In the fight against unconscious bias, Sweden experiments with AI – but will robotic interviewers really catch on?

Meet your interviewer, Tengai: she’s friendly, observant, and did we mention she’s a robot?

Tengai’s 16-inch glowing face sits on a table at eye level with the candidate. She smiles and blinks forming empathetic facial expressions as she asks “have you ever been interviewed by a robot?”

For most people today, the answer would be ‘no’, but that might not be the case in five years. For that, we have to thank Furhat Robotics, creators of Tengai. The AI and social robotics company that has spent the past four years building a human-esque computer interface that can replicate our speech and subtle facial expressions. The idea being, a human-like robot is much less scary than machine-like one.

A few companies, like the Swedish recruitment firm TNG currently trialing Tengai, are experimenting with the use of robots in their early interviews, and many more companies already use some form of AI in their selection process.

Many people have reservations about using AI to make hiring judgments. ‘How much should we trust these droids?’ they wonder. Indeed, the question has its merits.

Proponents of the technology point out humans aren’t great judges of character or ability because we are all affected by unconscious bias, which impedes our ability to assess fairly. And what’s more, this bias is hard to shake – numerous studies have shown that trainings which aim to minimize unconscious bias’ influence in the workplace has little to no effect on future behavior.  

On the other side, decriers of recruiting’s new reliance on AI-driven judgments point out that the underlying algorithms of these technologies can also be biased and given the homogeny of the tech and data-science field, we must be careful.

Let’s dive in…

Understanding Unconscious Bias

To grasp the argument for using robots in interviews, it’s first important to understand what unconscious bias is and how it occurs. As it has become a workplace buzzword, there’s often confusion around the actual defintion.  

Dolly Chugh is an award-winning psychologist and Professor at New York University. She specializes in the psychology of human bias. Speaking on the 10% Happier podcast, she offered a very helpful example which frames unconscious bias in a way that’s easy to understand:

“When I say ‘Twinkle, twinkle’ your mind probably automatically jumps to ‘…little star’. Somehow, ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star’ became an association in your mind. And there are many other associations we’ve all internalized.

We may associate certain groups of people with certain attributes. But we probably don’t remember when that became part of how we think. This is because it’s all part of the flow of our unconscious mind. The unconscious mind represents the vast majority of our brain’s work. Unconscious mental processing is absolutely essential for us to function as human beings, but sometimes it can lead us away from being the person we’d like to be in certain situations.”  

Reining in biases, as a recruiter, can be tough. First impressions and gut feelings count for so much during interviews. But left unchecked, unconscious bias can result in unfair judgments, overlooked talent, and ultimately, discrimination.

Enter The Robots

Robots designed specifically for recruitment purposes are generally much better than humans at making unbiased decisions about a candidate. This has already proven to be true through a recruitment experiment conducted in Sweden.

Since late 2018, Swedish recruitment agency TNG have been using an AI-driven robot head called Tengai to conduct first stage interviews in place of human recruiters. The results have shown an encouraging example of AI eliminating discrimination rather than amplifying it.

New Technology, Same Process

Tengai was built by Furhat Robotics. At first glance, it’s appearance is a bit disconcerting. It’s a disembodied robotic head with a friendly-looking human face. It’s placed on a table where it sits about eye level to the candidate. All this to ensure the interview proceeds in a way which most closely candidates are accustomed.

Unlike a typical interview, Tengai doesn’t engage in small talk. This ensures all recorded responses are work-related. Each candidate is asked the same questions, in the same order, with the same tone of voice. Tengai standardizes the process to a degree that even the most methodical human recruiters can’t match.

Crucially, Tengai knows absolutely nothing about a candidate’s race, religion, gender, appearance, or other visual/auditory factors that commonly give rise to unconscious bias. Once the interview is complete, human recruiters then receive a transcript of the answers. It’s then up to them to decide whether or not to move that person forward.

By replacing human recruiters with Tengai, TNG and Furhat feel they are creating a fairer hiring process that still retains a ‘human’ touch. But it’s important to keep in mind that robot interviewers bring their own set of limitations and challenges.

Hiring Involves More than Interviews

Research shows unconscious bias often influences whether or not someone advances to the interview stage. Tengai and other robotic interviewers offer zero benefits when it comes to creating fairer resume selection processes. So, unless such robots are accompanied by other bias-tackling measures throughout all other stages of the hiring process, they are an incomplete solution to the problem.

