70% of job searches begin with Google. Now that the search giant has put their job search algorithm into the hands of candidates, will they end there, too?

Following last summer’s release of the employer-focused Google for jobs (GJ), as part of the Cloud Jobs API, Google has now made GJ, complete with AI matching technology to surface job postings on every board they’re advertised, available to American job seekers.

With GJ, candidates can enter a search query like “jobs near me”, or “retail jobs”, and filter the results by location, specialty, company rating, or working hours – with more filters to come for ultra-personalized results. Think Google Flights, but for jobs.

It’s a big deal for both job boards and employers, for very different reasons. Job boards will have to rethink their value proposition to businesses and candidates, and while employers don’t really care whether job boards live or die, but missing out on GJ would mean missing out on candidates…

For candidates, GJ’s appeal is obvious: job boards are usually little different than their newspaper classified predecessors, as in broad, hard to search, and riddled with expired ads. Now, Google’s powerful creepy crawlies aggregate job data from around the internet to make sure posts are both relevant and up to date.

GJ does this by evolving matching technology. The idea being that enormous banks of data surface smarter matches through algorithms powered by AI and machine learning, thus eliminating the hassle of inconsistent job titling from company to company that has plagued candidates in the past.

“If I were Indeed, I would be scared; if I were an ATS that focuses on small- to medium-sized businesses, I would be scared,” says Jonathan Kestenbaum, recruiting tech expert and managing director for Talent Tech Labs. “If I were a Talent Acquisition enthusiast, I would be excited that such a large organization is taking interest in helping innovate within the space.”

Indeed has chosen not to make their jobs crawlable by Google. Rather, they are relying on the strength of their own brand, and the fact that, unlike most job boards, they are already using AI in their matching algorithms. Plus, for now, GJ with the added AI is only up and running in one country, the US, and in one language, English.

Photo Credit: Google Blog

Google may have the advantage of controlling the search engine where 70 percent of job hunts begin, But there’s still the matter of trust to consider. Facebook ran into trouble recently with their job advertising algorithm, when it was found to favor men. (Read why here) The candidate needs to know the AI underlying the search results is not so much a Harry Potter sorting hat, but more a summoning charm.

An accounting recruiter with over a decade of experience, Adam Karpiak says it may be a while before GJ really changes anything. “To the average candidate, job postings are job postings are job postings. These platforms actually make the recruiters look better because we specialize in people, NOT job postings. I’m sure GJ will be [a leg up], for the one percent of companies that understand what’s going on. It’ll take so long to trickle down to most companies, the ones that jump on it will definitely have an advantage.”

Google staunchly insists their new tech isn’t a replacement for job boards. The data giant is, in fact, partnering with LinkedIn, Monster, WayUp, DirectEmployers, CareerBuilder, Glassdoor and Facebook, to surface the best opportunities tailored to candidate specifications, hoping their foray into recruiting will push the industry forward in terms of tech innovation.

With more opportunities coming their way, job seekers are going to expect a quick and seamless process. So, recruiters, how can you make sure Google sees, and likes you? First off, make sure your job ad is compatible with Google search – you can check that by clicking here! – and be sure to follow this easy checklist, making sure your ad is:

1. Mobile friendly: Make sure your career site and job posting are easy to navigate on mobile devices, so you don’t miss the casual scrollers!
2. Informative: Adding details like office location, work hours, and flexible work options will make it easy for candidates to surface your job posting.
3. Well Branded: Reviews and content about your company will be more visible than ever, so it’s a great time to make sure everything is up to date. You may even consider branching into new media, like making that career video you’ve been dreaming of.
4. One-click–Apply Ready: Lowers candidate drop out rates, and strengthens your brand in the digital age.
5. Efficient: The influx of candidates means that process becomes extremely important. Make sure your ATS is supporting quick and organized communication for your team, so candidates have a great experience.

Read more about SmartRecruiters Google Job Search functionalities here!

If you want to stay ahead in the hiring game, there are some tech advances you need to be aware of, or even more, to master.

There’s a large skills gap in today’s job market, and hiring professionals are finding it difficult to find the right candidates in this highly competitive market. This has given rise to hiring managers leaning more on social recruiting, artificial intelligence products, and overall HR technology upgrades. Here are four ways HR Tech will take your talent acquisition process to the next level.

1. Implementing Artificial Intelligence/Chatbots

Using artificial intelligence or chatbots in your recruiting process can drastically reduce tedium. Reviewing resumes, scheduling interviews and internal coordination are all necessary, but with a chatbot, all these tasks can be automated, leaving HR and recruitment professionals to focus on more complex activities such as employer branding, improving outreach, and other related tasks.

