The robots are here—to help you find a job. Recruitment technology has been steadily advancing in sophistication, with database management, initial selection, and evaluation gradually being automated. People Matters asked Sergei Makhmodov, the CEO of DaXtra Technologies APAC, how today's technology is changing the recruitment process and what recruiters and HR practitioners need to be aware of. Here are the highlights of what he shared.

Which trends in recruitment technology do you think will be significant in the immediate future and for some time to come?

DaXtra has been around for nearly 20 years now, and looking back, it is clear to us that technology is steadily driving recruitment towards greater automation. Hiring is one large process that consists of many sub-tasks, and technology has been gradually automating more and more of those tasks, to a degree where it is now capable of performing very large segments of the entire hiring process fully autonomously—starting from attracting and sourcing suitable candidates, to screening, and all the way to interviewing them. What this will lead us to in the not so distant future is a very different way of hiring people, where candidates will be more in control of the process—through interactive online matching tools and conversational chatbots.

This degree of automation is based on having very large pools of data; how is the technology, and the people, keeping pace with that huge amount of data required?

What we are seeing now is an abundance of various talent pools and skills pools all around the world—job boards, social networks, various online communities are all easily available to recruiters. But this abundance of data, in fact, made the recruiters’ work more challenging. It's not that there are significantly more candidates per se. What has changed is that the same candidate is appearing in multiple places, which leads to confusion and drains resources.

Now, the solution to this is for recruiters to maximize the value of their own data that they have amassed on their ATS. The candidates on the ATS, unlike the job board or LinkedIn ones, are already acquired (so you probably already paid some job board or agency to get them in the first place), many may have been contacted, interviewed or otherwise qualified by your recruiters, perhaps you even have ongoing communications with some of those candidates or have hired them in the past. More importantly, those are the candidates that at some point in the past expressed a desire to work for your brand!

But the key issue is that candidate data doesn't tend to stay relevant for a very long time, forcing recruiters to prefer external paid talent pools with more up to date candidates. But these 3^rd-party talent pools cost money and require a great deal of time to search them individually, download candidates from them and then process candidates onto the ATS.

In many cases you already have candidates that you are downloading, but you simply don’t know and end up paying for them again.

To address this issue and to better monetize your own talent community, you need to keep engaged with it, which is where automation and AI come in very useful. So when you need to fill a new role, the automated process will accurately search your up-to-date database, shortlist suitable candidates, then reach out to them through chatbots, communicating the content of the job and getting indications of their interest. All of this can be done without any significant manual effort on your part, saving a great deal of time and cost.

At what point do humans enter the process, or where does it become a human-machine collaboration?

Well, while AI is increasingly very capable, the current technology is nowhere near the stage where it can make an actual hiring decision. It is not able, for example, to assess the candidate’s personality or their ability to be a good team player or how well they perform under a deadline pressure.

However, any need for such assessment is probably dependent on the nature of your recruitment project—do we really need a thorough personality and behavioural assessment for every single role, assuming we have the ability to reference-check our candidates? Temporary recruitment, contract recruitment, and permanent recruitment are all very different in nature and have different goals. If you want to hire a permanent staff member, particularly if it's for a demanding job that requires constant interaction with teammates as well as customers, then you're not just after their skills or their past experience. You want to be sure that they will fit in with the team, and the resume itself may not show that particular side of the candidate. In such cases yes, you do need a face to face interviewing process.

But when it comes to temporary and contract hiring, does it actually matter? We're seeing this question arising more frequently lately and we are starting to see the emergence of new-generation platforms where certain types of hires, those that are for short-term projects or those that are not client-facing, are automated almost end to end. In such cases, you might see an online assessment process where a smart chatbot asks the right questions and interviews the candidate to the level that is sufficient to fulfil the objectives of such short-term hires.

I imagine that this type of automation could quite well cover jobs where staff are located in different geographical areas, such as developers delivering tasks or projects for clients remotely. And this brings us to a different way of thinking about how companies should run and operate successfully – should we continue to maintain conventional costly ‘bricks and mortar’ structures in business, or should we look at a more dynamic, flexible model where the workforce is agile and can be used ‘on-demand’ in terms of where they're based and how many hours they need to work?