Key Information may Go Unrecorded

Robots like Tengai create an extremely rigid interview process. And while standardization offers some benefits, it isn’t perfect. It prevents the natural ebb and flow of a typical human conversation. For example, a candidate may mention something in passing that grabs an interviewer’s attention. If they feel the information is highly relevant to the role, they can ask the candidate to elaborate or clarify. This helps prevent great candidates slipping through the net due to unintended omissions in their answers.

Candidate Experience And Employer Brand

Even when the rationale for using robots is clearly presented, some candidates are not going to like being interviewed by a robot. It’s easy to see how the process may be perceived as cold and clinical by some candidates. As a result, this may cause significant damage to the employer brand. Others will welcome the change, but introducing robot interviewers will undoubtedly polarise candidate opinion. So it’s important to weigh up the risk/benefit ratio, which will vary widely from business to business.

Not All Technology Is Similar

When selecting any new technology for a hiring process it’s important to consider what it actually does. Some robots are made to standardize the initial interview process to root out bias, while other tools use algorithms to evaluate the candidate’s facial expressions or speech. With the latter example, especially, organizations need to rigorously question the way the AI is making judgments and track if those judgments are leading to a homogeneous talent pool.

HR and recruiting are about to experience a perfect storm – in a good way – learn how the labor shortage, tech innovation, and big investment are about to disrupt everything!

A healthy environmental ecosystem is the product of careful balance. Often, these schemes seem immutable, but even the most ancient can be transformed by the simple tipping of the scales. The same can be said for the HR ecosystem. Mutually reinforced patterns of behavior scaled up over years can be totally disrupted in a new wave of economic pressures, and we are about to experience three: a labor shortage, new technology, and major investment.

In the same way that a foreign seed can wipe out a native plant species or a flood can give rise to a new population of moss, we will soon see how Recruiting will adapt to these changing environs. Not only that, but we will witness how the C-suite and leadership view of HR – as a function – changes.

To understand better the evolving industry we talk to Franz Gilbert, Vice President, Solution Provider Programs at Bersin, Deloitte Consulting LLP.  An industry analyst with over 20 years of experience, Franz has seen how the market reacts when the pendulum swings. Here’s what he has to say about how the dust will settle… and whether ‘balance’ can be restored.

Can you give us your “state of the union” for HR Technology?

There are amazing things going on in the industry. It’s a great time to be in HR and HR technology specifically, and there are three simultaneous drivers behind this:

• Employees recognized as critical…
• Tech is ready…
• Investment is there…

One, from a business standpoint, the role of the employee is finally being recognized as critical to operations. Investors are seeing that better HR organizations tend to do better business. So now the people with the capitol want to vet companies from an employee management perspective, and – with the help of sustainable guidelines like the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) – companies are now reporting on turnover, training hours per employee, retention, pay equity, and diversity.

The global labor scarcity has played into the elevation of the employee status. In the United States specifically, there are 7.1 million open jobs right now while only 5.9 million people remain unemployed. That’s a 20 percent gap from a demand perspective which makes retaining employees incredibly important.

Second, on the technology side, the advent of cloud computing, which has made HR tech easier to do. HR is basically a tremendous pile of data, and there’s now the possibility to process it for innovative solutions to hiring pain points like sourcing outside hires, surfacing internal talent, and campaigning to passive candidates.

Third, we’re now seeing real investment in HR Technology companies. There’s more private equity and venture capital money in the market than ever before. The normal runway used to be around $500k in a year, but in the last 90 days, we’ve seen $256 million put into rounds, according to the public data. So, in a three month period, we’re doing what companies historically did in a year and a half to two years.

This infusion of capital is attracting amazing talent to HR tech. We already had good talent, but now you’re seeing people come into the industry with backgrounds in artificial intelligence (AI) and psychology from institutions like MIT and Harvard. It’s a great time for the market, and we’re already starting to seeing an explosion of smart solutions.

With the proliferation of point solutions are all-in-one platforms history?

The pendulum is swinging back from point solutions, and I think employee experience is going to be the great unifier. The challenge for the next three years will be bringing together all these technologies into a navigable interface.  I predict a great deal of collaboration behind the scenes, in terms of APIs, will have to take place, and perhaps some user interfaces will come to the market that just provide a skin for other applications. Of course, there will be some straightforward consolidation and acquisitions as well.

What are your predictions for 2019 for the HR tech industry?

• AI

AI has been the buzzword for the last couple years, but just now it’s coming into play as part of the feature suite of HR. I’m excited to see what happens now that the shiny foil is off this tech and we’re really going to see it in action.

• Candidate and employee experience

Another great trend I’m seeing is a return to driving good HR that puts employee experience at the center. This focus on making work great for workers is going to force the next wave of innovation.

