AI is transforming talent acquisition, but concerns about its risks are valid. However, in the face of these risks, some of which have the potential to irreparably harm job seekers and employer brands, both candidates and employers alike are forging ahead and embracing AI in hopes of reducing rote work and improving hiring outcomes. While the benefits may outweigh the risk for a single action or actor, in aggregate that may not hold, putting both employers and talent in a precarious situation.
At Datapeople, we believe embracing AI responsibly is key to unlocking its potential without compromising ethical or legal considerations. We believe that AI – when harnessed responsibly – can future-proof talent acquisition operations without the downsides. Responsible AI will power the future of talent acquisition. An AI you can trust, audit, and scrutinize to ensure velocity doesn’t come at the expense of bias or unforeseen consequences.
AI is already here, kind of
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a buzzword in recent years, with countless articles praising its breakthroughs and warning about its potential risks. The interest, and caution, are well warranted. It’s magic when OpenAI’s Sora instantly generates shockingly real videos from a simple text string. But there is a serious risk of mayhem when this technology is used by bad actors to push propaganda and bias that blurs ”the already-faint line between real and fake content online”. And that’s without accounting for the hallucinations that are still present in AIs as we witnessed with Google’s failed Gemini image generation launch. Forrester anticipates that in 2024 “heavy use of AI tools by both candidates (to spam potential employers with cover letters) and recruiters (to sift through vast numbers of applicants) will lead to misconnections, mischief, and mayhem.”
Candidates are eager for an edge
We all know that applying for jobs is a time-consuming and laborious effort – made even more complex as companies have added more hoops in a possibly misguided attempt to improve hire quality. So it’s only natural that candidates are embracing AI to help them more easily and swiftly find their next role. Whether they seek to improve their correspondence, rewrite their resume, or more quickly produce a work example, generalist platforms such as ChatGPT or those more tailored to hiring such as Teal stand ready to support.
Employers are looking to survive
With barriers to apply at historic lows, thanks in part to AI, and challenging economic conditions forcing more candidates to vie for fewer openings, employers are struggling to handle an onslaught of inbound applications. They too have turned to AI as a potential savior to reduce the effort and time to hire quality talent. Testing off-the-shelf generalist platforms like Microsoft CoPilot or investing in specialist recruiting technology platforms like Datapeople, employers are embracing AI to craft market-calibrated job posts, identify talent matches, and even automate screening and correspondence.
Recruiting intelligence and control, powered by responsible talent AI
Datapeople was founded on a singular idea: to empower talent acquisition teams around the world to deliver a more human hiring experience. To accomplish this we saw one big impediment. Talent acquisition as a function was underserved by existing technology and saddled with asymmetric internal relationships, forcing teams to add manual processes to cover gaps yielding a wholly inefficient hiring process. We fundamentally believe that legacy inefficiencies and poor experiences can be improved with technology and data-driven innovations, such as AI.
Datapeople is not alone in seeing the potential of AI for talent acquisition. However, we stand alone in our approach to AI, we are the only company (today) with the right approach to truly deliver responsible talent AI. While others are content leveraging off-the-shelf generic data models, the likes that power ChatGPT, our guidance is based on an AI trained on hiring data from over 65 million global job postings and millions of real-world hiring outcomes. While this approach may add time to our deployments, it ensures the results are accurate and actionable for talent acquisition. We do not and will never shoehorn generic capabilities in a misguided attempt to drive efficiency. At best generic data and AIs will deliver generic capabilities. At worst, they could expose your data, systems, employees, talent, and employer brand to unforeseen and unanticipated risks.
Today, Datapeople customers enjoy the benefits of our responsible AI trained on hiring data and outcomes to dramatically improve their hiring efficiency and goal achievement in the following ways.
Banish bad job ads forever
High-quality job postings are crucial for accelerating time to hire and lowering costs. However, fewer than half of employers feel that their job posts are effective. Much of this concern boils down to a lack of accessible market intelligence and ineffective, or completely lacking, collaboration among hiring team members. This is where Datapeople’s Smart Editor comes in. Our platform allows Talent Acquisition and hiring managers to collaborate effortlessly, consume market and role intelligence, and create effective job posts as a habit, not a chore.
Execute smart process improvements
For too long talent acquisition teams have endured a uniquely manual and time-consuming process extracting helpful recruiting data from their applicant tracking systems (ATSs) and many point solution add-ons. This painful, if even possible, experience has led many teams to operate on feelings more than facts. However, as teams are asked to do more with less while facing challenging labor markets, the need for data-driven insights and smart, informed actions has never been greater. To assist, Datapeople embraced big data and accessible analytics with Datapeople Insights, which automates the collection, normalization, and organization of messy (and at times missing) hiring data to empower hiring teams to make strategic, data-driven decisions based on recruiting insights – without the manual effort.
