In addition to delivering reduced costs and improved efficiency, AI can help companies hire the candidates that are truly the best fits for the job. In this Fool Live segment from "The AI/ML Show," recorded on Feb. 9, Motley Fool contributors Toby Bordelon and Jason Hall share some of the ways this new technology is removing human bias to improve the hiring process unlike ever before.
Toby Bordelon: You talked about what Pandologic is doing in hiring and recruiting. It's a lot different than it was a 100 years ago. Looking for a job, obviously, everything is different, but it's a much more tech-driven process, and it allows you, the job applicant, to actually apply to more places at once, because their scale there is efficiencies. You can send your resume out to dozens, hundreds of people if you want. You can fill out that specific applications really easily on a word processor. What does that do? It means your recruiting department is now inundated with applications, potentially. They got to sort through them, and yet they have algorithms, they do keyword services, but there's been a lot of work that says, keyword searches aren't necessarily getting you where you want to be.
Jason Hall: Yeah.
Toby Bordelon: Then when that becomes clear, people start playing to that and trying to game to that system. At some point, you can't just hire more people in your HR department for these problems. That's not a sustainable approach.
Jason Hall: Right.
Toby Bordelon: That's the opposite of where you want to go, right? You need something like an AI that can say, Okay, screen this for me, how am I to deal with this? How can I match up the best applicants to this job positions that when I interview, I don't have to interview 100 people. I want to interview five people, each specific one of them, someone that I actually could hire and could do this job well. I want to do that first interview screening with the AI, right?
Jason Hall: One of the things in their most recent presentation from the Needham Conference talked about was bias too. You think about hiring processes and recruiting are rife with the impact of human bias. We're so hardwired to look for things that we can relate to in candidates. That can make it really challenging. It's self-defeating because, a lot of times, the best candidates might get ignored just because the person that was filtering the candidates, they didn't even realize that were disregarding people that would be a great fit.
One of the things that AI can bring is not even just reduced costs and improved efficiency, but you end up making better hiring decisions. Your outcome is improved because you can hire candidates that are really the best candidates for the job. They might not even get their foot in the door with some of those traditional parts of the process. As much as all of the automation or the aggregators, like the LinkedIn and the monster.com, etc., all of those ways to get yourself in front of potential job opportunities, have proliferated, there's still this bottleneck of human interaction with your application that filters so much of that. So just simply changing out that one piece can move you that much closer to finding the perfect candidate every time.