• Upskilling

Workforce planning and workforce analytics will also play a huge role in 2019. As the labor shortages continue to grow, companies are being forced to know their employees better – their skills, their competencies, their goals, etc. Taxonomies like titles and hierarchy will become less relevant. It will become a question of ‘what can you do?’.

This ecommerce giant made its billions by automating shopping service, but when it came to recruiting it made three crucial mistakes that lead to bias.

According to sources close to the project, it was obvious from the first year that AMZN.O – Amazon’s Recruiting AI – did not like women… like, at all!

The classified project quietly started in 2014, the Seattle company sought to create in-house computer programs to review and score candidates, sources told Reuters. “Everyone wanted this Holy Grail,” one source shared. “They literally wanted it to be an engine where I’m going to give you 100 resumes, it will spit out the top five, and we’ll hire those.”

In much the same way that customers rate products, AMZN.O rated candidates from one to five stars. However, a year into the experiment a gender bias became apparent, especially for software developers and technical posts.

The problem was in the data – the algorithm was feeding on a decade of almost all male resumes and concluding that the ideal candidate is a man, or rather, not a woman. AMZN.O would dock points from graduates of all women’s colleges and downgrade resumes with the word woman/women like “women’s chess club captain.”

Sources say that the algorithm was edited to be neutral to these specific terms, but there was still the fear that the program would teach itself new ways to detect femme resumes and continue to grade them lower.

And though Amazon owes most of its success to its ability to automate everything from warehouse management to pricing, the project was scrapped last year as executives lost hope that AMZN.O could ever be functional. The sources, who only agreed to speak with Reuters a year after the project ended — and under complete anonymity — maintain that no hiring decisions were made using the bias AI.

For some, this story is proof that we aren’t ready for AI in recruiting, and indeed there is still much to learn. Computer scientists like Nihar Shah, who teaches machine learning at Carnegie Mellon University, warn that an algorithm is easier to make than to control.

“How to ensure that the algorithm is fair, how to make sure the algorithm is really interpretable and explainable – that’s still quite far off.”

However, according to 2017 CareerBuilder survey, 55 percent of US HR managers said that AI will be a regular part of their work within the next five years. So is the solution really to avoid artificial intelligence in recruiting all together, or are there some lessons we can glean from this AI debacle? For further insight, we talked to the director of product for SmartRecruiters, Hessam Lavi.

“Developers of this type of systems have an enormous responsibility to prevent negative biases to shape the artificial intelligence they want to produce,” says Lavi. “So, proper training needs to take place to learn not just the technical and process effects of artificial intelligence, but how AI will affect natural beings as well.”

Lavi, who recently headed the team in building SmartAssistant, the first recruiting AI native to an ATS, sees three crucial mistakes when it comes to AMZN.O

1. Thinking the bias is coming from the machine: Negative biases are unfortunately part of the recruiting trade, whether from humans or machines – only it’s much harder to detect in people. So, having a system that makes biases apparent is valuable in itself. The AI learns from the data you feed it, so it’s not the program that’s biased so much as the people who made the decisions that the computer is now analyzing. Eliminating the program is not tantamount to eliminating bias.
2. Limiting the data set: The dataset from one company, even one as big as Amazon, just isn’t enough. A singular company may be using bias paradigms unintentionally. The bottom line is, the more data the better.
3. Deriving future predictions from past events: Past-predicts-future AI can work great for domains such as medical imaging that have a very narrow focus, for example, forecasting the growth of a tumor where an AI can be trained to make clear-cut decisions and act as an expert. However, in hiring which involves a wide range of factors, this type of assumptive AI tends to emphasize biases of the past. If you only had men hired in the past, the algorithm may assume it’s because they are the best people for the job and will continue prioritizing them for future positions.

His best advice? Avoid the black box!

“When we built SmartAssistant we split up the decision processing into smaller, distinct components,” says Lavi. “For example, one component would analyze candidates’ industry experience, one would examine education, one would evaluate soft skills, and so on. Through creating these stand-alone units, we can trace negative outcomes back to their origin and understand why they are happening.”

“We believe the final decision in the recruiting process will be made by humans for the foreseeable future,” Lavi affirms. “But, AI has the ability to automate many of the repetitive tasks and winnow down the stacks of resumes that overwhelm recruiters and cause them to lean on their negative biases. AI technology is much more than just automating tasks and it can teach us about how we make decisions and point out shortcomings in our abilities.”

Technophobic no longer, recruiters are embracing the potential of AI to positively impact their workflow.

