AI and Automation: Reinventing HR and Beyond

The war for top talent rages on.

Worldwide, battle lines are being drawn across HR departments. Recruiters are often mired in an antiquated manual process to sift through thousands of incoming resumes, and then screen and interview candidates, with the goal to land the best and brightest talent before the competition does. For candidates, they want to minimize wasted time pursuing opportunities that ultimately don’t match their skill sets or suit their requirements.

Fortunately, for humans on both sides of the hiring process, the experts at Flexso are harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to help connect professionals quicker and more efficiently than ever before. Their story is a striking example of how AI and automation can enhance and enable the human side of the business.

How AI and Automation Improve the Hiring Process

In our latest Better Together episode, David Pierre, Partner at Flexso Digital, and Tom Mentens, HR Transformation Consultant at Flexso for People, share how they’re reshaping the HR landscape.

1. For the podcast, Thulium CEO Tamara McCleary, discusses the need for digital transformation in HR, how the process can be made more friendly to candidates and HR professionals alike, and how SAP partners can build SaaS offerings on the SAP Business Technology Platform.
2. In the LinkedIn session, I talked with Tom and David about their experience building the solution, how it’s been received, success stories, and more.

Here are a few highlights from the discussion:

Increased Hiring Speed, Trust, and Transparency For All

The war for talent is heating up worldwide, driven in part by the remote work boom during the pandemic. Recruiters can seek out talent anywhere — but the flipside is that candidates can apply for a much wider array of jobs than before.

This has led to repetitive, manual work for recruiters and endless applications for candidates. Flexso’s solution: use AI to help match candidates to the best positions and vice versa. Recruiters are empowered to make the best choice (and David stresses that the recruiter, not the AI, always makes the final decision), and candidates can be matched to their dream job, even if they applied for a different position.

Leaving the final decision to the recruiter not only builds trust, but it also allows HR to move from very transactional practices towards working with people’s experience and qualifications.  “We want to offer better quality services,” Tom says. “And that could be to employees, the board of directors…but also to candidates who are very important stakeholders as well.”

For candidates, AI interactions offer opportunities to not only save time but also rapidly evaluate the chances of their fit within the organization. Instead of visiting static sites with an overwhelming number of jobs, engaging with chatbots or even video assessments, “can help in an intelligent way…find the ideal job for you,” says David.

Mitigating Human Bias with AI

Removing human judgment bias in hiring, both subconscious and conscious, is a clear priority for modern businesses. But before any AI technology can weed out or even mitigate gender, race, and other biases’, master data sets must be updated. Applying historical data into your model will simply ensure it will perpetuate historical biases.

Flexso chose to partner with AI expert Techwolf to address the bias issue. “They (Techwolf) de-biased their model by actively filtering out wrong data as they were training the AI application,” said Tom.

The AI-driven engine allows recruiters to take a more skill and talent-based approach to hiring, with the AI uncovering candidates that might be a good fit without regard for gender, race, and other demographics.

AI as a Key Recruiting Tool

Upgrading the hiring process helps HR match the right candidate to the right job, and can help streamline the candidate experience. These benefits don’t have to stay behind the scenes, however. David suggests that businesses can use their superior hiring processes as a differentiator to attract talent: “The employer branding part of the story is not to be underestimated,” he says. A modern, fully digital recruitment process is essential for companies looking to attract innovative, transformative talent. It shows you practice what you preach, both externally as well as internally.

AI and Bot Automation Beyond HR

Flexso’s story is an inspiring tale of digital transformation in HR. And it also illustrates how businesses can use the SAP Business Technology Platform to build new service offerings. Here are two other examples of AI and automation at work:

• Groupe Mutuel is using SAP Conversational AI services to build responsive, multilingual, intelligent chatbots. These bots can answer customer queries instantly, with a 75% first-time resolution rate. In other words, ¾ of customers who use the chatbot doesn’t need further customer service assistance.
• Rabobank deployed a chatbot powered by AI technology to automate standard, repetitive invoice questions from suppliers. In the first week after it went live, the chatbot (“Billy”) handled 100-150 conversations a day. Billy increased both employee and supplier satisfaction, improving processes for everyone involved.

Be a Part of the Conversation

Looking for even more inspiring stories straight from SAP Business Technology Platform customers? You can check out the whole Better Together: Customer Conversations series and more at sap.com/BTP.

Please let me know if there are topics you’d like to hear more about in the future as well as questions you’d like to explore. And, as always, please contact us if you’d like to be a guest on a future episode.