This piece was originally created by Data Root Labs, edited and republished here with permission.

HR is one of those “human” jobs that will be hard to replace with AI. Akin to psychology, it requires a high level of EQ (quotient of emotional intelligence) and profound personal touch. The common preconception is that it’s very hard to augment, let alone automate. Over the last half-decade, this line of logic has come under fire, with data-driven approaches penetrating more and more human resource practices.

With the cost of AI adoption plummeting and the data science community growing by the minute, business leaders are starting to reach out to process automation and augmentation opportunities in the people operations realm. Gartner predicts that by 2022 (three years from now!) one in five workers engaged in non-routine tasks will rely on AI to do their jobs.

The key drivers fueling the growth of HR tech market include increasing need for managing the widespread workforce, growing demand for replacing the legacy systems, the increasing importance of candidate experience and technological proliferation in Big Data analytics, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Internet of Things (IoT). Thus, new report by Grand View Research, Inc. projects the global human resource management market to reach USD 30.01 billion by 2025, registering a CAGR of 11.0% from 2019 to 2025.

PwC forecasts that 20% of U.S. companies with AI initiatives will roll out AI across their business this year to both re-imagine jobs and work processes as well as grow profits and revenue.

A lot of AI use cases revolve around eliminating the tedious and routine tasks, while HR managers handle the most important side of the job – human interaction. We have identified the following key problems that AI can solve:

• Efficiency improvement: automating repetitive tasks.
• Recruitment and candidate assessment: more efficient and less biased hiring.
• Employee development: coaching and engaging employees to enable personal growth.
• Culture maintenance and HR management: identifying cultural issues and key areas for improvement.

Let’s look at those cases one by one:

Efficiency improvement

Automating repetitive tasks.

AI in HR and recruiting gets people to move away from repetitive tasks not to waste their talents. As a result, they can target their energies on more high-level tasks, such as finding promising employees and working to keep them with the company. HR staff will focus on being a strategic partner to business divisions rather than crunching data as a task processor. AI will empower companies to make faster decisions by:

• Accessing up-to-date information.
• Spotting trends through pattern recognition.
• Using machine learning to identify past mistakes to avoid and accelerating processes.

Recruitment and candidate assessment

More efficient and less biased hiring.

One of the major disruptors in candidate hiring is HireVue’s artificial intelligence platform. It identifies and analyzes the tone, word choice, body language, question context, and answers of candidates who have recorded video interviews to determine if they’re a good fit – by skillset and culture. Their quantifiable score compares all the candidates, ensuring HireVue makes the optimal unbiased hiring decisions – all thanks to AI and Machine Learning.

AI helps companies through the process of pre-hire assessments. While assessments are nothing new, in the era of AI, a company can predict which candidate will be a better hire in the future. Sample this, a candidate applies for a role in a company by entering his resume. An AI-powered system analyses the resume and compares it to the successful employees in the same role.

A chatbot reaches out to the candidate and asks some pre-screening questions. They collect candidate data, and AI uses it to score the candidate and present the result to a recruiter.

Pymetrics uses AI-based gamified assessment to screen candidates. One of their customer’s hiring success rate has gone up by over 30% while eliminating all the “educational pedigree bias” inherent to the recruitment process faced by almost all companies out there. AI in recruitment is already huge.

Another player in the HR assessment game, Sapia, helps big brands to get the candidate experience right. They already have text data on 15% of the Australian population that helps identify with 85% accuracy the personality profile of applicants into all customer-facing roles (retail, sales, customer service, etc.). To reduce the hiring bias, the company doesn’t use CV data, nor it builds data models off the existing employees. They only use the text data ensuring that everyone gets a fair go at the role. That allows their clients to hire for the right values and behaviors. In addition, Sapia provides personalized personality reports to every applicant for every role. Amid low unemployment and the rule of social media, this is particularly important to consumer brands who measure the impact of poor candidate experience on customer attrition.

Employee development

Coaching and engaging employees to enable personal growth.

Learning and development (L&D) is a young HR practice and yet the global L&D industry is worth over $200B. Nearly half of the L&D opportunities organization forget, inappropriately apply, or waste on people that don’t want or need it.

