Developing Diversity and Inclusion Based Intelligent Recruitment using SAP SuccessFactor and SAP BTP

Hello Everyone,

I hope everyone is doing well, just to set the context of this blog i need to tell you story how the IDEA was born, It’s all started with Netflix Show called CODED BIAS (Later on this blog i have shared some funny  story also around it), It was indeed eye opener for me about how our subconcious minds are so biased towards race, gender and relegion. If you are a fan of Artificial Intelligence then you gotta see this show on the netflix. This furthur helped us to design an AI-based Intelligent recruitment solution that is completely unbiased when Racism, Religion, and Gender equality are concerns. So thought to share the story of behind the scenes with SAP Community ultimately behind this SAP technology are used, so community deserves it :D, and also would like to know the views of everyone about this. Because definately as per me such solution should be very welcome into the enteprise eco system not only we should think  from technology and business  point of view, also for betterment of humanity and world too.

Disclaimer: This Article i have also posted over linkedin, but i feel it’s also a place where i can share. 

Introduction

Recruitment is not an easy job, Though I am not a Recruiter still understand their pain pretty much, Specially filtering Applicant’s resume for a particular position and when the numbers of applicants are pretty high is really tedious job. But wait a minute, we are not living in the ’90s century, we are living in an era of Digitization where AI is not anymore experimental it’s essential, and customers have already started implementing AI to Empower their Enterprise.

We believe Technology is meant to Empowering us so we humans could focus on the more value-driven task rather than focusing on the tedious task and that’s what Intelligent Enterprise also all about. Being Technologist our goal is always to make life easier for our customer and empower them with Intelligent Technology to solve their problems.

Business Challenges

Although the Introduction of this article gives a hint about what kind of challenges we are going to discuss, but to make it more simple let’s discuss in more detail.

Let’s look at the above problems a recruiter is facing in his/her daily life when it comes to closing a position for a big organization. It becomes more challenging when you receive many applications for one particular position because it makes her life more difficult in terms of making the decision for scheduling an Interview. And life knocks you down when you see, you are the only one who has to filter all the resumes for setting up Interviews and get feedback from the hiring manager that resumes are not much relevant.

Solution

Who Doesn’t Love challenges, and when with Intelligent Technology possibilities are limitless, you gotta thought better Intelligent Technology based solution which would not replace a recruiter directly rather empower them so that they could focus more on the value-driven task such as Partnering with hiring managers to determine staffing needs, Administering appropriate company assessments, Performing reference and background checks, Maintaining relationships with both internal and external clients to ensure staffing goals are achieved, Staying current on the company’s organization structure, personnel policy, and federal and state laws regarding employment practices, Serving as a liaison with area employment agencies, colleges, and industry associations ETC.

RISE WITH SAP offering now every partner and customer has an equal opportunity to build Intelligent Enterprise. During the brainstorming session with my colleagues, I found there could be many possible solutions to this problem but as an Innovation leader, you always gotta pick the Innovative more futuristic Artificial Intelligence based solution to address the problem better. So our approach was very simple to make as much automation as possible, so we thought to use SAP Conversational AI for Interacting with Candidates to get the resume and send this resume to the Custom Machine learning Model which will further extract the information from the resume and match with the job description and returns matching percentage to Conversational AI for setting up Microsoft Team Meeting by calling Power Flow. The biggest benefits of this solution are it doesn’t matter how many candidates you have, a chatbot could serve every candidate simultaneously and match the resume with the job description and based on matching percentage check the availability of interviewer and candidates both and schedule the Interview. Also, this solution would capture the result and more insight about the candidate’s strengths in terms of different skills to give pretty much good insight to the Interviewer about candidates, so Interviewer could prepare well.

Technical Architecture

SuccessFactors Intelligent Service Center is one of the best features I believe SAP has delivered as of now for developing Extension and Integration, It’s the perfect hook for building an extension for SuccessFactors, Combining it with the Integration center gives lots of freedom to the customer as well as Partner especially when event-driven Integrations and Extensions is way forward for developing modern Integration. Main magic happens when you bring SAP Business Technology Platform into the picture, rich service like event mesh act as a cherry on the top because it gives you the flexibility to bring the data in a separate database, in this case, SAP Hana or HANA Cloud by leveraging SAP Cloud Application Programming Model event listener API. Which make it very easy to make an automated job posting in different third party job posting website also, because most of the job posting website offers partner API to make automation around it. For running Tensorflow Based Machine Learning Model we thought to go with Kyma run time for better scalability and control. You might ask a question why Microsoft Power flow why not Azure Graph API for reading calendars and setting up a Microsoft team meeting. The answer is very simple we love Power Flow, Yes Microsoft you heard it correctly. It’s very easy to build API using Power Flow with full control, especially I am amazed by the capabilities it brings to the table, we are heavily Investing in Microsoft Power Platform to build an extension, automation, and Intelligent Solution. In the next article, I might discuss the different possibilities with Microsoft Power in the context of Extending SAP Products.

Process Flow in a Nutshell

How we are tackling Gender and Racial Biasedness during resume screening?

Well, this could be an interesting question in your mind that AI could be very biased towards gender, race, and religion because machine learning models are ultimately heavily trained and built by humans. As I mentioned in the begining of the blog  about watching a show called CODED BIAS on Netflix and you won’t believe I ended up with a big argument with my housemates over Infusing AI into Enterprise Software. To be honest, before watching CODED BIAS I never thought of the possible negative side of AI. When MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini discovers that facial recognition does not see dark-skinned faces accurately, she embarks on a journey to push for the first-ever U.S. legislation against bias in algorithms that impact us all, that’s what CODED BIAS show all about. This makes me really think about what data we should consider when we train the model in terms of feeding and we decided not to extract email, name, gender, and age to make any kind of biasedness possibility rather only skillset, project responsibility, and experience to make it simple and tackle this issue.

Demo

Enough read? Got Bored by different philosophy? Here is the demo to make you think about the possibilities.

Hope you have enjoyed the read, your views, questions and comments would be really appreciated.

Thanks & Regards,

Sudip