Would you trust your job search to a bot?
As artificial intelligence creeps into every aspect of the hiring process – from candidate screenings to video interviews – a new AI agent released by the startup Jobright.ai is aiming to make endless scrolling on job sites a thing of the past.
The bot is part of a growing supply of AI-powered job search tools, tapping into applicants' frustrations with protracted job searches and a stagnant labour market.
Here's how it works: Once a user uploads a resume, informs the bot of the kinds of jobs they are looking for and answers some basic questions, the bot starts compiling job postings which match the applicant's criteria and will send up to 50 listings each week. Along with showing the user the responsibilities and requirements of the roles, Jobright.ai aggregates relevant information for each listing, with details on the company's culture, history, funding and employee satisfaction levels.
If the user approves any of its suggestions, the bot can complete an application, including short-answer prompts, in less than a minute.
Over time, the AI agent will become more attuned to a user's preferences as the person pursues or skips past different job opportunities, said Jobright.ai co-founder and chief executive officer Eric Cheng.
It's "similar to how you work with Tinder,' he said.
To assess whether an applicant is a good fit for a given job listing, Jobright.ai translates the applicant's skills and experience into a "qualification score', a percentage which appears in a ring of mint green next to each job posting. The bot has to determine that a user is at least 60% qualified for a job, in order for it to recommend the listing.
Of course, what a qualified applicant looks like can vary across industries. In tech spaces, coding-language proficiency and machine-learning skills are prized. In other sectors, strong interpersonal skills might be weighted most heavily, but they're also notoriously difficult to measure. Titles and other markers of experience also can vary by industry and from company to company. A vice president at a large bank, for example, might have a very different experience profile from a vice president at a startup.
"Sometimes the AI doesn't know that kind of difference,' said Cheng, who enlisted career coaches and recruiters to help the company develop its qualification-scoring system. "We need to fine tune the AI models with the actual input from the expert."
Jobright.ai, which is currently geared more toward tech and engineering roles, is financed in part by the venture-capital arm of Recruit Holdings Co, the Japanese company that owns the jobs board Indeed and the employee-reviews site Glassdoor. On an earnings call in May, the parent company previewed a new Indeed "career scout,' which, like Jobright.ai, will customise resumes and fill out job seekers' applications for them. It hasn't yet been released.
Rival LinkedIn, which introduced AI resume feedback and cover letter drafts for paying subscribers last June, rolled out a feature earlier this year that allows users to tell an AI search tool about the jobs they want, as opposed to relying on strategic keyword searches.
By making better matches between prospective candidates and employers, Cheng said, AI can address the concerns not only of job seekers but of hiring managers, who are often inundated with resumes, making it difficult and time-consuming to separate serious contenders from unqualified applicants. Cheng said Jobright.ai is currently beta-testing a recruiter-focused interface and piloting it with about 30 employers, mostly small to medium-size startups. Cheng said most of the jobs listed by employers directly on Jobright.ai's site were filled within 30 days.
"Instead of giving them 500 applicants, most of them aren't qualified, we only probably recommend maybe 20 to 30 candidates, similar to like how a headhunter works," Cheng said. – Bloomberg
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