Companies like Fuse are now building AI-based coaching tools that request feedback, read comments, and glean sentiment from employees and entire teams. They use data to match these individual and team issues against higher performing teams, giving managers and supervisors the requisite tools to do better.

As part of it, HR undertakes activities such as talent acquisition, employee management, performance management, succession management, etc.

For example, organizations like Greenhouse Software are integrating IBM-AI capabilities through the IBM Watson Candidate Assistant. It is a suite of AI-powered tools that matches jobs to the candidates and vice-versa based on their personalities, skills and interest areas. Greenhouse collects candidate data through various funnels including social media.

It observes minute details such as whether an employee submitted their work sample through LinkedIn or Glassdoor. It maintains scorecards for all the employees based on its own analysis with zero human intervention. This helps the interviewers sort through the applications ahead of time and keep the talent funnel ready.

Culture maintenance and HR management

Identifying cultural issues and key areas for improvement.

AI can look at organizational network data like email traffic, survey results and sentiment of comments to identify areas of stress, arising ethical dilemmas, and various forms of spreading toxicity within a company culture. This helps HR managers identify red flags faster and act in a preventive rather than reactive way.

Employee mental health is extremely important. People are the foundation of your company and they better be happy if management aims to achieve some lofty goals. To remedy some ongoing cultural issues, AI now identifies behaviors that cause poor work performance and disrupt the balance of your working environment. A new breed of intelligent chatbots can ease these situations by providing interactions in an intelligent and easy-going manner while alerting the HR department of any cases that go beyond the red line and need in person handling.

The above are some of the key cases that new technologies enable. For a deeper understanding of the innovation happening in HR tech, take a look at the following infographic by Will Saborio at Silicon Salsa.

Many of these companies already have AI and Big Data components.

(fig. 1) The early-stage HR tech landscape

M&A activity in HR sector

The mergers and acquisitions activity in the past year has been on the rise in HR tech, characterized by both more deals and bigger volume of deals. The trend for consolidation is strong as companies look to increase scale, add new customers and product lines, and penetrate new geographies.

From Recruit acquiring Glassdoor for $1.2B and K1 Investment Management acquiring Jobvite for $135M to SAP’s acquisition of Qualtrics for $8B in cash, there is no lack of jaw-dropping deals in HR tech from both financial and strategic buyers.

What are the most important factors for the buyers? The buyers are willing to pay more for high growth, SaaS product offering, dominance in a particular vertical or geography, ability to scale current solution, sticky enterprise customers, and clean financials. Yet the ultimate factor that determines the highest price possible is the 2nd (or even 3rd) acquisition offer on the table forcing buyers compete for a given company.

With a changing and developing technology landscape, we predict a continuous increase in HR tech M&A activity. In the table below, we summarize the key recent M&A events in HR tech:

Startups and investments

In Q2 2019 alone, VCs have poured $1.448B of VC investment into HR tech. The categories that saw a spike in investments are Wellness (Gympass, $300M round ), Benefits (Collective Health, $205M), and Core HR (HR Path, $112.5M, Payfit $78.6M). When it comes to AI-focused startups, the results are also impressive. In the table below we summarize the biggest rounds and most interesting deals around companies using AI in HR:

Final thoughts and real cases

The human-AI collaboration model is essential for a people-oriented domain like HR. It’s unlikely that AI will replicate the nature of human relationships and its nuance. That said, advantages of AI in HR can help us attune to people operations and make better decisions supported by solid data.

Since AI is developing and new opportunities are opening up, the ways companies use AI and the impact of AI in HR and recruiting will also change. The future of AI in HR processes is clear – AI will affect every organization. The question is how companies adapt and which processes they choose to reinvent or improve.

“Companies will need to be mindful of existing biases and work to ensure that AI does not perpetuate the problem”Ben Reuveni, the CEO of Workey

We at DataRoot Labs work with various HR-tech enterprises and startups. We help them build out AI-powered MVPs or transform enterprises by reinventing their HR systems with AI. Below, you may find practical cases on how we have solved real HR challenges with AI technologies:

• Candidate Scoring Models for a Job Search Platform

“Will the last team member to leave please turn out the lights”

New year, new job.