Fairly or not, the recruiting industry is often branded as tech-averse. However, recent survey findings concerning the future of technology in HR are helping shed this negative stereotype, ushering in an era where TA becomes the poster child for early adoption.

According to Korn Ferry’s latest survey, 63 percent of TA professionals report AI having changed the way their organizations recruit. Not only that, but 87 percent say they’re excited about increasing their AI interaction in the future.

While these integrations are exciting sometimes it’s difficult to get past buzzwords to decipher the real concepts behind them.To gain a better understanding of the possibilities of tech when it comes to recruiting, we did the unpacking for you. Here are four main types of AI and automation technologies and how they’re being implemented in recruiting.

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is the ability of a machine or computer program to simulate human capacities such as learning, problem-solving, planning, and perception.

AI for recruiting is the application of artificial intelligence in recruitment designed to automate or streamline some part of the workflow, especially repetitive, high-volume tasks.

Let’s get specific.

In recruiting, there are three subdomains of AI techniques being applied:

• Machine learning is a type of algorithm that has the ability to teach itself by analyzing data and automatically improving its solutions through experience. Machine learning is being used to automate sourcing and resume screening as well as analyze candidate fit during digitized interviews.

An example of an innovative organization using AI for their screening is Indigo, a leading retailer that receives more than 2200 applications every week. Using AI to automate manual resume screening, Indigo has been able to reduce their cost per hire by 71 percent, triple their qualified candidates, and improve recruiter efficiency by 3.7x.

• Natural language processing is the ability of a computer program to understand spoken or written human language. One major way natural language processing is being used in recruitment is through chatbots that provide answers to FAQs and feedback to candidates in real time.
  
• Sentiment analysis is the ability of a computer program to determine the subjective opinion, emotional state, or intended emotional effect of spoken or written word. Sentiment analysis is being used to improve job descriptions by suggesting alternative adjectives, for example.

Recruitment chatbot

A chatbot is defined as ‘a computer program designed to stimulate conversation with human users.’

Randstad found that 82 percent of job seekers believe the ideal recruiting interaction is a mix between innovative technology and personal, human connection. According to Allegis, with 66 percent of candidates comfortable interacting with a chatbot, the market seems ready for mainstream adoption.

In recruiting, chatbots are being used to ask candidates qualifying questions, answer FAQs, and even schedule an interview with a human recruiter. A major advantage of using a chatbot in recruiting is its ability to answer thousands of candidates’ questions simultaneously in real time. Information collected by the chatbot is then fed into an ATS or sent directly to a human recruiter for follow up.

Robotic Process Automation

Hand in hand with AI is automation, or more specifically, robotic process automation (RPA).

The Institute of Robotic Process Automation defines robotic process automation as the application of technology that allows employees to use computer software or a machine to capture and interpret existing applications for processing transactions, analyzing data, triggering automatic responses, and communicating with other systems.

RPA is being applied in recruiting in two main ways:

• Candidate outreach such as automated emails or texts to maintain speedy and consistent contact. This outreach can be scheduled as a DRIP campaign for passive candidates, for example.
  
• Interview scheduling is being automated by software that offer time slots when a recruiter is free that candidates can then select without a back-and-forth email, text, or telephone exchange.

Blockchain technology

While blockchain is still in the beta stages, it’s gaining more and more attention this year.

A blockchain is a system of record keeping using an open, distributed digital ledger that records transactions between two parties. Each transaction in the ledger is verified and then recorded permanently across a peer-to-peer network of users. One advantage of blockchain technology is its speed of use — everyone has access to the most up-to-date information regardless of how many people are using it.

For recruiting, the main application of blockchain technology so far is candidate background checks; for example, on their educational or work history. For blockchain technology to work as a tamper-proof record of candidate history, it’s crucial that a credible and reliable source verifies the data in each block. For educational institutions, this is pretty straightforward, but it becomes more ambiguous when it comes to work history.

Even with all this technology making the recruiting process smarter, it remains to be seen how these elements will ultimately affect the business of managing human capital.

Ji-A Min is the Head Data Scientist at Ideal, AI recruiting software that automates time-consuming tasks such as sourcing, screening, and messaging. She has a Master’s in Industrial­-Organizational Psychology and her interests include data-based recruitment, HR tech, and diversity. Find out more about Ideal in the SmartRecruiters marketplace here.

Fed up with human inefficiencies, this former recruiter used her math skills to automate a very human process, and save a ton of time in doing so.

