Human Resources rely mainly on human qualities and interaction, especially in recruitment. New technologies emerging every day bring continuous changes to the world of work and make it data-intense. Processing and assessing this data effectively is paramount for all sectors of work, and for recruitment processes too. However, how can something lacking all nuances of the human psyche be applied to something so human-specific? In this case, Natural Language Processing (NLP), an artificial intelligence (AI) subfield, becomes prominent.
What is Natural Language Processing?
Natural Language Processing is a process giving a computer the ability to understand human language in its spoken or written form. This component of artificial intelligence can listen or read human interactions, identifying the wording and understanding the meaning of what is said. Daily uses of NLP action include spell checks, autocompletion or asking Alexa, Siri or Google Assistant questions. Programming languages are most strict; and though human languages have formally defined a grammar, they evolve. Dialects, slang and abbreviations fall out of that grammar, but in NLP’s expertise field. In recruitment, this tool can be used to streamline the recruiting process, reduce bias, improve candidate experience and much more.
NLP in Recruitment
Recruitment processes are lengthy and for the most part repetitive. A tool like NLP can be used to simplify every step of it. Indeed, starting with formulating job descriptions, the program can learn from past data and help craft descriptions, targeting the best candidates. During the recruitment process, recruiters review enormous amounts of resumes for a single job posting. Amongst this unstructured data, NLP can deliver optimal insights and matches, through a detailed and automated analysis screening candidates. For example, through a job description submitted as the search request, the system can return a selected list of the best-qualified candidates, from a database based on the language used in resumes.
Criteria for the ideal candidate like skills, education or experience can be set. The technology can then analyse and screen potential candidates. NLP can even be used to extract and handle legal documents, like contracts. It can be used to create matching algorithms that automatically recommend jobs for candidates, candidates for jobs. Natural language processing saves precious time analysing, processing and screening candidates.
NLP is not only a tool allowing easy, automated resume screening and data processing, reducing the hiring time and saving money, it can also help increase diversity amongst candidates by removing subconscious bias. However, artificial intelligence technology does remain fairly limited, given that it lacks nearly all nuances of human intelligence. Therefore, it cannot be considered infallible, and cannot be efficient without the complementarity of actual human intelligence.
NLP Tools:
- UiPath helps organizations automate business processes through a complete software platform. It is the most widely used Robotic Process Automation vendor in the world.
- Censia equips recruiters with artificial intelligence solutions that can significantly shorten the recruiting cycle. Its mission is to match ideal candidates to enterprises, as efficiently as possible.
- Mya is an AI recruiting assistant. It engages candidates at scale with meaningful conversation, streamlines sourcing, screening…
- ClearLaw AI is an AI tool handling legal content, using different technologies to make procedures like contract negotiation or review processes more efficient.
Natural Language Processing is an extremely useful AI tool and can benefit talent acquisition teams tremendously. It enables recruiters to become more strategic by spending less time on easily automated repetitive tasks and more time on proactive hiring, it can also reduce overall costs, and improve the general quality of recruitment.