January is the most popular month for employees to look for new opportunities. But that doesn’t have to mean starting the year with an epidemic of departures.

People leave their jobs for all sorts of reasons.

• Personal – for instance when a family member needs to relocate.
• Professional – to get more pay, a promotion, or make a career change.
• And of course,
• Organisational – when they are no longer required or suitable for their job.

Any thriving business will want to see a healthy level of turnover in its staff. But what if your people are leaving simply because their colleagues are leaving?

We call this the Turnover Contagion Effect (TCE) and it’s something that every business should care about.

Diagnosing Turnover Contagion

You may have experienced Turnover Contagion yourself. It’s that growing sense that “everyone” in your team is job hunting, and it’s been around for as long as people have worked together.

Your colleagues may not have told you directly that they’re searching. But when there’s a sudden spate of funerals, urgent repair visits or caring for holidaying parents’ goats (all true stories) you may get a sense that something’s up.

Then there are the colleagues who are cagey about letting you see their screens. And of course the ones who quite blatantly tell the rest of the team that it’s only a matter of time before they leave.

However confident and secure you may feel in your role and the organisation, it’s only natural to begin to question your position.

Have your colleagues spotted some major flaw in the business that you’ve overlooked? Do they know something you don’t? Should you put some feelers out there, just in case?

But if you’re observing that disintegrating team from the Human Resources department, you’re probably asking rather different questions.
How did TCE start? Can you stop it spreading further? And how can you prevent it from happening in the first place?

What causes the Turnover Contagion Effect?

Turnover contagion stems from co-workers sharing how they’re feeling and how they’re valued at work. When it’s positive it contributes to more productive working environments and more engaged workers. But when workers are looking around it breeds unrest – it becomes contagious. And once TCE starts it can be hard to stop.

And it seems to be getting worse nowadays, for a variety of reasons;

• Lower unemployment rates globally make it much easier for your employees to find a new job, and feel more confident in looking for one. There’s also some evidence that the current political climate is discouraging people from looking outside their home countries. So once an employee starts to look, they may find that they are up against far fewer competitors on the shortlist.
• Social media, and the web in general, have made it amazingly easy to browse for new jobs, even for those who are “not really” looking. LinkedIn is the most obvious place, but there’s a wealth of job sites and careers advice sites that can stir up job dissatisfaction. Social media also spreads the contagion. It’s always been obvious when an unexpectedly large number from one team leave, but now any employee who has reasonable internal connections can spot a trend.
• Lack of job satisfaction also contributes. Just a few little shared problems in the magic combination that includes pay satisfaction, team relationships and support, communication across, up and down the organisation, the demands of the job, and opportunities for growth and training can add to the spread of TCE.
• Poor job embeddedness in your company makes things even worse. Studies (1) show that a highly embedded employee is less likely to leave, and very likely to motivate co-workers to stay. A well-embedded employee has many connections within the organisation and the local community, and their job fits with other aspects in their life. The stronger those links, the more committed a worker is to the organisation. Leaving their job would mean sacrificing more than salary. They also risk the loss of friendships, community links and their sense of belonging. So a company where many workers are strongly embedded is less susceptible to TCE. When workers are poorly embedded, far more are ready to leave. They’ll be updating their resumes, watching job postings, applying for new positions, and that inevitably causes an increased individual turnover.

Add these together and you may also experience a fifth factor.

• Damaged employer reputation. As awareness of increasing staff turnover grows, your reputation as an employer may take a hit. And from there it can become a downward spiral. Your employees notice that more people are on the move. They start to think there’s something wrong with the organisation. They conclude there’s something wrong with anyone who chooses to stay, and they start their own job hunts. The internal damage spreads rapidly over social and traditional media to the local community and across your industry, making it harder to persuade new people to work with you, as well as increasing turnover. It can even start to damage the reputation of the products or services you provide.

Why does Turnover Contagion Effect matter?