Aida Fazylova used her background in mathematics and data science to sketch out a new approach to automate as much of the recruiting workflow as possible using artificial intelligence, automation and chatbot technology. The result, XOR.ai, is a customizable AI chatbot and workflow automation to engage, screen and hire candidates 33 percent faster than the normal hiring process, providing extended analytics about the candidates, including predicted employee lifetime value. With XOR, the recruitment process is completely automated, from the moment the candidate engages, right up to making a job offer.

Now, headquartered in Austin, Texas, with major customers in 15 countries around the world, XOR is the emerging leader in Human Resource/ Talent Acquisition process automation, and we sat down with Founder and CEO Aida Fayzlova (picture below explaining her amazing product at Hiring Success 18 Europe), to hear why this is so important.

Why is your product a necessary tool for any SmartRecruiters customer?

Our product combines the latest in Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, automation, and chatbot capabilities, eliminating the most time-intensive parts of the recruitment process. It’s available on your website 24/7, and can communicate in over 100 languages. XOR moves candidates through the funnel even while you sleep. Our AI will learn from your recruiters, hiring managers and candidates who come to your site, answering questions and gathering information, all to offer predictive analytics regarding future candidates and employees.

Briefly, on the back of a cocktail napkin, how does your product work?

Your candidate experience journey is elevated. XOR is with your candidates every step of the way, communicating conversations and data back to your hiring team in the ATS.

What does your product do that can’t be replicated?

Currently, XOR supports 103 languages and has global hiring capabilities. Our product is also known for its sophisticated scheduling functions.

How does your product help make the hiring process as easy as possible?

XOR automates 60 percent of repetitive administrative tasks that your recruiters are handling every day, which allows more free time for your team to focus on more imperative, strategic tasks.  

At what stage of growth are you, and where is that relative to how big you want to be?

We’re at a healthy stage of growth with a great headquarters in Austin, and major customers in over 15 countries around the world.

How does your product compliment the SmartRecruiters TAS – philosophically and technologically?

XOR is considered a one-stop solution for candidate experience. Providing self-scheduled meetings with recruiters, it’s available 24/7 to answer questions for candidates and walks applicants step-by-step through the entire application process. XOR will keep your candidates continuously engaged and send status updates until the position has been filled. Our software works the front end of the ATS for your candidates, automating a great deal of work for your recruiters and is proven to recruit 33 percent faster.

What led you to partner with SmartRecruiters?

SmartRecruiters has the same sweet spot we do. Most SmartRecruiters clients are enterprise customers and high-volume recruiters, which is really interesting for us. The simplicity and the beauty of the ATS is elegant and modern. Designing products and platforms in that same vein is why we chose to partner with SmartRecruiters.

How long did it take to become integrated into the SR marketplace, and what were the obstacles or adjustments in that process?

Our integration into the marketplace only took about a week, with one person, which was a pretty quick turnaround. We avoided any obstacles through preparation and research. There are some obstacles in getting the API to speak to each other but once we integrated it’s been working great.

How long would it take for the average SR user to implement and take full advantage of your product?

Set up will take about 3-6 weeks, most of this time will be spent with XOR’s customer success team, working closely with TA pros, learning the knowledge piece of the chatbot, going over screening scenarios and linking calendars to chatbots to self-schedule candidates. Our team wants to ensure your chatbot is customized to your recruiters’ needs and goals to be as successful as possible in their recruiting efforts.

What would you say to a company unsure about joining the SR marketplace?

SmartRecruiters marketplace is one of the best on the market. It’s full of incredible partners which gives you a great reach to SmartRecruiters customer base and vice versa. Great events like Hiring Success are organized to focus on bringing as much business to their partners as possible, and during those events, you are able to start building relationships with businesses and close a lot of deals.

What do you see as the future of Talent Acquisition and where do you fit into it?

We see it as a rise in conversational interface. Right now, most web interactions are form based. Forms are great, but there are better, more customer-friendly interfaces. Your friends meet you and they want to have a conversation, not fill forms, right? The same thing happens online. Users want to engage, ask questions, and have a personalized experience, not be stuck with one-size-fits-all forms.

This recruiter wants you to know: he’s not an external headhunter, and he’s not afraid of being “tech-augmented”, either.

As if HR Tech wasn’t moving fast enough, hiring for an industry that’s changing equally quickly is no small task. Ahead of his imparting wisdom in these shaky media times at Hiring Success 18 Europe, we sat down with Sergej Zimpel, senior recruiter at ProSiebenSat.1 Media SE, founder of Purple Squirrel Society for HR, and editor-in-chief of the blog for hardcore recruiters, Dinosaurs Will Die, to pick his brain.

