How Technology Can Help Break Down Barriers To Career Opportunities

AI can help talent acquisition teams reimagine, humanize, and democratize talent lifecycle

Growing up in rural India with parents, who worked in social entrepreneurship and women’s empowerment, I was already exposed to inequalities in society by the time I started at university. I was witness to stark gender and socioeconomic divides, and this shaped the way that I saw access to opportunity.

Once I embarked on my journey through university education, I encountered further divides and obstacles for certain groups, especially the rural/urban divide and what this meant for people’s career fulfillment. When I moved to the US with Talview, I was even more exposed to ethnic and geographical inequality, all of which strongly influenced how I thought about the world.

Barriers to education and career opportunities come in many forms, and it’s vital that we think hard about how to address them so we can provide a level playing field for everyone to build the best career for themselves.

The switch to the remote world we now find ourselves in presents a huge opportunity to break down these barriers and increase opportunities for everyone, no matter their age, ethnicity, gender, able-bodiedness, or geographic location. In fact, 78% of CEOs surveyed by PwC agree that remote collaboration is here to stay for the long term, so it’s vital to embrace this trend in a way that benefits everyone.

In comes technology. With the help of innovative AI-driven technologies, talent acquisition and management teams can reimagine, humanize, and democratize the talent lifecycle, breaking down barriers that had previously stood in the way of career success.

We need to revolutionize how we discover talent, with the help of technology. Much of the existing talent discovery measures are completed manually. That means recruiters are spending a considerable chunk of their time completing tasks like sifting through resumes, answering candidate questions, and scheduling interviews—activities that can be automated with the help of AI.

AI-powered chatbots can help manage many of the initial interactions that take place at the top of the hiring funnel. These conversations can happen in parallel, and provide immediate answers, round the clock.

Meanwhile, AI-powered recommendation engines can match resumes with roles based on successful past hires, allowing for the expansion of the talent pool and improving access for those who might slip through the cracks due to recruiter bandwidth. In addition, automated scheduling tools can help recruiters avoid the back and forth over email to schedule an interview or talent interaction.

All of these help recruiters become more efficient and productive, allowing them to focus on more strategic activities. Not to mention, a smooth start to the hiring process makes candidates more confident in the potential employer and increases the chance of them staying in the funnel. Actually, 79% of respondents to Talview’s Remote Hiring Trends for 2021 report said that remote hiring could help improve diversity in their organization, and 40% said their candidate experience improved when they adopted virtual recruiting.

For too long, candidate experience has been impersonal and inaccessible. HR leaders should look at ways they can ensure their hiring funnel is candidate-centered and end-to-end. When candidates are dealing with digital solutions as part of the recruitment process, HR teams need to build accessibility into every step of the process.

This can start with something as simple as making the digital recruitment platform available on every device. Many candidates may not have access to a computer, and so have to use the platform on a smartphone, or vice versa. Meeting candidates where they are and providing a seamless experience is paramount. This can also involve multi-language support—companies are working in a global ecosystem with applicants from many different backgrounds, so the ability to support multiple languages is crucial.

Accessible digital solutions also mean taking into account the one billion people on this planet that have some form of disability. Ensuring that every single aspect of the platform is compliant with WCAG guidelines should be a minimum for every organization. Accessibility is often something impossible to ensure when the process takes place offline and candidates are forced to travel to physical locations and fill out paper forms.

Lastly, part of humanizing the hiring process is making sure that candidate data is stored securely and that the organization respects the individual’s right to privacy. If a candidate feels they cannot trust a digital platform with their personal information, they simply won’t use it.

Humans are inherently biased in everything we do. And when it comes to marginalized groups, the barriers of bias are even higher. We should employ responsible and ethical uses of AI to help us reduce the bias in hiring and ensure a fair judgement for all.

Advanced interview intelligence platforms will soon be available for recruiters to leverage to continuously boost their performance as interviewers. Such platforms can provide real-time, objective insights into interviewer performance and how they can improve, and how objective their questions are. They can also provide data on things like time spent on each interview topic, the time the interviewer spent talking vs. the candidate, or whether or not inappropriate questions were asked. This drives the interviewer to consistently reduce bias and ask objective questions.

Not only does this help each candidate get a fair judgement, it’s also good for keeping top players in the funnel: 87% of candidates in a Deloitte report say that a positive interview experience can change their mind about an employer they had previously doubted.

There are also behavioral insights tools that give recruiters objective insights into the behavioral fit of the candidate to the organization. It’s notoriously difficult to establish the appropriate soft skills, learnability, and personality traits for a role during the hiring process. Still, AI can help give interviewers a fair take on a candidate's behavioral fit. Unlike traditional psychometric assessments, which are usually completed through questionnaires, a behavioral insights tool is backed by video interviews and augments the decision-making of the human by highlighting where their judgment may be biased.

Remote hiring is here to stay, so why not use it as a way to break down barriers that had previously stopped so many from reaching their career goals? With the help of up-and-coming AI technologies that are becoming increasingly available to HR teams across the globe, we can offer a level playing field to everyone, no matter who they are or where they come from.