5 Ways Artificial Intelligence Helps Recruiting

There are a lot of new trends in HR around data: Big Data, Social Data, Data Analytics. But one area that is gaining ground is the use of Artificial Intelligence in support of HR. (of course many may argue that those of us in the HR products world have always been artificially intelligent – but I won’t go there). What I want to discuss briefly here is 5 key ways that Artificial Intelligence can be used to improve the processes of recruiting: finding the right talent quickly.

1.       Goes Beyond Key Words: most search and discovery solutions can only find candidates that use the same words you use when you write the job description. If you say Marketing Manager, you’ll get people who use that term. But you might miss the perfect candidate who happens to have the right skills but a different job title and maybe a less traditional career path. AI uses data clustering techniques to create job clusters so you can identify these alternative skills and titles.

2.       Fast and Accurate: Have you ever spent hours poring over social and professional media sites to try and find that perfect candidate? Artificial Intelligence based search can look through that same data in seconds using refined searching and matching that helps you narrow in on what you are looking for.

3.       Perfect For the New World of Social Recruiting: Data in the social “ether” is growing and become more and more relevant to work place decision making. But not all the data follows the traditional rules of old-style recruiting. People talk about their skills and experiences in different ways, their job titles are unique (and funky) and while all of this is fun, it can make it harder to find people. AI based data matching has no problem with these anomalies. Chief Idea Officer, no problem, Chief Moral Officer, no problem, Beer Ranger, AI loves that title too!

4.       Customizes to your Needs: Not everybody who says they want a project manager or a sales lead or a client support specialist means the same thing. Sometimes you can see that clearly in the job description, other times, not so much. With artificial intelligence based matching, you can work with predicted outcomes to customize the kinds of people and skills you are really looking for. This allows you to build the customized profile for a particular job that is matched to your needs.

5.       Gets Smarter: The final and perhaps most important element of Artificial Intelligence is that it gets smarter the longer you use it. AI adjusts to patterns it recognizes. So it you hire sales people with a certain background and experience level, every time you accept or reject a match the system finds for you, it begins to understand that pattern and adjusts the types of recommendations it forwards to you.

Artificial Intelligence is gaining a foothold with HR products. If you want to find out more about it, feel free to talk to us at Innotrieve. We can get a little nerdy about it, but we’ll make sure you learn what you need to know about this valuable HR tool.

TaskRabbit is the New Recruiting Model

Image from TaskRabbit, Inc.

Have you heard about the company Task Rabbit? Basically it is a site (https://www.taskrabbit.com/) where you can post a task you want done: Walk the dog, pick up laundry, or wash your windows. You name it, you can post it. But there are no employees sitting behind the scenes waiting to be tasked to do your chore. Instead it is an open market exchange where people post a task and other people (just everyday people) bid on doing the job for you. I read that the # 1 task requested in TaskRabbit is building your Ikea furniture. (I think my wife would agree with that after the last time she had me build something…I don’t understand why she thought it was bad to have a lot of leftover parts).

There is a lesson in the TaskRabbit model for recruiting. And this lesson may be in both how you recruit and whom – or should I say what – you recruit.

First – how you recruit. Recruiters talk about the importance of networks, but in reality act either like islands and do all the work themselves, or act like King Edward VIII and abdicate their role to third party recruiters. But there is a better way and TaskRabbit has a hint of that better way. Get someone to help you. Both recruiters and employees have a vast network of people who you can ask for help. Employee Referral Linking Solutions like Innotrieve’s Referral Link is a great example of one of these solutions. With these tools you can quickly find people in the vast network of connections you have that might either be interested in the open job you posted, or know someone who is. Let your employees help you find the resources you need.

The second trend is who you recruit. Most companies, especially big companies think they need full time help. Yes, there is a trend to do more contracting, but that is the lazy way out. Companies should use the network of contacts that their employees have to create a grand marketplace of talent. What do you think it would be like if IBM or Cisco, or GE had a Task Board, where everyday people could simply bid on a task? Would the world come to an end? Would we blame it on Obamacare?  No, we’d simply get a good task done by someone we don’t know.

My bet is that we will all use advanced employee referral solutions to connect us to a bigger world, and we will all be better for it.

Do Recruiters (or Hiring Managers) Get the New Career Path

A fellow named Sir Ken Robinson who is famous for a TED talk about how schools kill creativity said in a recent Fast Company article the following:

“It’s important to note, that there just isn’t a straight line between what you do at school and what you go on to do in your career. I argue that it is like being in the ocean. You keep correcting your course according to the things that happen to you. But companies force us to write resumes as though it were a plan.”

He goes on later to say that “…companies need people who can think differently and adapt to be creative.” And finishes his argument making the point that we live in a world of ideas and concepts where imagination is the most important element of our long term success.