When your business starts to suffer from TCE you might think there’s an upside. A long-awaited clear out of rotten wood. A way to make savings on employee costs. A chance for re-organising a dysfunctional department. And yes, all those can be somewhat true.

But whenever you lose a team member there are costs, apart from the obvious ones of losing their production and having to recruit and train a replacement. And these costs far outweigh the benefits.

1. You lose the training you’ve invested in that person.
2. You lose their knowledge of your business and all the relationships they’ve built up, internal and external.
3. You may have to ask other team members to take on their workload while you recruit and then get the new hire up to full productivity – with potential detriment to their normal work.

And as you lose more and more from a team you also risk the engagement and morale of all of their former colleagues. In fact, that’s the greatest risk of the Turnover Contagion Effect – that it spreads further.

As our recent White Paper says (2), “… failing to monitor and moderate turnover can result in leaver behaviour becoming a cultural mainstay of a particular role type, or an accepted norm in the business as a whole.”

Here are 11 Essential Things to Know About Employee Turnover

A Possible Cure for Turnover Contagion Effect

Like most infectious diseases, TCE is easier to prevent than it is to cure. But if you do find that you’re already suffering from TCE, there are a few dos and don’ts.

Don’t

Reduce Social Communication

It’s certainly NOT effective to apply one commentator’s suggestion of trying to “…combat the social environment that stimulates turnover”.

That social side of work may be spreading the contagion, but it’s also the foundation of the strong sense of belonging to a business and a community that encourages people to stay.

Trying to move desks further apart, ban Tweets and Facebook posts or prevent canteen gossip will cause more problems than it solves.

Do

Instead, it may be more productive to consider the root cause of the lack of organisational commitment.

You should be asking:

• Are supervisors and managers actively supporting the teams experiencing Turnover Contagion?
• Should you be finding ways to make your business feel a true part of your local community or your industry?
• Are there working practices and benefits that could be flexed to make workers’ life and work more balanced?
• Could community engagement or social responsibility programmes help?

… and Probable Prevention for Turnover Contagion Effect

But as mentioned, it’s easier to prevent than cure, so better still is to start at the beginning.

Think about who you hire and how you look after them when they start work.

Are you hiring people who align well with your company culture and values? Are you hiring people with the personality and behavioural traits that make them more likely to stay and perform in your company?

If you’re unsure, that’s where you should start. Try to find out what makes people stay with your organisation. What do your long tenure employees have in common? With your newfound knowledge of your ideal candidate, identify the applicants that fit the bill and prioritise them in your shortlist.

This may sound like a difficult task, but nowadays there are even analytics and technology solutions that can do this for you.

Once you’ve found the right people you still need to look after them and help them commit to your organisation. Introducing each new hire to your company in a motivating induction
process, where they get to know other workers, will give them a strong start.

As they become truly embedded they’re your best hope for preventing future outbreaks of Turnover Contagion.

At Sapia, we help you find your shortlist of candidates who are more likely to stay in your specific business. We combine your data with our workforce and data science to scientifically screen your applicants and predict who is more likely to succeed. And that can also include how well those candidates will fit into your team, your organisation and your community.

References

(1) Felps et al. “TURNOVER CONTAGION: HOW COWORKERS’ JOB EMBEDDEDNESS AND JOB SEARCH BEHAVIORS INFLUENCE QUITTING” © Academy of Management Journal 2009, Vol. 52, No. 3, 545–561

You can try out Sapia’s FirstInterview right now, or leave us your details to book a personalised demo

To find out how to improve candidate experience using Recruitment Automation, we also have a great eBook on candidate experience.

Why recruitment automation combined with Ai, has become such a ‘big thing’?

Is your recruitment team overwhelmed by the sheer volume of job applications and CVs? Are you struggling to find the right candidates in a timely manner? Is administrative work taking up too much of your team’s time, leaving little room for building relationships or focusing on business growth?

If you answered “yes” to these common challenges faced by recruiters and hiring managers, recruitment automation can provide the solution you need. This is particularly relevant in a time of high unemployment when there is a larger pool of candidates actively seeking opportunities in various roles.