2. Posting on Multiple Job Boards

Recruiting professionals are relying on job boards to source quality talent. According to Zety, about 52% of applications arrive via from job boards. Most applicant tracking systems (ATS) offer job board integrations. Posting to several job boards at once is a great way to get more exposure, and with an ATS, your hiring team can save hundreds of work hours otherwise lost to filtering through a pool of applicants.

3. Pre-screening Candidates

AI for recruiting is designed to reduce or remove time-consuming activities like manually screening resumes. 52% of Talent Acquisition leaders say the hardest part of recruitment is screening candidates from a large applicant pool. AI screening software adds functionality to the ATS by using hiring data like performance and turnover to make hiring recommendations for new applicants. The recommendations are made by applying learned information about existing employees’ skills to automatically grade new candidates.

4. Using AI to Remove Bias From Recruitment Process

AI is able to assess data points around successful employees and objectively determine the best hires in a talent pool. Recruiting AI can be programmed to ignore demographic information, such as gender, race, and age to increase the opportunity for diversity.

AI also exposes bias in your recruiting, giving you a clear view of potential problems and the ability to address them.

If you’re thinking about improving your talent acquisition process, start with a 30 day free trial of XOR, which will streamline your process, lower your cost-per-hire by 50% and decrease your time-to-fill by 33%.

To eradicate hiring discrimination, humans need to accept that sometimes, machines can not only identify things we can’t see, but things we might not want to admit.

Meet Anna. She is waiting, the way you do in 2017, in a digital queue, to find out if she landed her dream job. She’s worked hard for it. Harder than others. But she’s not going to get it. A man will.

This man will be hired by the head of finance, let’s call him Henry, who has a varied skillset, a calm demeanour, and is respected by his colleagues. Henry isn’t mean, he isn’t vindictive, but he won’t hire Anna. He will discriminate against her, and he won’t even know that’s what he’s done.

Do I blame him? I pity him. Do I feel sorry for Anna? I do. Not only for her, but also for, say, Muhammad, who won’t get his dream job either. Some other Henry in some other company won’t be able to see past his name.

This happens every day in recruiting. We consciously or unconsciously engage in bias meant to protect us, while losing out on potential talent. More than inefficient, this is unacceptable. And that’s why in 2018, SmartRecruiters will release AI Recruiting Assistant, developed to eradicate even further this kind of bias. Yes, a machine is going to help you be a better person.

If you haven’t heard of us yet, SmartRecruiters is a software that companies – our customers – use to manage talent during the process of selection, attraction, and hiring. As we like to say around here, you are who you hire, you hire the best because hiring success is business success. With 30 million applications to date, we are on track to reach 136 million in the next three years in companies with over 2,500 employees.

Facing both sides of the business, we aim to close the gap between the 37% of people the McKinsey Global Institute says are unhappy in their jobs, and businesses frustrated at being unable to find the right talent. So far, we’ve helped employers match the best candidates to their needs in 80 countries and in 35 languages. Our biggest clients receive over 40,000 new applications a month. And the plan is to go even bigger. But it took a while to get here.

Back in October 2013, I co-founded a company called Jobspotting, that connected millions of people with millions of jobs. My colleagues were former Googlers with a combined experience of two decades in machine learning and deep learning, collaborative filtering, and big data. We were profitable and growing monthly, and we had matching technology that some users felt was “better than LinkedIn.” But we weren’t exactly solving unemployment yet.

Then I met Jerome Ternynck. An entrepreneur, a friend, and as the founder and CEO of SmartRecruiters, he was also in the business of connecting people to jobs. We met in Paris, and he told me how every night his daughter would ask, “Daddy, how many jobs have you created today?” And he’d tell her. And she’d tell him whether or not she thought he’d had a good day, and whatever was going on, he never forgot the business’ core: to connect people to jobs, and keep improving the processes of how that happens. Merging Jobspotting and SmartRecruiters was one milestone, and the launch of AI Recruiting Assistant is going to be another.

Recruiters usually screen CVs manually. It takes tons of time, and they have natural biases. They will discriminate. An algorithm, our AI Assistant, will not. Once implemented with our customers, the fusion of Jobspotting technology and SmartRecruiters’ platform will get to work, automatically screening incoming applications and scoring candidates against jobs, highlighting their work experiences, education level, skillset, and much more.

SmartRecruiters AI Recruiting Assistant will be available to our 3,000+ customers, including giants like IKEA, Bosch, Adidas, Visa and Marc Jacobs, affecting millions of candidates – and over a million new users a month. I can’t wait to see the first test and make the hiring process better, and more fair, for everyone.