But do we look for imagination when we recruit? How often do we throw out the resume that isn’t an exact match to a specific set of skills? Is this getting even more pervasive now that we let automation drive our screening process? The HR space is rife with companies claiming they can find you the better candidate faster. But they can only find the candidates that fit narrow criteria.
 
How can that work if – as many studies have shown – skills learned today will be obsolete in 3 to 5 years?
 
How do we recruit for the “best athlete,” the one who has that well rounded set of skills that allows them to adapt, and to be creative and productive in uncertain and changing times?
 
When I was in the early days of my career I worked in a consulting firm. We specialized in building automated tools to help support complex business systems problems. As we grew very rapidly we wanted to understand how we could grow managers more quickly. Accordingly, we set about assessing what the common characteristics were for our most accomplished leaders. We found two things: 1) it was not our best engineers who succeeded, but the ones who had some form of liberal arts education in their background. And, 2) they had experienced a wide ranging and diversified set of experiences at the firm. They had not stuck to a single career path.
 
So that kid with the degree in art history, take a second look. S/he just might be your next CIO.

Quick Study (2): Employee Feedback on Referrals

A couple weeks ago in a blog post entitled Quick Study Finds 3 Reasons Employees Don’t Refer, I highlighted the reasons employees gave for why they were reluctant to provide referrals. I mentioned in that post that I would share some of the other results as well. So here you go:

First some quick data points:

• 170 employees were asked to participate in a new referral program
• 24% agreed to participate (41 employees)
• 6 jobs were posted – ranging from a help desk position to marketing to very technical
• 44 names were referred during the 5 week test
• Number of referrals per job ranged from a low of 4 to a high of 13
• The most referrals was for a marketing position, the least was for an HR position (go figure!)

When employees from the tests were interviewed, here was some of the key feedback:

• It’s Personal: Referrals are so personal. I had a hard time referring people unless I knew both the company and the person I was referring really fit perfectly, even though I knew that some people I rejected might have been OK.
• It’s a Noisy World: Even though this new tool was very easy to use and minimized my time, I am still just too distracted with so many other things during the day.
• What’s It All About: Our Company seems to hype referrals a couple times a year. A quick email and a mention at the company meeting just isn't enough to get my attention.
• Incentives Get Attention: The odds that I will ever see that $1,000 referral bonus seem remote (I don’t play Lotto) can there be other incentives for me to spend time on this?
• It’s My Network: I am reluctant to send too many referrals onto HR. What are they doing with the names? Will they spam my friends? This is my network of friends – leave them alone!
• Is Anybody There: I hate sending on a name and never hearing anything back. It’s just rude and turns me off!

And the last main bit of feedback:

• I Wouldn't Wish This on My Best Friend: It is all about the strength of the culture. I like working here, but I am not sure I would recommend this place to someone else. It’s a job, but nothing to brag about.

What are your thoughts about these results? Do you experience some of this in your referral programs? 

Quick Study Finds 3 Reasons Employees Won’t Refer

We recently conducted an experiment with 178 employees to find out how they would react to a new employee referral program. 42 signed up. That is 23.6%. Not bad, but also not anywhere good enough. I wanted to know why more did not participate.

Before we started this experiment we did a little researching of our own to find out what to expect. How many employees usually participate in referral programs? I had a hard time finding a study that focused specifically on that, but the number seems rather small. Less than 10% seems to be a common number I hear. (If you know of a study that provides good data about this – please send me the link)

That means if you have a company of 250 great employees that you would love to clone, you only get about 20 to 25 of them that ever pass on names for you to consider. Why is that?

After running our test for 3 weeks I interviewed a subset of the employees that participated in the referral program and a subset that did not. The responses were interesting and I will write about some more of them in future blogs, but here are the top three reasons employees did not want to participate in referrals:

1. Email Noise: This one surprised me (though maybe it should not have). An overwhelming number of the participants in both groups interviewed said they barely read emails that aren’t critical to the task at hand. Emails from HR or “corporate” get perused, but unless it really affects them right now, today, they put it aside. It is not that they have anything against participating in a referral program; they just didn’t slow down enough to read the email.
2. Fear of Failure Effect: Employees don’t want to be associated with a bad referral. They even stated in our conversation that they realized referrals usually resulted in better employees, but they were unwilling to pass along any name that might not be seen as a great referral.
3. Refer vs. Recommend (or just passing along a name): This reason was related to the Fear of Failure reason above but was different in a very important way. They did no trust that HR would still put a referral through the same kind of scrutiny they would a non-referred candidate. The employees said they knew a lot of people, but that was not the same thing as knowing whether they would fit in as employees. They were happy to pass on the name, but were not comfortable saying the person was a guaranteed good fit.

