Jonathan Whistman Jul 15, 2021 1:10:09 PM
Guest Columnist and Strategic Partner of Kinsey Management
When balanced with human expertise, artificial intelligence has the potential to revolutionize recruiting for hiring managers, recruiters, and candidates alike.
What Artificial Intelligence Means For Recruiting
In sales, the competition to find and win over the most skillful sellers is as consequential a priority as any. The revenue-producing power of the most capable salespeople can fuel entire sales forces and companies to the next level. To locate, engage, and hire more of those hard-to-find game-changers, hiring managers and recruiters must be keenly perceptive and compete with other potential employers for top candidates’ attention.
How AI Is Changing the Recruiting Process
For everyone to win, the recruiting process has to flawlessly work in favor of the candidates within the talent pool and the people pursuing that talent pool to fill positions. An effective recruitment strategy finds the most economical means to target the most relevant talent without alienating or excluding capable people. AI can erase the recruiting detriment of unconscious bias by emphasizing relevant skills and traits instead. It can also help attend to applicants’ needs, free up significant time, and minimize turnover by automating various elements of the search for the most proficient salespeople.
1. Removing Unconscious Bias
Even the fairest and reasonable people are not immune to the fundamentally human tendency for “underlying beliefs, experiences, and feelings” to influence decisions, resulting in unconscious bias. The possibility of unfairly dismissing or repelling members of the talent pool exists in every step of recruitment, from job descriptions to resume screenings to interviews. AI can help develop job descriptions that contain “neutral and inclusive” language-based purely on pertinent skills and tasks, which “can lead to 42% more applications.” And when it comes to screening resumes manually with interviews in mind, it is easy to subconsciously notice applicants due to their alma mater or hometown instead of what really matters. AI can screen resumes for you, and process them objectively, so candidates’ skills, fit, and selling abilities ultimately shine through.
PerceptionPredict Performance Fingerprints distill data into the ‘sales DNA’ your unique role requires of current and pre-hire salespeople. Our predictive analytics help applicable human attributes and skills rise to the surface of that overwhelming sea of candidate information. This AI-based decision support platform objectively computes the probability of someone’s degree of success at a given sales position. Following just a 20-minute assessment, recruiters and hiring managers can anticipate, at the push of a button, precisely how many units someone will sell or how much revenue they will likely be capable of generating.
2. Optimizing Sourcing and Outreach
Research by McKinsey & Co. reveals that 69% of businesses “believe AI brings value to their Human Resources function.” Failing to source and communicate with prospective hires attentively makes it much harder to pinpoint the individuals who are truly the best fit for the job. Some AI features have helped reduce applicant drop-off rates from 50-60% to just 8%. “Candidate targeting” based on specific attributes enables recruiters and hiring managers to “discover, reach, and engage with relevant talent.” Those who implement AI in recruiting can expect to “hire more efficiently, shortlist more accurately, and screen resumes with more fairness,” given large talent pools from which “52% of talent acquisition leaders say the hardest part of recruitment is identifying the right candidates.”
Using intelligent software to automate screening streamlines the most disruptive and tedious processes for recruiters and job candidates. From chatbots that “engage candidates in real-time” to fair and accurate resume screening to “digitized interviews,” AI tools and the data they yield make recruiters “more proactive in their hiring, help determine a candidate’s culture fit, and improve their relationships with hiring managers.”
3. Soft Skill and Personality Testing
By testing soft skills and personality, AI screening processes erase interviewer biases and ensure higher-quality hiring decisions. Brief questionnaires help AI like PerceptionPredict uncover attributes, “cognitive and emotional traits” like collaboration, organization, assertiveness, and openness “to new ideas and innovation.” These insights reliably “predict how an individual performs at work” and how they approach different scenarios. That’s why the research-based human attributes, traits, and skills, are the mainstays of the PerceptionPredict people intelligence platform. These underlying attributes have been shown to have the greatest impact on a person’s future success.
4. Efficiency and Time-Saving
First and foremost, recruiting is supposed to be a “people-first function.” It is hard to put people first when recruiters and hiring managers are bogged down in the most high-volume, time-consuming, and exhausting task of examining mountains of information in applications and resumes. In recruiting, AI works by maximizing time spent focusing on and interacting with the people you have to consider. Tasking AI with the chores of “screening resumes and shortlisting candidates to interview” can conserve as many as “23 hours of a recruiter’s time” per hire and even decrease “per screen costs” by 75%.
The best utilization of machine learning elegantly integrates technology with irreplicable human interpersonal intelligence. Every opportunity for AI to make a “mundane” step in the recruiting process “easier and quicker” equates with more time connecting face-to-face with top talent.
5. Minimizing Turnover
Businesses in the sales industry commonly struggle with high turnover rates, which promise to drain large amounts of time and resources, impeding productivity and profits. Software like PerceptionPredict is designed to learn what predicts individuals’ outcomes of success or failure at a job. AI’s superior capacity for rigorous job matching results in “happier, more productive employees who are less likely to turnover.” Some companies who adopt “AI-powered recruiting software” early on have seen 20% gains in performance, increasing revenue by 4% per employee and decreasing turnover “by 35%.”
Utilize World-Class Artificial Intelligence with PerceptionPredict
Plenty of HR professionals remain understandably skeptical about the presentation of AI as some miracle fix. Indeed, artificial intelligence is not a band-aid or a one-size-fits-all hiring process solution. For example, “AI requires much data to learn how to mimic human intelligence accurately,” and depending on the software’s development, it can be susceptible to imitating human biases. At Perception, we utilize advanced mathematics to understand your data. Still, we are not trying to mimic human intelligence, and all of our AI is explainable and understandable, which allows us to continue to monitor for any unintended consequences.
At PerceptionPredict, we operate in terms of data-driven material skills, tasks, behaviors, and traits. That is why we created our proprietary machine learning platform to map candidate aptitudes over 400 research-based human attributes. We have also compiled an extensive knowledge base to inform you about the many pitfalls of unconscious biases and how to eliminate them while tracking down the best sales talent.
Are you ready to let PerceptionPredict save you time and costs, defeat unconscious bias, find and win over the best salespeople for the long term? Book a demo now to learn more.