Recruitment automation processes can help increase productivity, expedite candidate selection, accelerate the hiring process, and reduce costs. Furthermore, it improves the candidate experience and enhances your organization’s talent profile and brand reputation. It’s no wonder that most recruiters and hiring managers have already integrated automation into their recruitment processes.

Recruitment automation systems, powered by AI, offer significant advantages. They streamline repetitive tasks, such as CV screening and initial candidate assessment, allowing your team to focus on more valuable activities. With the help of AI algorithms, these systems can quickly sift through a large number of applications, identifying the most qualified candidates based on predefined criteria. This significantly reduces manual effort and minimizes the risk of overlooking qualified individuals.

Additionally, recruitment automation systems improve the efficiency and speed of the hiring process. They facilitate seamless integration between various recruitment platforms, such as job boards and applicant tracking systems, consolidating data and eliminating the need for manual data entry and repetitive tasks. Automated workflows ensure that each step of the recruitment process is executed smoothly and consistently, from initial application to final hiring decision.

Moreover, recruitment automation systems enable better candidate engagement and communication. They support personalized and timely interactions, such as automated email responses and status updates, which enhance the candidate experience and maintain a positive employer brand image.

What is recruitment automation?

From the way we shop or pay bills online, to how we order food or choose our entertainment, data-driven technology has changed the way we do everyday things. Technology helps us to make better use of our time and lets us transact or connect in more convenient and efficient ways.

In much the same way, recruitment automation is the technology that automates or streamlines tasks or workflows within the recruiting process that would previously have been done manually.

These new technology tools and platforms address tasks at every step of the hiring process. They often leverage technologies such as machine learning, predictive data analytics and artificial intelligence.

The top 10 benefits of recruitment automation  

Recruiting and HR are all about human capital. So at first, glance using machines and technology can seem counter-intuitive.

Recruitment automation technology, however, is not designed to take the human touch out of the equation, it’s designed to help humans work smarter.

Here are ten of the benefits and advantages:

1. Increase productivity – work smarter, not harder. Free your time (and headspace) to focus on higher value and more meaningful tasks. With automation, recruitment processes can be ‘always on’ and you can be open for business 24/7.
2. Fill roles faster – automated candidate pre-screening, nurturing, and assessing, can greatly reduce overall time to hire.
3. Lower costs per hire – depending on the scope and investment of your organisation’s recruitment automation, leading vendors should be able to model and demonstrate cost savings and pathways to RoI.
4. Hire better consistently – data-driven decisions can help improve the quality of hire.
5. Improve the candidate experience – candidates appreciate an engaging experience, faster responses and quicker hiring decisions.
6. Remove bias and build diversity – objective decision-making based on personality characteristics, skills and traits, helps build diverse workplace teams.
7. Beat the paperchase – streamline data collection, recording, storage and tracking. Different platforms and tools can be integrated to share data, updates, information, feedback and more.
8. Promote better collaboration – from early hiring planning right through to onboarding, technology enhances collaboration between all stakeholders
9. Build a better workplace culture – by starting with employees who are a better fit, improve metrics like tenure and retention, employee satisfaction and employer brand reputation.
10. Data, data, data – automation creates data that will enhance reporting, analytics and data insight that can help to constantly improve business and hiring processes.

Automated interviews – a popular place to start automation

Reviewing and screening CVs and job applications is widely acknowledged as time consuming and repetitive tasks of the recruitment process. It’s often one of the first processes that recruiters prioritise for automation.

In an age of high volume briefs– such as team roles in retail, customer service or graduate internships – it’s standard to receive a high volume of candidate applications. Properly and fairly reviewing every candidate among hundreds or even thousands is beyond any recruiter. It’s not, however, beyond the capacity of technology.

Here is the Ultimate Guide to Interview Automation

Sapia – leaders in automated pre-screening

Sapia is a leading innovator in the recruitment technology space. 

Since 2013, Sapia has worked to solve and consistently improve the frontier problem of every recruiter and every employer. That is how to get to the right talent faster while consistently improving the candidate experience. 

Artificial intelligence can see what humans can’t

Sapia’s solution addresses top-of-funnel recruitment needs with an artificial intelligence-enabled automated interview platform, designed to integrate seamlessly with leading Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS).

