You have probably heard of artificial intelligence before, which has been around in the past few years. It’s become one of the most important buzz words with different spin-offs, particularly cognitive intelligence. However, there have been many negative associations with cognitive intelligence that results in companies shying away from dubbing themselves as AI pioneers.
This article will talk about what artificial intelligence and cognitive intelligence are and how they can help with your organization’s recruiting processes.
What is Cognitive Intelligence?
Before defining cognitive intelligence, we must first define artificial intelligence.
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, artificial intelligence (AI) refers to:
“The ability of a digital computer or computer-controlled robots to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings. The term is frequently applied to the project of developing systems endowed with the intellectual processes characteristic of humans, such as the ability to reason, discover meaning, generalize, or learn from past experience.”
The issue is the use of the term “artificial,” giving it the connotation that it lacks authenticity, sounds robot-like, and is unnatural. However, its goal is the opposite!
To put it simply, AI is a computer solving complex problems humans would. AI is important in economic sectors and industries, like health, life sciences, information technologies, digital transformation, data analysis, security, and even the consumer sector!
Now, what is cognitive intelligence?
This is a crucial part of AI, which encompasses tools and technologies allowing our apps, bots, and websites to hear, see, speak, interpret, and understand user needs naturally. They are applications from AI allowing machines to learn user language, so users won’t need to learn the machine’s language.
The Challenges of AI in Recruitment
Even when intelligent algorithms have been in use for years, there’s a lack of understanding, contributing to the lack of accountability and transparency.
As a result, algorithms would also show some level of bias even when the goal is to eliminate it. Fortunately, big companies like Facebook are testing new tools that reduce bias through machine-learning algorithms.
But there is still much room to grow here because, unlike us humans who can learn from trial and error and course correct, machines would make decisions based on the data they receive, regardless of how faulty it is. Only when we humans step in to fix such biases can they be minimized. While totally eliminating bias is almost impossible, such efforts are worth making for further advancement of technology.
Cognitive Intelligence Services
So much technology is present in our daily lives, with cognitive intelligence aiming to imitate human processes. It would analyze large amounts of data created by connected systems, offering tools with diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive capabilities that can observe, learn, and offer insights.
Cognitive intelligence is orientated with human and contextual interaction, so AI’s challenge is to design technology for people to interact with it naturally. That would involve developing apps with human behaviors, like
- Listening and speaking, with being able to turn text to audio and vice versa
- Natural Language Processing (NLP), for the computer to understand contextual and grammatical connections.
- Understanding feelings and emotions are also known as sentiment analysis. Cognitive intelligence aims to create empathetic systems that can understand a person’s emotional state, making decisions based on that.
- Image recognition meaning to find and identifying objects in image or video sequences. While it’s simple to do for humans, it’s challenging for machines!
About Cognitive Recruiting
Cognitive intelligence is helpful in many sectors, including HR industries, particularly for recruiters and talent acquisition teams. These departments are taking advantage of intelligent automation to improve their sourcing, recruiting, and onboarding processes.
But what is cognitive recruiting?
Simply put, it’s the deployment of cognitive intelligence automation throughout the recruiting process. This can include (but isn’t limited to) the following:
- Robotic process automation
- Chatbots
- Virtual agents
- Artificial intelligence
These are some of the automated tools that have the ability to adapt to various situations and may be implemented concurrently or individually. These will help with data gathering, sourcing, screening, and making decisions in the recruiting process. That said, not every process is conducive to cognitive intelligence, and when you implement their capabilities, you must align them with the organization’s goals.
The Benefits of Cognitive Recruiting
There are numerous benefits cognitive recruiting has to offer, such as reducing the time to fill, improving the best-fit candidate identification, and increasing the overall process efficiency. Besides that, here are the other benefits cognitive recruiting offers:
Improve the recruiting experience for both parties
After candidates upload a resume, the cognitive recruiting process will screen data and post questions via chatbot. This additional data gathering helps recruiters make better decisions during the progress.
Chatbots can ask progressive questions. If a candidate answers unfavorably, the chatbot may end the application process as needed. Organizations can also use chatbots and texting mechanisms to follow up with candidates after their interviews. It can include touchpoints, so candidates remain engaged during the decision-making process or invite candidates to schedule their interviews.
Analyze data
Cognitive intelligence can compare organization-specific talent management and candidate data, determining the probability of success for individual candidates.
For instance, cognitive recruiting processes would use high-potential employee profiles when comparing candidates’ applications and interviews. Those with similar education and skills would be more likely to turn into high-potential hires, thus being ranked higher during the process.
Helps with strategic sourcing
To ensure that the business-critical jobs aren’t vacant for long periods, cognitive processes may proactively interact and engage with candidates regularly to ensure they don’t become disengaged and uninterested.