I can’t change the likelihood of a 40-year-old white male hiring a 30-year-old white male, but AI Recruiting Assistant doesn’t care what your name or gender is, how old you are or what skin color you have. The only question is who the system will rank higher based on their own merit, Anna or Muhammed.

We all have natural biases, and we don’t always know when they’re affecting us. Things get trickier when you’re a recruiter, monitoring your own thought process to hire without discrimination. With the advent of AI Applicant Tracking, are we looking at a future where machines can help us with that?

First, some context. I recently attended a recruiting event, focused on diversity in hiring. Barring the usual dreaded group activities, forced corporate roleplay and all, I did learn something about bias in recruiting: it’s more common than we think.

But it’s not malicious. More often than not it’s perpetrated unconsciously by well-meaning folks who enthusiastically attend meetings about non-bias hiring, who believe and champion the idea that diversity within a company is important.

One recruiter faced the group and described an experiment he conducted, himself as the guinea pig. He would cover applicant details on a CV like name, age and gender with post-it notes, not thinking it would make a difference in his hiring process. His conclusion?

“I use a lot of post-it notes in my hiring process now.”

This man had attended diversity seminars and conferences on non-bias hiring before. He thought it was enough to be aware of the issue, but as it turns out, you have to do something proactive.

HIs sticky-note approach, rudimentary though it may be, is what’s at the heart of most HR technology addressing negative bias. It’s as simple as asking ourselves what data we need in order to make the best decision.

Ok not quite so simple. Because recruiting, at its core, is itself a process of bias. Selecting few from many based on candidates’ most useful qualities for a particular job. A positive bias.

The problem is when lists include qualities that aren’t about the probability of success, like age, gender, sexual orientation, race, etc. Recruiters and hiring managers have to untangle their positive and negative biases, which is harder than it sounds. These are viewpoints they’ve been using their whole lives. And rather than address it, and take time, effort and introspection, it’s tempting to push blame down the line.

A common excuse from recruiters is that no women, POCs, etc, even apply to certain roles, so it’s not their fault if their choices are seen as less than ideally diverse. It’s true that training and outreach can help promote under-represented peoples in a particular trade, but it’s important to take steps at every stage in the candidate pipeline, because people need jobs now, and recruiters are the gatekeepers.

So beyond purposely withholding certain details like our friend at the event, recruiters and hiring managers can also reduce bias by creating a system of checks, which could include writing out a list of qualities a candidate should have for the job, and making sure that those are actually the qualities on which they are judged.

While this simple method of self-accountability can be quite effective, the list itself could be flawed and that’s where we need technology.

Up until now we’ve used algorithms that often adopt the bias of an institution, or the people doing the hiring, because the calculations are based on that institution’s single data source. What makes our technology different is the vast amount of data we collect from a variety of industries, which allows us to find appropriate candidates from unexpected places, candidates you never may have known existed, or have considered before.

The AI sources and selects top candidates to interview far faster than any human could, and with less bias. The idea of machines doing a job better than people is always off-putting at first, but think of what you could do with all that saved time: actual face time with candidates. Time to nurture connections. Build a network your company can draw from in the future.

SmartRecruiters AI aims to address the problem of human bias, and let the machine take care of that part of the process. And when the hiring manager is shown their shortlist, our product will then hold humans accountable. Our collaborative approach adds community checks and balances to the recruitment process, which means platform administrators will be able to see the work of their hiring team, which means if a particular manager hires a white male over a black female who scored higher, they will have to justify this to their coworkers, their superiors, and themselves.

The following article was originally published on the Human Capital Institute website and is authored by Head of People at SmartRecruiters Sarah Wilson. Join Sarah in the future of recruiting – a future which is actually happening right now! Robots, technology, and the land of tomorrow. How can we harness all the recent advancements in HR Tech to make everyone’s lives easier from candidates to hiring managers?

Anyone who visited Walt Disney World during the 1980s and 90s likely has a solid memory of the Tomorrowland attraction.

I remember getting onto the ride that took you through history – all the way back to the dinosaurs (the tar pit scene still haunts me) – and then into the future.  It was the near future.  The air smelled cleaner (and faintly of oranges) as if we’d solved ozone layer and global warming issues, people dressed in white, cars flew and there were robots EVERYWHERE. They looked like metal people with blank expressions and they were doing all kinds of tasks – they mowed the lawn, dusted the shelves and took out the trash.

