Job interviews: Recruiters are using artificial intelligence to analyse what you say to find the right hire
Harqen’s AI platform analyses language to determine a candidate’s suitability for a role, potentially making it less prone to bias than video-based recruitment technology.
Artificial-intelligence-based hiring tools are already transforming the recruitment process by allowing businesses to vastly speed up the time it takes to identify top talent. With algorithms able to scour applications databases in the fraction of a time it would take a human hiring manager, AI-assisted hiring has the potential not only to give precious time back to businesses, but also draw in candidates from wider and more diverse talent pools.
AI-assisted hiring is also posited as a potential solution for – reducing human bias whether subconscious or otherwise – in the hiring process.
US company Harqen has been offering hiring technologies to some of the world’s biggest companies for years, partnering with the likes of Walmart, FedEx and American Airlines to streamline and improve their hiring processes. Originating as an on-demand interviewing provider, the company has now expanded into AI with a new platform that it says offers a more dependable and bias-free means of matching employers with employees.
The solution, simply called the Harqen Machine Learning Platform, analyses candidate’s answers to interview questions and assesses the type of words and language used in their responses. According to Harqen, this allows it to put together a profile of psychological traits that can be used to help determine a candidate’s suitability for a role.
Combined with a resume analysis, which provides a more straightforward determiner of whether a candidate’s professional and educational background fits with the requirements of the job, Harqen says its machine-learning platform is capable of making the same hiring decision as human recruiters 95% of the time. In one campaign that assessed approximately 3,500 job applications with “a very large US diagnostic firm” in early 2020, Harqen’s machine-learning platform successfully predicted 2,193 of the candidate applications that were accepted, and 1,292 that were declined.
Key to Harqen’s offering is what the company’s chief technology officer Mark Unak describes as the platform’s linguistic analysis, which can identify word clusters that are specific to certain job types but also offers a personality analysis based on the so-called “big five” traits, also known as the OCEAN model (openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism), which can help hiring managers determine a candidate’s enthusiasm for the position.
