Automating the hiring process and TA process can help a business in several ways. Hiring in large numbers as the business scales and keeping the hiring costs controlled can be difficult when done manually. But the solution to this problem lies in modern-day technology.CSS Corp cracked this problem and managed to bring down the cost of hiring by leveraging automation and AI while hiring in huge numbers.
“We have doubled our headcount in the past, which means that the number of people we were looking at or the number of resumes we were scanning were even more. So, the question was how do I hire these many people with a limited number of people in my TA teams, without exploding the cost of hiring,” Rahul Joshi, CTO, CSS Corp, said.
The company wanted to solve this problem not just by leveraging AI but by process optimization.
“When you hire a person within an organization, you scan between 80-100 resumes, select a few and present them to the hiring team. For the final one, you have multiple rounds of interviews. And someone in the TA team is doing these things manually. If we had to hire and double our headcount manually, it would not have been possible,” he explained.
CSS Corp was not just looking at traditional recruiting but also needed to look at social media and other places from where it could get good candidates. Solving this problem required the company to automate its system and make them learn with time.
“Let’s say A is a potential recruit of CSS Corp. So A will see an ad on his LinkedIn page. On clicking on it, he will see an automated test questionnaire. Based on A’s responses in the questionnaire, we will identify if he is the right fit or not. If he clears that automated test, he will be notified to go and attend the next round of interviews.” he said
“If A is being hired for a voice process, he will have to go through a voice test. The system has been automated to say if A will qualify for B2 in English and so forth. Similar benchmarking has been done with automation and AI. And the final interview will be done face to face,” he added.
Since the system can be played to and some tricks can be used to qualify the initial automated rounds, the company has set up another mechanism to avoid that.
“We do the automated tests and score matching because we know the system can be played to. You might say that you are a full-stack developer but in the test, you might have scored 10 on 100. So, the system knows now that you can not be matched to the profile. We have these kinds of checks and balances that are kept in mind when we design the systems so we don’t have biases,” he explained.
The majority of hiring in CSS Corp happens through resume scanning which flows in the system through various sources. To go through those resumes, the company has developed a cognitive search integrated with the internal system that identifies the right candidate. CSS Corp calls this system TAMS (Talent Acquisition Management System).
TAMS identifies the right resumes which flow into the systems and matches them to the resource requirements and then presents the top 10 resumes that the team can look at and call for interviews. This is being done with Microsoft Cognitive search and integration with other backend systems.
“The cost of hiring post covid has become half compared to pre-covid. I don’t need as many people to scan and go through resumes. Based on the information provided, and the intelligent learning of the system, the efficiency has increased so we have the ability to scale this up over the period of time,” he concluded.