Compare this vision to today. It seems completely in the future, completely out of reach. Cars are still on the ground. I don’t know where you live, but where I live, there is definitely still pollution, carbon fuel, and the air does not smell faintly of oranges.  The people around me are not dressed exclusively in white (aside from the Diner en Blanc annual event). Everything about the vision of Tomorrowland seems like a funny upside-down version of the future.

“Nonetheless, there ARE robots EVERYWHERE.  They may not look like a traditional robot stereotype, but they are present in so many parts of my daily routine.”

Nonetheless, there ARE robots EVERYWHERE.  They may not look like a traditional robot stereotype, but they are present in so many parts of my daily routine.  An app tells me the best way to drive into work, my watch tells me when to pause and take a moment to breathe, the fancy coffee maker at my office calculates the water temperature for a perfect cappuccino, and my phone covers everything else I could need in a regular day.

For as long as I have been in this industry, I have heard that recruiters are frustrated about the overwhelming effort needed to find the perfect candidate, that hiring managers are flaky or change their minds too often, and that candidates apply for roles that are not a bad fit.

“Recruiters often say they have too many tasks and not enough time, and that the business doesn’t understand what takes them so long.”

Recruiters often say they have too many tasks and not enough time, and that the business doesn’t understand what takes them so long. Recruiters say the senior leadership team thinks there are too many recruiters for how few people the company is hiring, and they need technology to make things more efficient and help get end results.

Recruiters say automation is the answer.

As Head of People at SmartRecruiters, I responded to recruiters’ need by creating the applicant tracking system – an automation tool that would reduce the likelihood of candidates receiving a personal response to their applications.

When this didn’t solve our time and resourcing issues, we layered in more technology: ‘knock out’ screening questions that stopped an application dead in its tracks; artificial intelligence (AI) that prioritized which candidate to call first, video interviewing that allowed quicker assessments and that saved the precious time the recruiter was spending on the phone with unqualified applicants.

“Here’s the thing about super smart computers: they aren’t always right.”

Here’s the thing about super smart computers: they aren’t always right. To be fair, I’m not always right, either. I’ve let my past decisions and their repercussions impact my future decisions. I’ve let my surroundings and mindset cloud my judgment. I’ve learned from my successes and my failures.

These tech-based systems weren’t infallible. That era of recruiting technology made the job search process impersonal, robotic, and lonely for candidates.  Sending out countless resumes in hopes that maybe a human will someday read it is daunting, frustrating and ultimately depressing. The void got wider. We’d arrived at the tar pit for candidates.

“The best recruiting solutions are Talent Acquisition Suites that encourage the actual hiring managers and executives to get involved directly with applicants.”

So where does this leave us? Emerging technology in the recruiting space seeks to connect candidates to jobs in the most efficient way possible. The best recruiting solutions are Talent Acquisition Suites that encourage the actual hiring managers and executives to get involved directly with applicants – sending messages, reviewing resumes, and providing real feedback (in real-time) about a candidate’s application status.  We are starting to see more and more recruiting teams acting like sales people, building communities of talent and nurturing them so they know exactly who they want to chase when an opening comes up within their companies.

Let’s fast forward to the Tomorrowland of recruiting. The applicant tracking system is replaced by a true talent acquisition suite of tools designed to be inclusive, personal and easy to use.  Candidates will see in real-time whether a recruiter has looked at their resumes, and they can directly interact with a prospective employer to learn more about what it’s really like to work there.

AI is used for candidate discovery and job matching to increase the likelihood that you apply for the right job on the first try. It is also used to rediscover a candidate who may have applied months (or years) ago to another job, but whose profile now perfectly fits with an open position.

Video Interviewing gives candidates a chance to tell companies why they should take a chance and give them a call, and allows them to provide what isn’t on their resumes.

“Realize that recruiting really is a team sport.”

Most importantly, we harness the collective power of our organizations and realize that recruiting really is a team sport.

Hiring managers can contact a candidate directly and they can even (gasp) deliver an offer to someone they want on their teams.

Recruiters can spend time getting to know a candidate on a deeper and more meaningful level because the tools and technology they use will help them with the technical assessments of skill and ability.

Maybe cars don’t yet fly – but we’ve cleared the air.

In a digital world where you can have any piece of information available to you at the swipe of your thumb; we need to focus on using technology to help us create more intimate relationships with our candidates – not divide us further.

Here’s the wildest thing about this idea – this future world is here.  These technologies exist and the companies who built them want to help you figure out the best thing for you and for your candidates. The key to remaining human is to use your intuition.  If you think like your applicants for a moment, you can find a way to balance efficiency and intimacy.