Velocity Resource Group & Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence appears to be everywhere these days. Much of the information out there, however, isn’t always the most accurate. For companies looking to make AI a part of their processes, it’s important to have a firm handle on what AI is and what AI can realistically do for their business. It’s not a small investment, after all.

Brett Zingler, vice president at Velocity Resource Group, has immersed himself in articles, videos, and product information about AI before making any decisions on the particular kinds of AI that make sense for VRG.

Teaching & Learning  

Brett and the VRG team are assessing available AI and deciding whether it’s best to build or buy their AI: “I have a feeling it’ll be a mix of the two and we’ll have to invest time into teaching the machine.”

The teaching and learning component of AI entails human beings teaching the machine what to do and when to do it. Machines must have the capacity to learn and demonstrate that they learn from and adapt to human patterns and data. Brett believes  there is misunderstanding regarding these important components of AI: “Much of the current AI out there is not exactly the machine learning, disruptive technology that many claim it to be. There are companies preying on consumers’ lack of knowledge about what AI really does.”

While machine learning is not entirely new, its complexity and speed are. For Brett and the VRG team, bringing AI on board does not make sense if its capabilities won’t offer much more than replacing mundane tasks. The real measure of whether AI is a worthwhile investment depends on how much it can truly optimize the VRG process at a large scale beyond their own capabilities.

Disruptive Technology  

In order to push past myth and get facts, Brett and his team have questions and criteria guiding their quest for the best AI for VRG. They ask potential AI providers to articulate (a) just where the AI is in their product and (b) exactly what the learning component of their AI entails. Brett explained, “There’s a difference between automating something and having something learn. Just automating something is not technically disruptive. AI is dependent on the user feeding it variables so that it can further develop.”

In an industry like recruiting, having AI with the ability to learn what candidates say about their candidate experience on a social networking site such as LinkedIn might prove helpful. That kind of machine learning would involve a linguistic rule creation. The ability for a company like VRG to capture large sets of this data, analyze it, and utilize it for making important decisions about potential modifications to the talent acquisition process, and the candidate experience more specifically, would not only improve the cost effectiveness but the quality and success of recruiting programs. 

High-Touch Engagement

AI holds great potential in the talent acquisition process, but Brett has no concerns about it fully replacing the human aspect of recruiting. VRG is grounded by its belief in high-touch candidate screening. While VRG is actively pursuing AI solutions that make sense for the organization, they remain focused on capitalizing on the power of human interaction between recruiters and candidates.  Brett shared, “AI will never be able to tell you if you can get in the trenches and be shoulder to shoulder with someone. Our team is able to better analyze whether or not a client will work well, for the long term, with a candidate.”

Brett believes AI might help VRG scale down the number of candidates they call on because they can teach it to capture a specific number of the best attributes of the last X number of hires: “If we can scale back the volume of resumes we visually screen because we taught AI to figure out what profiles or resumes we need to really focus on, that’s a great thing.” The VRG team wants AI to be complementary to their existing operations. If AI can help them narrow down potential candidates’ profiles to exact locations, and populate contact information so that recruiters have all of that information at their fingertips, it makes sense.

Velocity’s methodical approach to making AI a part of their operations is a logical one.  AI has the potential to help VRG be even more effective and efficient throughout the talent acquisition process. The data AI can provide and analyze can help decision makers refine searches. VRG will adopt AI that seamlessly works with real people – their team, candidates, and clients. There is nothing artificial about the high touch experiences VRG will continue providing.

Categorized in: Work

This post was written by Elevate, Inc.