologies, chatbot algorithms are also starting to be used. This tool can help, through question and answer logic, in the screening of candidates in the acceptance phase of the application itself.

Today, the proliferation of personal presentation videos (Video-CV), particularly in America and Great Britain, has allowed a more deep use of artificial intelligence in the selection activities. The computer, through an appropriate AI application, analyzes the facial expression, the posture of the subject, the tone of the voice, the vocabulary used and classifies the candidate on the basis of an eligibility score, automatically generated by the algorithm. It seems that many prestigious companies (eg Goldman Sachs, Hilton, Tiffany & Co, Unilever, Vodafone) normally use tools of this type and that over one million candidates have been evaluated with these tools.

This practice is so well established and accepted by companies and candidates that some universities organize preparatory courses for their students to optimally deal with interviews with these artificial intelligence systems.

Logically, indiscriminate use of these AI technologies can create distortions in the evaluations of the candidates; we think of foreigners with reduced linguistic mastery, shy people with reduced ability to present themselves in brilliant terms, but also people who are demotivated by the fact that they must necessarily pique interest into a machine.

Because at the base of every working activity there is always a human relationship between people, we believe that the selection process will never be able to ignore the empathic relationship that is created between recruiter and candidate. Therefore we welcome the tools that can reduce the time of search and selection, but in the absolute awareness that it will always be a recruiter, endowed with traditional natural intelligence, who will have the last word on the recruitment of the candidate.

ACTION ICT is a young, dynamic and innovative IT company. It operates, both nationally and internationally, offering professional skills and design solutions in the ICT field to medium and large businesses. Our highly skilled know-how is housed in three expertise specific departments: ACTION DATA (Big Data and Analytics), ACTION APP (Web & Mobile Application) and ACTION IOT (Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things and Robotics).