EQ, Talent Acquisition and AI

AI has become an integral part of how businesses function in recent times. The phenomenon is all set to change the way recruiters go about their fundamental tasks as well. It is beginning to provide strategic solutions to some of the key challenges when it comes to talent assessment.

In its early stages, AI had quite a dubious reputation and was feared as a ‘Black Box’ that was incapable of backing its judgment/decisions with substantiating evidence. However, it is steadily gaining a more significant level of trust in recent times as it’s now capable of mimicking human intelligence in a more logical manner - and that’s some very reassuring news!

According to a report by Tractica, AI is going to take the hiring industry by a storm by 2025 and is expected to reach $59.8 billion in the next 5 years. It’s going to perform the bulk of the tasks for hiring managers by doing the heavy lifting work of resume shortlisting, screening, and evaluations.

However, a common dilemma that the majority of recruiters face today is whether the candidate they have shortlisted has the right balance of both IQ and EQ and if they’d be qualitative collaborators and contributors to their company’s culture and values.

While most AI-driven tools for hiring perform the fundamental task of identifying and contacting candidates from a large talent pool or assessing their hard skills, what recruiters really need to do holistic, 360 degree assessment of the candidates. This has been borne out in multiple studies including the 2019 global talent trends report by Linkedin itself.

This is where ‘EQ’ or ‘Emotional Quotient’ comes in- something that will be of utmost importance in the near-AI world, and the only skill that AI will not be able to replicate. As Harvard Business Review puts it “Those that want to stay relevant in their professions will need to focus on skills and capabilities that artificial intelligence has trouble replicating — understanding, motivating, and interacting with human beings.”

How Humantic AI Predicts ‘Emotional Intelligence’

With so many variables involved in the process, AI platforms have come up with unique methods to build a robust and reliable assessment process. Humantic AI does so by creating a meta-profile of each candidate that ‘predicts’ their personality, behavior, culture fit and EQ.

Humantic AI accomplishes this goal via a pioneering concept that it calls ‘data recycling’. Under this, Humantic takes as an input all the data that TA teams would already be assessing for any given candidate — their resume, Linkedin profile or any essays, cover letters etc. that they might have written. The Humantic profile is then created by combining research in sociolinguistics, psychology, and behavioral science with AI, machine learning, and natural language processing. The Wall St. Journal has termed it a technology that will transform talent assessment in the next decade and Harvard Business Review has mentioned that this approach can give accuracy that is even higher than that of the traditional methods.

Along with providing DISC and Big Five personality assessment, Humantic AI also assesses the candidate for other job-relevant characteristics such as teamwork skills, needs for autonomy, attitude and outlook, learning ability, and orientation.

The top recruiters today are using EQ not only for assessment but even during candidate reach-out, ensuring that they craft a superior, personalized candidate experience from Day 0 (The video at the end of this post explains more about the same).

In the words of Humantic AI cofounder and CEO Amarpreet Kalkat, “Our analysis suggests that Humantic can provide a 20–30% improvement in recruiter productivity while improving quality of hire and lowering the overall time to hire. But most important perhaps is the fact that it opens up the opportunities for a diverse set of people, benefiting minorities and other groups and making it a more even playground for them.”

If you would like to learn more about how you could use Humantic AI to make your recruitment more emotionally intelligent, check out this short how-to guide by Mike “Batman” Cohen.