What does hiring success mean to you?

As a recruiter, you are somewhat in the middle between hiring managers and candidates. For me, success means both sides are happy with the outcome.

Why recruiting?

I did a couple of internships as a student, and my first job in HR involved recruiting. I liked it so much that I became a recruiter in my job after that.

In hiring for your specific industry, what is the most unique, or most specific, skill you need a candidate to have?

The digital industry is very dynamic, so candidates have to be very tech-savvy, open to change,  and curious about new stuff.

What has changed most about your job since you came on board, for better and for worse?

I got even more responsibility, which is definitely a good thing! 

How many people do you hire in a year?

About 50-70.

Do you feel what you do is given the value and credibility it deserves?

I think we have to work for a good standing with our hiring managers and managing directors. I think I can say that most managing directors I work for understood the crucial role of recruiting.

What is one thing people tend to misunderstand about what you do?

Some people think I’m an external headhunter. And some people think recruiters have to be really tough and mean in interviews.

What is one thing you’re proud of having accomplished in your current role?

My network! It feels good when I can fill a role two weeks after the briefing because I have the right candidates in my network.

You are obviously not a Luddite when it comes to tech. What can you do now, thanks to tech, that you couldn’t before?

I think tech helps us with a lot of boring admin stuff – and I hope it will help us with even more automatization of administrative tasks in the future (interview coordination, I am looking at you!). Another field where tech helps us is of course direct search. I can’t imagine how I would find a Senior Javascript Developer without Linkedin and Github.

What are you most looking forward to as tech plays a bigger role in recruiting?

I like the concept of a “(tech) augmented recruiter” – I think/hope that tech will be able to support us with admin tasks and longlists, then we can focus even more on networking in the future.

AI, good or bad?

Good! Recruiters should be the first movers with these technologies.

Your competitors are looking to make the same great hires you are, so how do you make sure you have the upper hand in snagging candidates? The answer, increasingly, is Artificial Intelligence.

“Recruiting has really been transformed these past years,” said Hessam Lavi, Director of Product at SmartRecruiters. “We’ve seen a shift from HR and recruiting coming from an admin function, or merely a cost center, to much more of a strategic function. It’s become mission-critical, but, at the same time, increasingly expensive.”

Speaking in a webinar detailing how SmartRecruiters’ SmartAssistant, the industry’s first native AI-powered recruiting tool, Mr. Lavi stressed five ways he sees AI technology providing the backbone for recruiting in the future.

Task Automation: AI will take over high-touch activities like scheduling interviews and screening resumes, allowing recruiters to focus on high-value, strategic activities.

Automated Sourcing: AI will source new candidates online and re-discover talent in organizations’ own talent pools, helping recruiters leverage their own networks more efficiently.

Smart Advertising: Job advertising is a highly manual, unscalable process. AI enables advertisers to automate job advertising, making it performance-based and targeted. Through technology, your jobs will be advertised on the right job boards to the right candidates – at the right price.

Improving Diversity: Diverse teams perform better, no doubt about it. AI helps identify potentially biased language that would dissuade women or people from minorities to apply. Automated screening and scoring evaluates candidates only based on their skills, eliminating implicit bias from the hiring process.

Candidate Relationship Management: Candidates behave much more like consumers now – they value convenience. By outsourcing 1:many conversations to AI (through chatbots, for example), recruiters can focus on 1:1 conversations and drive better talent engagement and hiring success.

For this all to work seamlessly, cobbling a batch of BoBs onto a legacy ATS just won’t do. Real performance needs native level integration, and SmartAssistant is setting the standard for everything that will follow.

Click here for the full lowdown on what SmartAssistant can do for you.

Declared obsolete once Zuckerberg’s attempt went kaput in January, at least in the recruiting space, chatbots are not only holding on, but thriving.

They called it M. It was Facebook’s virtual assistant. Offered through Messenger to a select group of Californians in August 2015. It was supposed to trigger actions based on keywords in chat windows. Users could make dinner reservations, or book a vacation, and if the query became too complicated, an on-call human would quietly take over. The idea was to help the AI learn, and eventually release the feature to all Facebook users, but money-sucking M never made it past beta testing. It was put to sleep in January this year, only ever having reached 10,000 users. But does M’s failure to launch speak to the extinction chatbots as a whole, as no less an authority as WIRED proclaimed recently?

