While the wonders of artificial intelligence are often hyped beyond reality, AI-powered recruitment software is actually offering real advantages to wall and ceiling contractors.
Those businesses now have the ability to use AI to automatically crawl the web for the specific kind of job seekers they need, auto-interview those people via text chat or video on-the-spot—and then auto-schedule the most promising job candidates for follow-up interviews.
Still other AI solutions are designed to search out and engage “passive” candidates—people who exhibit valuable skills and experience but are currently not on the job market.
And other apps enable wall and ceiling contractors to automatically rifle through résumés submitted at their business website for candidates who have the precise qualifications they’re seeking.
In a sign of the times, an increasing number of recruiting solutions are also adding AI algorithms designed to ensure that diversity and inclusion are among the cornerstones of your hiring practices.
And still other apps offer neuroscience games that job candidates can play—games designed to glean the people who best exhibit the traits, skills and characteristics you want.
All of these AI solutions come in the nick of time in a market where the job seekers have the upper hand—and are seeking smart, time-saving—and fair—ways to find their ideal job.
“The job market is very much tilted in the workers’ favor,” says Evan Sohn, CEO, recruiter.com, an AI-driven recruiting service. Businesses looking to attract top talent “must change their recruiting efforts” to include the advantages offered by AI, he adds.
Agrees Doug Leonard, CEO at Clovers (clovers.ai), which markets an AI-powered interviewing service: “It’s obvious that the pandemic has shifted the ways we do business in other ways.
“Work is increasingly virtual. Transparency is vital. And a spotlight has been placed on efforts toward diversity, equity and inclusion.”
Despite those new challenges, Kevin Parker, CEO, HireVue (www.hirevue.com)—another candidate interviewing solution that uses AI assessment of job applicants—says businesses should still see the current job market as a plus.
Says Parker: “The pandemic has created a unique opportunity for employers to redesign their hiring processes—leveraging technology that complements the capability of employees at a speed and scale not otherwise possible.
“As the economy rebounds, our data shows recruiters increasingly looking to virtual hiring to widen access to candidates they may not have had access to in the past.
“Employers are looking ahead to a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to rebuild a diverse and inclusive workforce, and will need to rely on technology to hire at scale.”
Toward that end, here’s a representative sampling of leading edge recruiting services offered by AI, which your wall and ceiling business can use to help automate much of the process of recruiting employees—especially if you’re going after younger, entry level candidates who tend to “live” online and on social media:
Textio (textio.com). Every outreach to a potential job candidate starts with a job description. So it makes sense to consider Textio. It’s an AI editor that ensures the wording of your job ads and job descriptions is thoroughly inclusive and encourages diversity.
Competitor Talvista (www.talvista.com) offers a similar service, using AI to help ensure your ads and job descriptions steer clear of disenfranchising applicants due to race, ethnicity or disability.
Paradox (www.paradox.ai). An extremely successful AI-recruiting toolmaker, Paradox makes a conversational AI text chatbot, which interviews job candidates on your website or other digital property and then schedules the hottest prospects for a follow-up, human interview.
The bot, dubbed “Olivia,” is designed to anticipate the questions job applicants typically ask for your specific business. And it’s equally adept at interviewing top-level talent—or job applicants simply looking for hourly work.
Paradox also recently saw a bonanza of investor confidence in December 2021, scoring a $200 million infusion of new funding.
Says Aaron Matos, CEO of Paradox: “I started my career as an HR practitioner. And I’ve always believed—at my core—that if you get the people thing right, you can build teams that change the world.
“When we created Paradox, we saw a future where software became invisible—driven by conversational experiences that untethered people from their desktop through an assistant who gets work done for them. That vision is clearly coming to life.”
VCV AI (https://vcv.ai/) can screen hundreds of thousands of résumés directed to your business to find the kind of workers you’re looking for, then reach out to those candidates, offering either an online chat or phone call as an interview format.
It can make hundreds of calls per minute and uses voice recognition technology to “talk” with job candidates and fill them in on details about your job opening.
The system can also be programmed to use facial recognition—combined with predictive analytics—to evaluate the personal mannerisms exhibited by a job candidate during an online video interview.
And once interviews are complete, VCV sends videos of what it considers to be the most promising candidates to your HR department for final processing.
Clovers (clovers.ai). An AI powered video interviewing platform, Clovers is designed to integrate seamlessly into commonly used video meeting software, including Zoom, Google Hangouts and Webex.
