Receive hundreds, or even thousands of CVs every day, select the most interesting ones, carefully analyse the most suitable candidates for the new position and call them for interviews, which often involve multiple meetings with each candidate. This is the typical process when a company decides to hire new employees, an endless story that starts in the HR office and ends with management, often involving other departments along the way.

Personnel selection is certainly one of the longest and most expensive processes within any company, as well as one of the most crucial: choosing the right person can mark a major, positive turning point for a company, while a wrong choice can be a terrible mistake. To tackle this burden, we are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.

Algorithms that are more effective than human beings?

Though companies have had increasing access to a greater variety of tools and information over the years, up to now identifying the right person for a specific role has been a process conducted with a very traditional approach that is out of step with available innovations. However, things are changing. This is the opinion of giants such as LinkedIn, which predicts that artificial intelligence will soon significantly change the personnel selection process.

From chatbots able to converse with candidates in real time to algorithms that can immediately extract the most suitable candidates for a given role, several companies have already adopted automation as standard practice for this type of procedure. Here are the areas where particular progress is being made.

One curriculum after another

A typical example of a seemingly insurmountable obstacle is certainly the process of screening CVs, which are often in different formats. Reading all of them, isolating a candidate’s most interesting qualities and comparing them with those of other candidates: what if a machine could do this, rather than a team of people? Some start-ups have considered this and are developing algorithms to collect information that is usually gathered through CVs using a format with questions that enable better identification of candidates’ skills.

Others do the exact opposite: they collect the qualifications and qualities of their employees and of their own company in order to construct a virtual identity of the perfect candidate so that they can focus their search on a narrower range of profiles.

The virtual assistant

Every time that new positions open up, companies automatically publish an announcement, candidates put themselves forward and a sequence begins that recommences from scratch whenever a new job becomes available. Every “round” generates a considerable quantity of data, which is usually abandoned in the next round, so the process must start again from zero. By using dedicated software, it is possible to avoid losing this data every time by constructing a sort of fully-automated memory of every contact that candidates make with the company, saving a considerable amount of time.

Less bias

Together with the ability to streamline the process, one of the most interesting aspects of this new approach to recruiting is the ability to make the process less influenced by a single operator and therefore to free it from possible bias. Indeed, an algorithm can be much more impartial than a real person. This is an added benefit if you are aiming for greater diversity in the workplace, for example in terms of gender, ethnicity, age and social status.

We are a long way from letting machines handle all human resources work by themselves, however working to limit bias would be an excellent starting point.