What's your experience with referrals? If you have any information on employee participation in referrals that you're willing to share,  I’d love to hear about it.

Give A Con A Break

The City of San Francisco was one of the first to take up a measure to ban the use of criminal histories as part of the pre-employment process. Several other government jurisdictions are considering similar legislation. This trend is born of the idea that criminal histories may be racist (because minorities tend to be convicted at a higher rate than non-minorities) and that it exacerbates the unemployment problem – especially among those with criminal records.

But for me the more interesting question (and more difficult challenge) is how do we truly assess that risk and make smart hiring decisions about people with previous legal or drug problems. Should they all be damned forever and a day? Story ended. That would be the easy way to handle the problem. No need to worry about complex hiring procedures or concerns that people won’t follow the exact dictates of the company. We hire no one with a previous conviction or a previous problem with drugs. Period!

We’re better than that.

A previous conviction does not have to be a permanent sentence of unemployment. The real solution to the problem is that criminal history alone should not be the only reason for rejecting a candidate. Yes – I understand (I used to be in the background checking business after all) that there are very real circumstance that mean zero tolerance (access to vulnerable populations like children or elderly for example) where the risk is just too great. But that is what I mean when I say that a criminal history record alone should not decide the hire/no hire choice. A criminal history record PLUS a high sensitive position – should mean no hire. Other situations such as repeat offenders, people with a pattern of multiple problems, a conviction along with lying on your resume might all be reasons for rejecting a candidate.

Patterns and context should dictate hiring risk – not just single data points.

It's people we are dealing with and people can make mistakes and still move beyond them. This is where our professionalism as recruiters and human resource people comes in. We use data to help make decisions – we don’t let data make the decisions for us.

Nine Months In Jail

I have a friend, a fellow that I used to work with. He just got out of jail. It all started with drinking. Most of these stories do. He was an IT director, very successful, had a wife, one young son, nice house. But he and his wife drank a lot. I never knew they did, it did not show up in his work. He hid it well. But things got worse for him over the years.

He lost his job, got a DUI or two, and violated his restraining order one too many times. They put him in jail.

Now he needs a job.

Would you hire him?

This is a guy with a lot of great technical skills in an economy where there is high demand for those skills. But he has an arrest record. That is challenge enough. But I learned something else about his struggle to find a job: he can’t get there. Or at least he can’t get to a lot of places.

I had breakfast with this friend of mine the other day. He was excited to announce that he had finally been offered a job. The interview went well. They questioned why a guy with so much experience and background would want this lower level position, but they also understood that someone with his past history needed to start over. Job offered, job accepted.

Then they told him the job started at 7:00 AM.

The buss that he has to rely on to get from where he lives to where he wants to work can’t get him there in time. When you have a DUI you lose your license. When you are in jail you can’t take the mandatory courses to gain it back.

I said I would drive him for the first two weeks.  

Digital Recruiting is Not Mission Impossible

A few months back I read an HBR Blog called Digital Staffing: The Future of recruitment-by-Algorithm by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic where he started out by mentioning that “Americans are now spending more time on social networking sites than on all other sites combined” and that “As a consequence of spending so much time online, we now leave traces of our personality everywhere (and that) these online behaviors are of increasing interest to recruiters and employers, who are desperately trying to translate them into "digital reputations" and use them to find talent online.”

Dr Chamorro-Premuzic felt there were three primary reasons that employers are likely to find their future leaders in cyberspace.

• First, the web makes recruiting easier for employers and would-be employees. 
• Second, the web makes recruiting less biased and less clubby. 
• Third, web analytics can help recruiters become more efficient. 

I could not agree more. About 8 months ago I partnered with a colleague of mine who is a PhD in artificial intelligence to begin building a data access and retrieval solution to help recruiters. Our first product is going to focus on leveraging internal referral networks. But we have several more ideas planned. The information available in public and private networks – our electronic footprint – is exploding, and while there are still several important issues to resolve around privacy, data miss-use, data ownership, etc. the growth of social data mining for recruiting, employee engagement, employee development, contract staffing, you name it, is going to explode in the next 2 to 3 years.

In his HBR Blog, Dr Chamorro-Premuzic predicts that “We will soon witness the proliferation of machine learning systems that automatically match candidates to specific jobs and organizations. Imagine that instead of receiving movie recommendations from Netflix or holiday recommendations from Expedia, you receive daily job offers from Monster or LinkedIn — and that those jobs are actually right for you.” LinkedIn, of course is already doing this – just not very well yet. But it will get better, and companies like mine will be layering new products on top of these networks to improve these data services even further.

I look forward to the day when I can wake up in the morning, choose the “job” I want to do for that day, and head to sleep knowing I will have new options again the following day.

Good morning, Mr. Hunt. Your mission, should you choose to accept it….

