In an increasingly technological world, there seems to be new innovations every day. One of the most talked about technological advancements of this past decade is undoubtedly artificial intelligence.
At Bear Staffing, leveraging technology and optimizing our process with the latest advancements plays a huge part in our success.
Does that mean that, on its own, artificial intelligence is trustworthy and effective, in every case? Certainly not. By creating a hybrid artificial intelligence and human-backed approach to recruitment and staffing efforts, we proudly promise the best staffing experience for our clients.
What is Artificial Intelligence?
Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is data-driven technology designed to do the job of humans. As the name suggests, AI uses code and data to fake the functions of human analysis in order to perform jobs that a real person typically would.
These functions can often be done much faster than humans and with less training and oversight, ultimately saving both time and money.
Today, AI is used for a number of tasks including speech and facial recognition, decision-making, and language translation.
Staffing and AI
Another common use for artificial intelligence today is in staffing and recruitment companies. Staffing can be exceptionally tedious and overwhelming, requiring many man-hours and a lot of repetitive work. By introducing AI into the staffing process, Bear Staffing has significantly reduced the workload of our staffing team.
Here’s how AI works in the recruitment industry.
Let’s say you are hiring for a position at a solar energy company. You want to make sure that this person has at least 3 years of experience in solar sales, is familiar with the tool GoSolo, and has experience selling Tesla solar products. Instead of taking hours to comb through resumes, spending a few minutes reading each one, an AI program can very quickly read through thousands of resumes and pull out only the ones that include the keywords: solar energy, renewable energy, solar sales, sales representative, GoSolo, Tesla Solar, and an experience level over 3 years.
By introducing AI into the process, that tedious effort just got a whole lot easier.
For over a year, Bear Staffing has been using artificial intelligence to sort through applications within our database, quickly and efficiently sorting through thousands of resumes in a fraction of the time it would take us humans. Another way we use AI in our staffing process is by allowing AI programs to search the internet for candidates whose resumes and qualifications match job descriptions, but who haven’t submitted applications.
In this way, we can reach candidates who otherwise wouldn’t have been on our radar to begin with. But while the benefits of AI in this process are great, it is also important to understand why AI alone is not staffing any of our client’s facilities.
Controversial AI
AI has numerous applications in the ever-adapting and technologically advancing world around us. However, some AI programs have actually shown to be biased toward certain keywords or limited in how deep they will explore that resume once specific keywords aren’t immediately found. Amazon was one company that experienced this firsthand.
In 2014, Amazon hired a company to automate it’s recruitment process. The company created a system of 500 computer models coded to scan thousands of resumes submitted to the company for over 50,000 keywords. Once identified, the system was designed to pick out the candidates that were best suited to work for Amazon, based on how their resumes aligned with those keywords.
About a year into the process, the AI experts picked up on something alarming: The AI was biased against women. It seemed that the program was intentionally filtering out resumes with the word ‘women’s’ and / or females that attended two female-only universities.
While the reason for this was never fully discovered - or released to the public - the results speak for themselves.
That’s not the only bias that Amazon and other AI users identified. Amazon also discovered that the program was spitting out unqualified candidates. In 2020, the scientific journal Nature was to print a study on the ability of AI to identify criminality of an individual based on a single image. Unsurprisingly, the AI was found to be biased based on race and ethnicity when scanning the images and the study was stopped.
Another AI powered tool called Genderify was also terminated once biases against women and certain professions were picked up. The tool was designed to identify a person’s gender based solely on their name, email address, or username. Researchers found that when used alongside the word ‘professor’, the AI incorrectly sorted almost 95% of individuals as men. Similarly, the word ‘stupid’ was incorrectly biased toward females.
A hybrid approach
All this is not to say that AI has no place in staffing and recruitment. At Bear Staffing, we’ve developed a hybrid model for staffing that uses AI and real humans to find the right candidates for any roles.
We believe that humans should hire humans. Not bears, not computers - real human people. Our staffing teams use AI to help them comb through both submitted and not yet submitted applicants - pulling out certain keywords and identifiers - and then allow real people to make the final call.
This hybrid approach ensures a fair model that employs the use of technology as well as the intuition and analysis of a real human.
Our hybrid approach combines the newest AI technology and certified human staff to makes it easier, faster, and - ultimately - more effective than ever to find solutions for staffing in all industries.
We wouldn’t want our facility to be staffed exclusively by robots, so we won’t trust AI alone to staff your facilities. Get in touch with Bear Staffing to see our hybrid AI and human-backed approach in action!