At DaXtra we first started experimenting with having a flexible remote workforce some time ago. But with the current COVID-19 crisis forcing companies to re-align and allow most of their staff working remotely, it is now becoming more evident that such approach works – not only because the crisis has shown that we still can deliver projects with a restricted staff mobility and without a negative impact on the outcome, but also because it is much more cost-effective than with the traditional office commute setup.

Could you share a bit more about common gaps in the recruitment process and how technology is closing these?

Let's look at gaps right at the top of the hiring funnel, where candidates engage with the company. Let’s assume you have a candidate who finds your job and expresses an interest. Their journey to apply is a very tedious one to say the least.

A typical company loses around 95 percent of candidates right at the entry gates—all because the application process is so complex, so cumbersome, that the candidates are turned off in the first couple of minutes.

With some registrations requiring up to 30-40 minutes, it is no wonder that the vast majority of job seekers who initially express an interest in working with the organization, simply drop off before finishing their applications! So that's the first gap.

Then, let's say 5 percent of candidates do finish the application. But then what happens is the recruiter gets say 100 applications, but they don’t have time to add them all to the ATS, as this process is also too complicated, manual and time-consuming. So the recruiter selects top 5-6 applicants to enter into the database and leaves the rest untouched in the inbox. And that is such a commonplace and such a big waste, because tomorrow there may be another job that the candidate you discarded yesterday would be perfect for, but because you never added them to the database they won’t be found and you will end up paying job boards or agencies for the same candidate again, having paid for them twice!

But how do you effectively search ATS databases often containing tens or even hundreds of thousands of candidate records? Well, imagine a scenario where you simply upload a job-spec in Word or PDF on your ATS and an automated system immediately generates a list of 20-30 best matches from your talent pool and then proactively communicates the contents of the job to those candidates in a friendly email or as a link in a text message. When candidates open the message a friendly chatbot will ask the right on-topic questions, then register and synchronize their answers back to the ATS. It can be a confirmation of the candidate’s interest in the job; a decline, yet still with the current status update; or a request to be removed from the database entirely. That is a lot of actionable intel that is acquired automatically and put on the ATS, and a lot of legwork saved to come up with a meaningful shortlist of suitable candidates. Moreover, such automation will help you to keep your candidate data always up to date and relevant, reducing excessive dependency on 3rd-party data providers.

This level of automation exists today and is easily available. We ourselves have developed an AI-based matching system that can perform a comprehensive semantic analysis of all candidate and job data on the ATS to literally ‘understand’ what candidates have been doing and when, how successful they have been and what worked or didn’t work for them throughout their career.

What do recruiters and HR professionals need to understand about today's recruitment technology, in order to get the most out of their tools?

I think that HR needs to get more up to speed with what's available out there. At DaXtra we partner with both, staffing companies and corporate recruitment clients and, in general, we are seeing that staffing firms often tend to be more advanced and forward-thinking in their tech strategies than corporate HR, they tend to be more savvy and invest more in new automation. It is still not uncommon, in particular here in Asia Pacific, to see very large organizations still running recruitment on spreadsheets. That is costing their internal operations dearly and is just outdated and unwise in modern day’s terms.

Certainly, bringing robust technology that is already used successfully by many staffing companies, as well as many progressive corporate TA departments, will help. With the correct tech stack in place, even training your recruiters to use new tools should not be an issue, because the whole idea is that the more you automate the easier it becomes for end-users to operate the software. Rather than asking your recruiters to learn how to build complex Boolean queries, you would give them tools that can be used by anyone who is familiar with searching using Google or Facebook .

Obviously, we're not living in a science fiction story. There is always an initial planning phase and an effort to configure any such automated platform—you can't just take the robot out of the box and expect it to get everything right from the start.

You need to tailor it to your own requirements, just as we, the vendors would configure the software for each individual client scenario. It might take a few weeks, some time, effort and expense, but in the end, you will be able to derive and enjoy some game-changing benefits from it.