AI tech solutions helping to fast-track recruitment in HR

AI tech solutions helping to fast-track recruitment in HR-illustration photo, source:freepik

L’Oreal is one of the world’s largest cosmetics and beauty corporations with more than 80,000 team members globally. The French corporation gets about five million applications for roughly 15,000 new positions each year. The vast number of applications took up a great deal of L’Oreal’s money and time for the personnel selection process.

Things got easier when the corporation adopted a modest approach by applying AI to the recruitment process in an intern programme. A representative of L’Oreal said that 12,000 applicants with 80 spots were quickly processed by AI, saving 200 recruiting hours compared to the previous full human-powered review process.

Meanwhile, Unilever, one of the world’s leading multinational companies specialising in food, home, and personal care products, also said that around 70,000 person-hours of interviewing and assessing candidates had been cut, thanks to the automated screening of 1.8 million job applications each year through AI tools.

According to consulting firm Mercer’s 2020 Global Talent Trends report, the application of AI in recruitment will become a prominent trend in the next three years. Some 88 per cent of businesses globally have used AI in some way for human resources (HR) management, with 40 per cent screening and assessing candidates with the assistance of AI.

Early adopters using AI-powered recruiting software have seen their cost per screen reduced by 75 per cent. Two-thirds of recruiters and hiring managers globally agreed with these positive results brought by AI, according to research results from LinkedIn.

Although AI offers a variety of support in the recruitment field including automatically searching for potential candidates based on job announcements, resume screening, chatbots or digital interviews, in Vietnam, it has only recently been taken on board by HR tech companies, but mainly focuses on the early stages of the recruitment process.

Tran Trung Hieu, CEO of TopCV, an HR tech company that is applying AI to all recruitment processes, believes that related solutions help boost the accuracy in collecting, analysing, and evaluating candidates or recruitment information.

“A lot of hiring decisions are made based on a whim. The application of AI will help recruitment activities be more objective and standardise the match between the candidate’s experience, knowledge, and skills with the requirements of the job,” Hieu explained.

Currently, the recruitment process for businesses often takes too long, causing employers to lose potential candidates to competitors. AI will help gather data, classify resumes, answer candidates, and even analyse resumes to find out the most suitable candidates. In contrast, recruiters can focus on tasks that AI cannot do, such as building employer branding, creating relationships with candidates, and making hiring decisions.

“AI also helps businesses expand their search for talent abroad and connect suitable candidates globally,” Hieu added.

Automated settings from AI will likely help Vietnamese businesses to naturally communicate with thousands of candidates every month and be ready to answer all their questions 24/7, while HR professionals can focus on management and consulting.

Many Vietnamese enterprises are now switching from unskilled or middle-class workers to high-quality workers, especially those operating in the tech sector. According to the Ministry of Information and Communications, Vietnam needs about 1.2 million IT human resources by 2025, while the entire current IT human resource supply system is only capable of meeting more than half of that.

The recruitment shift from quantity to quality requires businesses to rebuild their corporate culture and offer attractive policies in terms of income and development opportunities.

Nguyen Dieu Cam, general director of T&A Ogilvy said, “The imprint of AI on the HR in Vietnam is in the initial stage. Businesses that want to rise to the top in the talent recruitment race must pay a lot of attention to building a comprehensive HR strategy, integrating technology solutions to increase the candidate experience.”