Recruiting Technology Can Be Les Misérables

With apologies for my miss-use of the French word form, a lot of the recruiting technology that is out there today really is “Les Misérables”. If Fantine was a recruiter and left alone, unemployed and destitute – I could hear her sing:


I dreamed a dream in times gone by
And hope was high
Recruiting software was worth the buy
I had a dream my life would be
So different from this hell I’m living
So different now from what it seemed
Now recruiting tech has killed
The dream I dream!



The problem has really been that most of the products on the market out there today take a broken process that was developed 20 years ago and try to make it more automated. The only thing you get from automating junk is faster junk. There have been some attempts to get at the heart of the problem (getting the best candidates to want to apply for your job) but little innovation has really helped much. The standard recruiting organization uses a tool to manage the requisition, create a job post, shove it out to irrelevant job boards, and pray for a good outcome. When that fails they call a headhunter. Ugh.

Maybe there is more help to come. Recruiting is going to change because job seekers (both passive and active) are going to change. The target audience for recruiting is more online today than ever before. They like hearing about opportunities – as long as they don’t get spammed. And they like to move around a bit to find the best job fit.

One area for hope is with referrals. Our employees are connected to huge numbers of people. But we don’t know how to tap the reservoir. Opportunity knocks.
 
So in spite of Javert  trying to thwart the best efforts of change, perhaps there is hope for the dream over this next decade.

(Photo curtesy of iStockphoto)

6 Things In For 2012, Out For 2013.

I predict that 2012/2013 will be seen as the death of an old paradigm in human resources and the beginning of the new paradigm: The New Employee Economy. As with most major shifts, this won’t happen overnight (and many will think it didn't happen at all) but it will. While there are many changes that will happen, here is my list of 6 Things that were (still) in during 2012, but will be on their way out in 2013:

Things that are out	Things that will be in
Monster.com and all the other monstrous big job boards and sourcing behemoths who can’t see the change coming	Hire Rabbit and all the other furry creatures who are leading the way to a more clever way to map resources to jobs
Labor Acceptance of things being the way they are.	Labor Activism to lead the change for a more open market for resource exchange. We don’t need jobs; we need places to ply our trades. If we can’t find them, we’ll start our own company!
ATS Systems and all the complexity they have built in to manage a job force that doesn't want to work that way.	Virtual Resourcing where employees can decide each morning where they want to work.
Background Screening and all the fear based, overly conservative, “who done it” mentality	Culture Fit and the idea that screening people into the right job is more critical to success than screening people out.
Social Media which is a lot of fun but has nothing to do with your job performance. Leave Facebook posts alone. What the heck, we all like to get a little crazy after work sometime.	Professional Media and the multiple environments that let you speak for yourself. There will be even more growth of places where professionals interact, share ideas and grow their value by growing their network.
Management Driven Product Design: Closed door meetings where managers discuss customer needs, commission lengthy studies and decide what is best for the customer.	Crowd Source Driven Product Design where people decide what they want and let you know by the way they are using it.

This New Employee Economy is going to be characterized by a less hierarchical mindset and a more open flow of resources. Sounds like fun.

See you in 2013.

Will you Find Your Next Hire Using Social Evidence

Do really talented people spend time on the internet? There is evidence that they do. So if these really smart people are out there leaving an electronic footprint – can you use it to find them when you need them? Can this information be used to find contractors, consultants and your next great new-hire?

Linked In is betting you can

So is Facebook and……

That is the idea behind Social Evidence based recruiting.

Jamey Jeff the co-founder of Remarkable Hire wrote in a blog post entitled What is Social Evidence? How it will change the way you recruit online that there are 3 simple steps to sourcing talent using Social Evidence:

1. Find out where the talent you are seeking “hangs out” online.
2. Learn how those destinations give you insight into candidates’ level of expertise (the “currency” of Social Evidence)
3. Engage appropriately

If it were only that easy.

This concept intersects with the concept of BigData and how big data may help in recruiting. There is more and more information being accumulated from our daily internet traffic. How can we reasonably, legally, economically (and with respect for privacy) go after that data to help aid the process of matching great resources to great jobs?

To solve this puzzle, we as technologists in human resources, have to develop the methods and tools that will allow recruiters and candidates to participate in this process. For it to be really successful, it will have to be a seamless process that allows existing social and professional network activities to be mined. But it will also have to allow for people to actively engage in social media activities that are kept private. Solving this dilemma, and the dilemma of “who owns the data” (a topic for a future blog) is key to really opening up social evidence to everyday recruiting.

There are a number of hurdles to overcome before this is an everyday process; but it is coming.

So will you find your next hire using social evidence? Probably not just yet. But the answer may well be very different 12 months from now and will certainly be radically different 5 years from now.

Hang on – sourcing in the future ain't going to look like Grandma's headhunter.