Furthermore, cognitive intelligence will scan vital websites for talents and candidates who have favorable capabilities and skills, inviting them to apply when new open positions are listed.
Recruiters have more time for candidate relationships
When you remove transactional and data entry tasks, recruitment teams can focus more on building and maintaining candidate relationships. You can leave AI and cognitive intelligence to schedule interviews and perform other repetitive tasks! That way, you can concentrate on seeing whether a candidate is best suited for your organization’s culture.
Things to Consider for Cognitive Intelligence
Note that investing in cognitive intelligence is costly and time-consuming. While you can reap many benefits, there are various things to consider before determining if cognitive intelligence is a suitable fit for the organization.
Do you have an adequate candidate and hiring data?
For cognitive intelligence and its tools to make and facilitate proper decisions, you must have a significant amount of data to form such a basis of choices.
How much data is required?
According to machine learning specialist Jason Brownlee, the amount of data required will depend on the complexities of your problem and chosen algorithm. Ideally, you’ll probably need hundreds of thousands for the average modeling problem, which deep learning will tackle.
For instance, cognitive intelligence can assess candidates through thousands of data points from facial movements, word choice, and video interviews.
If the system is set up from previous hiring successes, small and new companies or positions won’t have enough historical data to produce accurate and meaningful results. To work your way around that, you must apply cognitive recruiting to certain positions but not every single one in your organization. We recommend discussing this with an experienced implementation partner to head towards the best path for the organization.
Will cognitive intelligence help you find the best candidates?
Just like traditional recruiting, cognitive intelligence is only as good as the processes and platform you’ll build from it. Some candidates might be passed over since they didn’t meet a qualification, but they might have performed the job excellently. Or some candidates may have excellent qualifications but would struggle in the position.
Cognitive intelligence can help adjust the current qualifications to suit the candidate pool better, maintaining more positive outcomes. That said, there are screening methods that you must conduct to find and place the best candidates for the open position.
Will this reduce any pain points while supporting the organization’s goals?
This is crucial to any decisions when implementing technology. Consider and ask yourself if cognitive intelligence helps in addressing your organization’s pain points, such as:
- Longer recruiting lead times
- Inefficient candidate selection process
- Scarce recruiting resources
- Among other factors
You can design cognitive recruiting to optimize and improve processes connected with such pain points if it can. Furthermore, you should also identify if cognitive intelligence will help achieve the organization’s goals, like hiring the right people, sourcing passive candidates, and more.
How do you measure the results?
When you establish metrics to measure before implementing cognitive intelligence in your recruiting process, you can easily track your initiative’s success in the organization. Here are some of the sample metrics to measure:
- Response rate
- Time to fill
- Offer-acceptance rate
Do you need to start from scratch or use cognitive intelligence in your current system?
Implementing a new end-to-end cognitive intelligence process and tool may be better than forcing automated processes in existing systems. When you build data feedback look into a process from the start, you’ll find that it’s easier to find patterns. Furthermore, the endure experience will likely be smothered for end users.
Will cognitive intelligence align with any legal requirements?
In the end, organizations will still be responsible for following employment laws. Furthermore, they will be liable for any decisions made due to utilizing cognitive intelligence. Legal and labor relations representatives must be consulted on parameters built into cognitive intelligence, so companies remain complaint.
Molding cognitive intelligence to talent acquisition strategies
Here are the five basic steps for cognitive intelligence success in recruiting processes and talent acquisition:
- Identify your organization’s objectives
- Integrate technology in your current system and strategy
- Proceed with caution, integrating cognitive intelligence piece by piece
- Build an algorithm and test for any bias
- Share the benefits as you mitigate risks through tracking metrics
The Future of Cognitive Intelligence
While cognitive intelligence isn’t expected to reach the goals of artificial general intelligence, cognitive intelligence will become more involved in business and technology. It will do so through shared cognitive competencies and navigated shared values crucial in the relationship between machines and humans.
When AI can begin making reliable decisions even during unforeseen situations and environments, people will trust it more with higher autonomy, becoming vital in autonomous transportation, robotics, and control points of financial, industrial, and logistic systems.
Furthermore, we can expect a higher level of human-machine collaboration as cognitive intelligence will represent active and persistent agents communicating and collaborating with humans, serving and learning from them to perform better.
Wrapping It Up
We hope that this article on cognitive intelligence, its benefits, and considerations informed you more of whether or not it’s worth investing in your organization’s recruitment processes. While cognitive intelligence offers numerous benefits, you must remember that you’re the decision-maker. These tools aid in the processes, but you have control over how to build the process and the final approval of who you’ll hire.
If you want to upgrade the way you source and hire talents, contact us here at Hirenest. We can provide everything you need to make the best decisions for your hiring needs and get top candidates.