If we take anything from the HR technology conference Unleash’s Startup Competition, held March 21 in London, it’s that chatbots are alive and kicking. At least in the recruiting world. Despite the array of flashy AIs, ARs, and VRs that made up the contestant pool of 30 startups, vying for the grand prize of 30,000 GBP last week, it was two good old-fashioned chatbot platforms, Jobpal and RoboRecruiter, who scored the highest with the Unleash judges.

WIRED’s eulogy for chatbots is predicated on the idea that voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa are more effective and less costly. M always needed expensive human labor because people could and were encouraged to ask it anything, whereas Alexa’s purview is much narrower, with most user requests being simple commands like “Alexa, turn off the lights.”

The problem of scope is not so relevant to recruiting chatbots, however, since tasks are easily defined as interactive faq’s, re-engagement of former candidates, and scheduling interviews. Even if only those three tasks were automated, the time saved is significant, up to 40 percent, as estimated by CEO of ideal.com Somen Mondal.

“Imagine,” writes Mondal, “if all [those admin tasks] was automated out. That’s two out of every fiver hours back to the human recruiter.”

To get more insight into why Talent Acquisition hearts chatbots, we caught up with London Unleash Startup Competition judge, Carl-Christoph Fellinger – TA expert and on-the-ground recruiter with over a decade of practical experience – to pick his brain about why, despite being given last rites, two of the six finalists were chatbots. (And three of the remaining four had chatbot capabilities.)

“I judge the startups on whether they address a real need,” explained Fellinger. “I want to know they understand the root cause of the problem they propose to fix, and if their solution is actually applicable.”

The need for automation in recruiting is clear, and an Allegis survey found in 2016 that 66 percent of job candidates are comfortable using a chatbot for the first steps of their application process.

“Communication with candidates causes a significant amount of work for companies,” Fellinger observes, “but it’s also important to businesses that applicants have a good experience, so chatbots are a good solution.”

Anecdotally, it seems that people applying for jobs are more comfortable with chatbots when asking initial questions, especially about salary. Anna Ott, head of Unleash Startup ecosystem and the director of London Unleash’s startup competition, found that in her year-long experiment with a chatbot called hubbot (built by Jobpal), the most common question was some version of ‘Where do I get the most money?’

“ [With Chatbots] the power of information extraction is entirely in the hands of our candidates,” says Ott, “whereas in a traditional recruitment process, I as a company would have been in charge of what information I provide to a candidate.”

But if chatbots are so great, save recruiters time, and are loved by candidates, what are they doing in startup competition? It would seem the technology is already perfected. But not quite: 70 percent of chatbots fail, Facebook found in February 2017. Why? Usually for one of three reasons: their purpose isn’t clearly defined, the goals are too ambitious, or it’s launched prematurely.

We are still a ways away from the ‘Google’ of chatbots, but recruiting wants to be the industry to find it.

Fellinger points out the obvious: “Chatbots satisfy the need for dialogue with candidates and save the company money.”

And the latter, more than any buzzword, is the most exciting thing for most businesses.

With technology that aggregates information from social and professional sites across the web, this Silicon Valley startup is ready to throw its hat in the ring with the top players in the race for AI recruiting supremacy.

Entelo scours the internet to automatically generate profiles of potential hiring prospects, then gets to work matching candidates to customers. Sounds simple enough, but as we found out from data scientist Gaurav Kataria, there’s a little more to it than that.

Hi Gaurav, before people start clamoring to meet you at Hire18, tell us a little about your background.

I spent the better part of the last decade at Google, leading the Data Science group in the Cloud division. In November 2017, I made the move to Entelo, a company uniquely positioned to modernize recruiting, where I lead Product and Data Science. Outside of work, I am a guest lecturer at Stanford University where I have been sharing my “Lessons from the Field” on how entrepreneurs and executives can build machine learning capability within their own organizations.

So what is Entelo, in your own words?

Entelo is the world’s leading AI-driven recruiting automation platform. It helps companies find, qualify and acquire top talent. Our technology aggregates information from more than 50 social and professional sites across the web to consolidate candidates’ social footprints. We provide employers with more than 500 million unique candidate profiles from which they can source top talent. By automating the process of locating, evaluating and contacting quality candidates, Entelo eliminates tedious manual workflows and frees up recruiters to be more strategic and personalized in their individual interactions with prospective hires.

What made you decide to not only attend but support Hire18?

We are looking forward to hearing from industry leaders on what they see as some of the biggest opportunities and potential pitfalls in the world of talent acquisition.

What is the biggest takeaway you hope to leave with?

My presentation is centered around the notion that recruiting is ripe for the benefits of automation. I hope attendees walk away with a better understanding of how AI can help them make their own jobs more valuable, by automating the tedious tasks that can be more efficiently completed by computers.