While some automated interview platforms use video and voice technologies, Sapia uses mobile-based text. Candidates know text and trust text, and they welcome the opportunity to tell their own story in their own words and in their own time. 

The automated interview is built around a few open-ended text questions that can be customised to the specific role family – sales, retail, call centre, service etc – and specific requirements relating to the employer’s brand and employment values.

The platform uses AI, ML and NLP to provide reliable personality insights into every candidate. It can accurately predict candidates’ suitability for the role. Additionally, it can guide their progression through the recruitment process. It delivers insights that recruiters and employers need to make better hiring decisions at scale.

See How Sapia’s Interview Automation Works Here >

Blind-screening at its best

Sapia provides blind-screening at its best. The platform effectively takes a candidate’s gender, age, ethnicity and other traits out of the process. There is no visual content, voice data or video that can act as triggers to subjective bias. Also for most customers, even CVs are removed from initial screening.

The blind screening means all candidates are competing on a level playing field and have the opportunity to tell their story without the subjective biases of a traditional human interview or a cursory review of their CV. Blind screening also supports employers’ diversity goals.

Integrated with an ATS, a simple Sapia interview link sent to an applicant’s mobile lets recruiters nail speed of recruiting, quality of candidates and a better candidate experience in one.

Sapia will help to:

• reduce recruiter time spent by 90%
• increase candidate satisfaction to 99%
• achieve interview completion rates of 90%
• reduce bias and support diversity goals
• enhance the candidate experience with personalised feedback and coaching tips.

It’s a far better candidate experience

Improving the candidate experience is a priority for every recruiter and employer. This is as the effect of a poor experience can cause lasting damage to reputations and brands. Sapia is the only conversational interview platform with 99% candidate satisfaction. Candidates enjoy the process and value the personalised feedback/coaching tips.

Did you see the FREE e-Book on Candidate Experience? Download the Candidate Experience Playbook Here > 

8 ways recruiting automation can work for you

Recruitment automation doesn’t describe just one technology product or platform. Automation will generally involve a suite of platforms, software, tools and technologies. All of them work together to provide end-to-end functionality throughout the hiring process. Integration with an applicant tracking system (ATS) or candidate relationship management (CRM) platform helps bring all the tools and data together in one place.

The efficiencies and savings of recruitment automation can be gained through every step:

1. Candidate sourcing and engagement – use analysis of candidate data to identify and engage with potential future candidates. 
2. Always-on candidate nurturing – collect candidate data, build deeper talent pools, track candidates and measure recruitment success. Automate email communications to keep past candidates ‘warm’ or schedule upcoming events such as interviews. There are many ATS and CRM vendors with different features and functions. Some of them are automated job listing creation, career site integration, interview capabilities and more. 
3. Leverage social site recruiting – connect with candidates where they hang out – LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. Automate social media publishing and campaign strategies with bespoke scheduling and planning tools as well as many sites’ own business tools 
4. Job listings – more accurately target candidates all over the internet using programmatic job advertising. Automate budget management, job postings, branded content distribution and more. 
5. Candidate pre-screening – rank and grade candidates to qualify who moves forward in the firing process. Automate CV screening and top-of-funnel interviews using a platform like Sapia’s mobile-first, text-based solution. 
6. Skills and aptitude testing– there is a wide range of software platforms that can automate pre-employment testing. Some may focus on specific skills such as programming, data entry or language competency while many more measure ‘soft’ skills such as aptitude, personality traits, cognitive abilities. With its open-ended question format, Sapia assesses close to 100 traits or personality characteristics in ranking candidates. 
7. Interview scheduling – streamline the process with automated scheduling, confirmations and follow-up communications to candidates.
8. Background checking – automate background checks, police checks, reference checks, educational qualifications and more with a wide range of vendor solutions.

Here are 6 Reasons to Start Your Hiring With Interview Automation

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Finally, discover how Sapia’s Ai-powered interview platform can help support your recruitment needs today. It’s a powerful way to bring all the benefits of recruitment automation to your business. You can also take it for a test drive here >