Leveraging the power of AI to help best-fit candidates find the right job faster

A competitive labor market and sky-high demand for talent can only mean one thing: Recruiters must rely on the help of AI and automation to overcome hiring challenges and fill critical roles fast. But how?

Employers and HR leaders need to establish their competitive edge by redesigning experiences for talent. AI and automation are able to advance this goal by bringing hyper-personalization that improves productivity, while also delivering a system of competitive talent data intelligence to enterprises.

Through the increased uptake in digitalization and shift to distributed or hybrid working models, HR leaders now have an even greater opportunity to support employee movement within their organizations, scale internal sourcing, and reduce time-to-fill, with the help of AI tech.

UNLEASH caught up with leading HR transformation and employee experience guru, Benoit Hardy-Vallée, Associate VP, Talent Experience Strategy at Phenom People, to discuss just how HR leaders can really leverage the power of AI.

Where to start?

(Hint; it’s not just about tech)

With employers around the world facing incredible talent shortages, it’s unsurprising that many are confused by the bombardment of solutions out there that promise to solve everyone’s hiring woes.

To start on the journey to bettering retention and recruitment, employers and HR leaders need to establish their competitive edge by redesigning experiences for talent and consider how a holistic approach to the talent experience could benefit them, in order to meet modern talent demands.

There aren’t any magic, silver bullets and I’d be worried of ‘short-term’ solutions.

Benoit Hardy-Vallée, Associate VP, Talent Experience Strategy, Phenom People

When UNLEASH spoke to Benoit, he considered how important a culture of progress is for an organization, and believes this to be the place where HR teams, managers, and leadership need to start in order to motivate talent to stay. Speaking from his experience working with employee sentiment and survey tools, he described how motivation and development and the feeling of progress have always been up there with reasons why people are staying (or leaving).

“Employees need to feel like they have opportunities, whether horizontally into a different function, or vertically into more leadership and responsibility-driven opportunities. Facilitating this is really important to keep talent happy and to make them want to stay.”

But where do AI and automation fit into creating this type of culture? Benoit argued that recruiters and talent teams need to be comfortable with internal mobility and hiring internally – there needs to be a normalization of creating opportunities for internal progressions, in his eyes. He believes that AI can help facilitate the progress of employees, leadership, recruiters, and hiring managers in a more natural and seamless way. “If we make internal progress simple, people will do it. But to make it simple, you have to work on your culture, your process, and your technology to get to the stage.”

Later in our conversation, discussing the high turnover rate in many organizations, and considering how AI can help with retention and the employee experience, Benoit again discussed this facilitation of progress for employees. He told us that AI can be incredibly powerful in preventing employees from leaving way before the need for predicting how likely it is or not.

Organizations should now be “using AI so employees can find not just the open jobs, but also gig opportunities and short-term projects that are available, what mentors there are, what learning opportunities are there – matching and developing the employee experience.” This, coupled with a compelling user experience, is where he believes the game-changer for retention figures lies.

AI and the future of recruiting

As we have heard time and again, recruiters and TA teams are busier than ever, with talent demands increasing each day. What’s often not highlighted though, that Benoit rightly examined is, “if there’s a shortage of talent, there’s a shortage of recruiting talent.”

He believes that now is the time for HR teams to open the door for AI and automation, not to replace people’s jobs or to fill the gaps when hiring is a struggle, but to help recruiters to manage the processes – the manual, laborious tasks that prevent them from really adding value to the recruiting and onboarding process.

Benoit sees the value of AI and automation lying in its ability to relieve recruiting staff of things like scheduling and screening tasks, freeing their time to allow them to focus on advising hiring managers and to create space for “informal conversations with the business about what the organization actually needs from the talent it’s intending to recruit.”

Ethical AI

There’s a lot of uncertainty around AI and its ability to reduce and introduce bias and therefore a lot of interest in understanding how HR teams can implement AI ethically, and prevent bias from occurring.

Because AI learns from existing data sets, created and informed by human behavior, no algorithm is inherently ethical or unethical. For AI systems to operate responsibly, explainability and transparency need to be at their core so that anyone can understand how and why a decision has been made regardless of their knowledge of machine learning.

EEOC commissioner Keith Sonderling discussed in a recent Chad and Cheese podcast that it is not that AI is discriminatory or misogynistic, it is all about the data being fed in; “the bias inputs give you bias outputs”.

In our conversation with Benoit, he similarly considered that in large part, the problem of bias begins with historical data, and that “the key is to have an AI system that is blind to everything other than skills.”

The more you are exposed to the diversity of the human experience, the more you tend to have an open mind and understanding of those experiences and the richness. Similar with AI. 

Benoit Hardy-Vallée, Associate VP, Talent Experience Strategy, Phenom People

By empowering organizations with technology that can simultaneously automate tedious recruitment tasks while delivering personalized experiences and opportunities of progression to the very best candidates and internal employees, there’s the potential to impact the retention and recruitment figures for many businesses.

Find out more about Phenom and their TXM platform to enable AI-powered experiences for your candidates, recruiters, employees, and managers.