Some workers fear that technology will replace them. What would you say to recruiters who are reluctant to incorporate AI into their strategy?

I’d explain that AI isn’t out to take your job, but elevate it. It’s well documented that humans and machines are best when they team up, and my presentation will reference studies like the one reported by MIT Tech Review, in which researchers compared the ability of expert doctors and AI software to diagnose cancer. They found that doctors perform significantly better than existing software, but doctors together with software performed even better than their counterparts.

The HR industry has gotten a bad reputation for being slow to adopt new technology. Do you think AI is too forward-thinking for them?

HR professionals have made incredible strides in the past few decades. This is an industry that changes constantly, and when we look at the path from Help Wanted signs to newspaper ads to job boards to social recruiting, recruiters and HR leaders must constantly adapt. In fact, forward-thinking HR professionals are already investing in AI software to help them outperform the competition. As the Entelo 2018 Recruiting Trends Report finds, 62% of companies plan to adapt AI-powered recruiting software in 2018, and of those, 86% plan to spend on intelligent sourcing software. As this sort of thing becomes more mainstream, we’re sure to see even more recruiters becoming proficient in AI hiring tools.

The Hiring Success 18 countdown is getting to the point that someone, if so inclined, could start counting down in days instead of weeks. And as we approach finality on our speakers-and-sessions roster, we managed to steal some time from Marlina Kinnersley, the CEO and co-founder of Fortay.ai, a machine-learning-based cultural alignment platform.

Meet the companies vying for the title of Recruiting Startup Of The Year (RSOTY) at Hiring Success 18, in San Francisco, March 12-14. Your vote determines which six will be flying to California to pitch their ideas to 1000+ Talent Acquisition leaders, putting them in the running for the grand prize.

One of these six will be selected by a group of C-Suite experts and industry analysts for the ultimate prize of a Gold Sponsorship to Hiring Success 19, worth $10,000, which includes a branded booth and dedicated demo-room for potential customers to interact with their product.

Marlina Kinnersley will be bringing her wares to San Francisco March 12-14 as part of the Recruiting Startup of the Year contest. And she and her team have a pretty good shot. Used by leaders to obtain actionable insights resulting in an 80% improvement in recruiting efficiency, Fortay.ai also improved employee engagement and productivity.

Marlina also founded Culture Labx Toronto, which brings together founders, C-suiters, and culture practitioners. Marlina has over 10 years’ experience in building engaged teams across small and large sized companies, but the most relevant question to ask her today is:

What exactly does Fortay.ai do?

Ninety percent of leaders believe that culture is important, yet 70 percent of employees are disengaged, a statistic that has not changed in decades! Fortay.ai helps companies scale culture alongside their growth, using a data-driven approach to hire and retain high-performing, as well as diverse, teams. Candidates are ranked based on value-fit for true cultural alignment, and on culture-add for optimal efficiency, resulting in speed and accuracy for both companies and candidates. Increasing hiring efficiency by up to 80 percent, our analytics platform helps companies nurture and fortify their culture with actionable insights, as they continue to grow.

What gave you the idea for your startup?

It was a personal experience in a toxic culture, where leadership was not aligned, employees were not engaged, and there was a significant lack of trust across the organization. Their turnover was over 25 percent, and was 100 percent due to cultural misalignment. If I’d known what the culture was really like I wouldn’t have accepted the offer. That was my Eureka moment.

Of all industries to tackle, why recruiting?

With my personal experience being echoed over and over again, knowing that culture mismatch is very prevalent in today’s workforce – and also seeing a huge market opportunity – it was a perfect time to apply new technology and methodology to the problem.

How do you envision your idea changing the talent acquisition landscape?

Our mission is to inspire companies to attract, retain and build happy, diverse, and high-performing teams. We aim to be the leading platform in regards to workplace culture. To achieve this, we first need to arm recruiters with an effective way to capture their company’s cultural fingerprint. Then they can baseline candidates against workplace values, beliefs, and perspective at the beginning of the recruiting process.

What does ‘hiring success’ mean to you?

When you have diverse, high-performing teams, only then have you achieved hiring success. When teams are aligned, effective, collaborative, the proof is in the retention metrics.

What’s the true role of technology in hiring?

Technology is there to improve our lives, reduce bias while optimizing our recruiting process, and most importantly, to deliver a positive experience for our candidates. With our subsequent efficiency, we can invest our time in building meaningful relationships with talent, and spend more time in high-value work.