Effortless increase in everyday efficiency
For a process as intricate as hiring, a reduction in the daily friction can make a huge difference. For Datapeople’s AI evolution, we’ll be focusing on improvements across the board that make creation, distribution, and action more seamless with less effort. Improvements will reduce the time to create job posts with additional science-backed automated suggestions, building on our success with smart posting. Automate the creation of tailored communications (e.g., candidate emails) by smartly extending the agreed-upon job post as a source document. And provide more one- or few-click actions based on hiring performance insights to drive real-time improvements.
AI the responsible (Datapeople) way
At Datapeople, we approach AI differently. Our approach is based on a unique combination of AI, natural language processing (NLP), and behavioral and decision science. We understand the psychology behind decision-making and how various factors influence the choices we make. This ensures we harness and deploy AI in a manner that yields impactful yet consistent outcomes. Our responsible AI will always be developed according to a standard successful recipe.
- Purpose-built, not generic: We power our guidance with data from over 65 million global job postings (and counting) and millions of real-world hiring outcomes ensuring relevant and actionable insights. This contrasts with generic large language models trained on broad datasets and most other Talent Acquisition solutions that rely on them to produce non-optimized (at best) and possibly inaccurate (at worst) actions and insights.
- Built internally, data stays secure: Your data is never shared with third-party providers, safeguarding privacy and security.
- Interpretable models, clear reasoning: We prioritize transparency with interpretable models that allow us to understand, inspect, and explain the rationale behind our AI-powered guidance. (To see what we mean, read this detailed explainer on our gender inference model.)
- Human oversight, validated results: All AI-based guidance is vetted by human experts before reaching you, guaranteeing reliable and trustworthy advice.
Further, we are vigilant in understanding and protecting against the risks and challenges that AI poses.
- Datapeople workflows secure AI control: Our platform equips TA leaders to monitor and mitigate potential risks like data breaches, unlike other AI tools that largely exist unseen and unmonitored.
- Unwavering commitment to responsible AI: We prioritize ethical considerations even when it means choosing more prudent solutions over faster, potentially riskier approaches.
Our models are deployed within the Datapeople workflow, allowing talent acquisition leaders to monitor and safeguard against risks such as data privacy breaches. We are committed to a science-backed, bias-free, and privacy- and security-compliant approach, even if it means exploring and deploying technologies that are more prudent than those used by less risk-averse companies who embrace generic AI models in prioritizing speed to market over risk tolerance.
Embracing the potential, responsibly
AI has the potential to automate much of the manual work that falls under the responsibility of TA and HR teams today, freeing them to focus on their core talent (and people) priorities. At Datapeople, we approach AI development with excitement but also with an awareness of the risks and challenges it poses. To determine where to invest, we consider the following principles.
- The AI-based features must dramatically enhance recruiter and hiring team productivity.
- The AI-based features must continue to be built with inclusion in mind and circumspect of biases that can creep in from datasets.
- The AI-based features must be developed to ensure no PII or confidential data is shared externally.
- The AI-based features must be developed to ensure little to no “hallucination,” drift, or insertion of junk.
- Where possible, the AI-based features must allow customers to opt-in to the features after validation.
As regulators around the world consider how to approach AI and data protection, Datapeople welcomes and will participate in the creation of thoughtful regulation. We are confident that our responsible approach aligns well with existing and proposed regulations (like those in New York City that specifically highlight the role of AI in hiring). Datapeople as a company and platform is diametrically opposed to automated employment decision tools (AEDT). Today, our platform is not involved in candidate screening in any way. Our technology and aspirations for talent acquisition contrast with AEDTs where the goal is essentially to decrease candidate pools; Datapeople’s approach is conversely to expand applicant pools with qualified candidates and increase access to employment opportunities for job seekers.
Responsible AI is the future of talent acquisition
The potential of AI is irrefutable. The upsides are real, as are the downsides that continue to blindside employers and candidates. Yet, there is little doubt that mass adoption is on the horizon. The question we all need to consider is how much risk are we willing to be exposed to in our pursuit of AI-driven efficiency. If the answer is little to none, as we believe it should be in Talent Acquisition, the AI that we embrace must be responsible. The AI we build, deploy, and harness must not only respect our ethics and standards but maintain them as new use cases and opportunities for the technology emerge. Further, we must ensure we trust our AI partner, not only with our data but with our employer and even personal brands.
At Datapeople, we’re committed to developing AI solutions that enhance productivity, promote inclusivity, and safeguard data privacy, all while adhering to the strictest ethical and regulatory standards. Our implementations will prioritize ethical considerations and user trust. Our AI will always be designed to augment human expertise, not replace it. It will prioritize collaboration and transparency to ensure responsible use. It will operate within our platform workflows, such as the Smart Editor, ensuring consistent usage within pre-designed parameters managed by version controls.
Responsible AI will power the future of talent acquisition. Join us in building the future of talent acquisition where AI empowers progress, respects human values, and elevates the entire hiring experience. To learn more, watch Perspectives on Generative AI’s Transformation of Talent Acquisition, our webinar with leading industry analyst Tim Sackett.