In practice, the interview “feels” like a typical video meeting and includes a highlight reel that Clovers generates featuring key takeaways from each interview.
HireVue (www.hirevue.com). Another video and or text interviewing solution, HireVue uses AI to evaluate applicants during the interview process. Kevin Parker, chairman and CEO of HireVue, says the company currently processes 30,000+ interviews every day for its myriad clients.
One especially noteworthy product feature in Hirevue: Its Builder tool, which enables HR to easily create structured interviews designed to mine for the key skills your business is looking for with any given job description.
The tool, which is also designed to promote fairness in hiring, was recognized Human Resources Executive Magazine as a Top HR Product for 2021.
Says Parker: “Improving diversity and inclusion in hiring is a strategic business imperative, and customers using Builder are able to simultaneously deliver on improving fairness, while efficiently filling critical open positions with top talent.”
Entelo (www.entelo.com). The key component of Entelo’s software is an AI-driven web crawler, which looks into every nook and cranny of the web—including LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter—to find candidates who match the kind of people your business needs.
Entelo also automatically sorts, analyzes and ranks a candidate’s eligibility for an open position across several attributes, including job title, work history, skills, likeliness to leave, their current role and more.
Promising candidates are directly contacted by Entelo—either automatically or on a schedule designed by your HR department. And Entelo’s follow-up messaging helps ensure HR stays in contact with the most promising prospects.
ZipRecruiter (www.ziprecruiter.com). One of the largest online employment marketplaces in the United States, ZipRecruiter offers an AI component that can be used to surface the most promising candidates on its board.
The feature works by studying how employers in specific industries rate the people applying for work in that industry on ZipRecruiter.
Those insights are used to surface the traits, skills and other characteristics exhibited by highly rated candidates—and the looks for those same characteristics in new candidates applying for jobs at your business.
Arya (goarya.com). Arya has a slightly different AI spin than ZipRecruiter.com. It studies the successful traits, skills and characteristics of people who are already employed at your contracting business—and then crawls the web for job candidates who exhibit similar profiles.
The program also gets smarter over time about the people you’re looking for by continually studying the performance of your existing employees.
Performance metrics Arya uses for this analysis include written performance reviews, the speed at which specific employees are promoted and the length of time they stay at your business.
HiringSolved (try.hiringsolved.com). A multifaceted AI recruiting tool, HiringSolved puts a major focus on enabling you to maintain a running analysis on the job applications you have on hand.
Plus, it also features search tools you can use to drill down into that database to easily find your best prospects for any given job.
HiringSolved also auto-notifies your HR department in advance when the contracts for your key people are expiring—30, 60 and 90 days—so HR can potentially offer those valuable people new opportunities to keep them engaged at the company.
Pymetrics (www.pymetrics.com). Pymetrics is a specialized AI HR tool that enables you to assess the character and skills of prospective employees via games it furnishes candidates to play.
Pymetrics designs those games by inviting your existing, most successful employees to play its neuroscience games, and then gleaning data on their traits and strengths, based on the way those employees play those games.
Subsequently, Pymetrics uses that data to judge potential hires who play the same games, looking for people who have the same traits and characteristics of the successful people already working at your company.
While the emergence of all these new AI-powered hiring solutions promises to save wall and ceiling contractors significant amounts of time and money, the tools do come with a caveat.
Specifically: Some advocates of equal opportunity in employment argue that some of the algorithms powering some of these solutions could result in biased hiring.
Their reasoning: Algorithms are written by humans. And sometimes human biases, which may exist consciously, subconsciously or unconsciously in the minds of computer programmers, have a way of creeping into the code that humans write.
Among the federal governmental agencies taking this risk of bias very seriously is the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (www.eeoc.gov).
The takeway: You’ll want your in-house counsel to stay current on the EEOC’s moves when it comes to AI and hiring—and ensure that any AI or automation tools you use comply with U.S. federal employment laws.
Says Charlotte A. Burrows, chair of the EEOC: “Artificial intelligence and algorithmic decision-making tools have great potential to improve our lives—including in the area of employment.
“At the same time, the EEOC is keenly aware that these tools may mask and perpetuate bias or create new discriminatory barriers to jobs. We must work to ensure that these new technologies do not become a high-tech pathway to discrimination.”
Joe Dysart is an internet speaker and business consultant based in Manhattan.
