I originally wrote about this topic on my blog http://backgroundcheck.tandemselect.com/ but wanted to share my thoughts here on HR.com. Artificial Intellegence - or more broadly - machine leaarning, will play an increasing role in HR over the next decade. It is just gaining a foothold in background checking. There is more to come!

If you are like me – you had to be impressed by watching Watson on Jeopardy. A glimpse of the future was surely provided over those three nights. I’m excited. There are so many tasks that require accessing and evaluating large amounts of data in a short period of time that computers will always perform better than human beings. It may surprise you to know that one of these areas is with criminal records checks. Yes that is right: Criminal Records Checks. There are thousands of sites and millions of records that can be searched very quickly by smart, well “trained” computer applications using artificial intelligence search techniques. The trend is catching on slowly with the more innovative background checking companies. At Tandem Select we are using a company called Fetch Technologies to assist us in our AI based screening processes. I used to work with Fetch so I was familiar with the quality and integrity of their work – and there are other vendors beginning to provide services in this area as well.

The basic concept behind the use of artificial intelligence to help search and extract criminal history records starts with mimicking what a human being would do to perform that same task. Humans log into criminal history sites, input the basic candidate information required to check for a criminal history record, view the results, identify the relevant data (this is the hard part – but as Watson showed – machines can be very good at deducing relevance) and extract it for use in the background check report. Computers can be taught to follow this same script using artificial intelligence tools. It turns out, machines are not only much faster, but also much more accurate. At Tandem Select it can take us (on average) between 2 minutes and 15 minutes to conduct this standard criminal history check, using artificial intelligence the time it takes is reduced to between 7 seconds and 40 seconds for that same data. Not bad. Bring it on dear Watson. You extract the data, and we humans will invent better, more strategic ways to use that data for employment screening purposes.