The Great Reshuffle of the job market is about matching talent with opportunity in an organic way that level sets profitability and people sustainability. In this competitive labor environment, workers are empowered with the agency to own their success and call the shots.
To entice talent, businesses are upgrading the quality of experience they provide both to their employees for internal mobility and to external job candidates. Innovations in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are enabling businesses to deliver this new level of experience, which is transforming internal mobility and talent attraction.
Stacy Chapman, chief data strategist, SAP SuccessFactors, and former CEO and founder of SwoopTalent, a leader in talent data intelligence that was recently acquired by SAP, takes a clear-eyed view of the power of AI to sort hiring and employment decisions. She says, “The potential for AI to play a part in improving the human experience is really high, but there is always a decision point in, as a society, do we head to utopia, or do we head to dystopia? I don’t know that that’s played itself out yet.”
SAP Acquires SwoopTalent Intellectual Property to Boost Talent Data Intelligence
What concerns Chapman and others are the manifold possibilities for AI to be applied poorly or superficially as a quick fix for efficiency woes but with little regard for the rights of the individual. Alarms have sounded from organizations that track bias and systemic discrimination. In October, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) launched an initiative aimed at ensuring algorithmic fairness for the benefit of applicants, employees, employers, and technology vendors, citing concerns that “these new technologies do not become a high-tech pathway to discrimination.”
On average, 40% of enterprise companies are using some AI matching capabilities to support their talent acquisition and sourcing effort, according to Aptitude Research, a human capital management (HCM) research and advisory firm. “When done right, AI matching improves the candidate experience, reduces bias in hiring, and improves the quality of applicants,” says Madeline Laurano, founder, Aptitude Research, in a recent report. “Companies must take a critical look at the providers they are evaluating, the algorithms that they have in place, and the impact it has on their fair and equitable hiring practices.”
Employment decisions are too important to “let the machine take care of it.” Employers that are committed to fairness and transparency require a trusted technology partner that adheres to standards for ethical AI and has access to the troves of quality data needed to train AI models responsibly. “When you talk about AI, there’s this extraordinary amount of functional understanding that goes into what’s right, not just what’s accurate,” says Chapman. “This is what we deliver at SAP SuccessFactors. We bring so much rich domain expertise and such profound respect for ethics and privacy.”
Opening Opportunity for Internal Mobility
With 20 years of leadership in HCM, SAP SuccessFactors created a new cloud-based technology category for human experience management (HXM) with the goal to unleash the power of human potential in the workplace. Research shows that empowering employees leads to improved engagement, which has a direct impact on business profitability. A rich, personalized employee experience that matches talent with internal opportunity is a game changer for businesses to achieve agility and profitability while retaining their current workforce.
SAP SuccessFactors Opportunity Marketplace, introduced in 2021, opens a new dimension in the employee experience by empowering employees to seek new opportunities to grow and invest in themselves within their organizations. Employees will be able to manage their own unique talent profiles, dynamically powered by AI and machine learning, to unlock data-driven opportunities for internal mobility. Talent profiles will be created from data curated by the employee, which can include personal interests, archetypes, aspirations, work style, wellness, reading habits, and similar development tracks of coworkers.
“SAP SuccessFactors Opportunity Marketplace looks really broadly and deeply at the whole self. It has the ability to recommend things far beyond what your previous professional experience might have been,” says Chapman. “There is quite a bit of potential to open up new career paths.”
Winning Over Talent with Candidate Experience
Candidate experience has emerged as a leading metric for corporate recruiting success. With the volume of jobs left open in the Great Reshuffle, recruiters are too overwhelmed to manage all interactions across multiple touchpoints in the hiring process. They are looking to AI to provide a new level of efficiency and personalization that wins over talent with an amazing candidate experience.
Recruiters succeed when they use AI to supplement a holistic talent strategy while applying their own judgement and experience to evaluate candidates. “I would advise them to not 100% rely on the AI as a replacement for their own evaluation,” says Mengtian Jin, data scientist at Brilliant Hire by SAP, where she works with recruiting teams to deploy AI for optimal effectiveness and compliance. “Always remember: AI is not to replace you, but to help you to improve your professional efficiency for your work.”
Brilliant Hire by SAP, a fast-growing startup led by a team of SAP employees, builds AI-powered solutions that can enable companies to shine as employers of choice by elevating the candidate experience and streamlining the hiring process. Available on SAP Store for integration into SAP SuccessFactors solutions, Brilliant Hire’s algorithm matches people with job openings based on their skills, not rigid keywords, which helps to attract diverse and qualified candidates by removing unconscious bias. Recruiting teams provide their input during model training to enhance accuracy on a per-customer basis. The startup recently launched an applicant scoring feature to enable recruiters to instantly uncover the most qualified candidates for a job requisition.
A new member of Brilliant Hire’s Board of Advisors, Chapman is impressed with the startup’s careful approach to AI. She says, “Brilliant Hire is not only cleverly thinking about the problem and using the right technologies, but it’s also thoughtfully and kindly thinking about it, so the use of AI becomes very human-oriented and ethical.”
This article originally appeared on SAP BrandVoice on Forbes.
