The future of hiring is about collaboration between humans and machines: Achim Preuss

Humans or bots and AI—who can hire the best candidate? Both have advantages but an optimised cooperation between humans and AI will beat any of the two alone, says Achim Preuss, chief technology officer for Aon’s Assessment Solutions.

So far, AI is typically not used to automate jobs, rather to automate tasks and augment human functions, which in turn increases productivity and performance. It is unlikely that at any time recruiters will become superfluous through AI. “However, the recruiter's job will change and become more complex and responsible because recruits will control highly complex AI-driven processes. Our future is about collaboration between humans and machines,” Preuss said in an email interview to ET. Edited excerpts:

What does the future of talent assessment look like given AI is making inroads?

The three key criteria for successful talent assessment are attractiveness for candidates, the efficiency of the entire process and validity of the hiring decisions. In all three areas, AI can generate significant advantages. The attractiveness of a selection process to candidates is mainly driven by it being short, transparent and engaging. AI helps make the selection process shorter by taking more information into account and by including passive data of candidates. AI increases the efficiency of the entire process by automation. By using natural language as main communication between candidates and the recruitment system, candidate’s engagement can be ensured over the entire process. AI-based natural language processing is already used but will increasingly dominate the measurement process and the selection workflow.

AI seems to be the holy grail of talent assessment. What are the pitfalls? What should organisations be careful about?
The thing people typically forget about artificial intelligence is that it’s exactly that — artificial. Behind the most powerful algorithms are vast, complicated datasets, which are built and labelled by a vast human workforce. These tasks in HR can be enormous and there is a tendency in organisations to believe that it just needs enough data. But the point is that the size of the available data doesn’t matter if the quality of the criterion data is flawed, because it is biased and does not have a conceptual framework that takes into account future requirements. If there is one tip: start with proper job analysis that considers future requirements and avoid to simply map on criterion data.

How is AI changing the way companies appraise their employees?
Performance appraisal is an area where AI-based people analytics in combination with passive and unstructured data can generate new levels of insight into KPIs (key performance indicator) of an organisation. Already more relevant data on an employee exists in an organisation that is not yet linked to performance. AI-based people analytics allows the overall metrics of the organisation to be tracked through the contribution of individual employees. The appraisals themselves will be on multiple measurement points, multi-view references, combined with passive data and then directly connected to follow-ups, next steps, potential analysis, development paths, and training. AI-based machine learning will link diagnostics and training closer together for everyone’s benefits.