No wrong answers: assessing soft skills with AI

The use of AI in recruitment can help businesses identify candidates with the requisite soft skills and personality traits that align with the organizational culture.

Recruitment is all about assessing people. While it may be easy to assess people on objective scales like height, weight, and scores on written technical tests, non-tangible elements like personality traits elude objective judgment. That’s because there is no absolute scale that exists to clearly quantify personality traits. The closest that any scale has come to “measuring” someone’s personality is the Big-5 test, which is the current gold standard for personality assessments. However, this test is based on self-reported answers, which allows people to manipulate the results by giving a predetermined set of answers to the test’s questionnaire. Does that mean it is impossible to measure a candidate’s fit to your organizational culture? The answer to that is no—if you use AI in recruitment.

Machine learning to assess soft skills and cultural fit

When it comes to assessing people for cultural fit or professional attitude, a list of close-ended questions with predetermined “right” and “wrong” answers may not be effective enough. That’s because humans are much more complex than that. And what you think makes someone perfect for a job or for your organization may not be very obvious. This is where you can use AI in recruitment processes.

AI has proven its exceptional pattern recognition capabilities through various applications. For instance, AI systems have proven to be capable of predicting the survival rates of heart disease patients with greater accuracy than human clinicians. So, it is not too far-fetched to think that, given enough data, AI can track non-obvious patterns in data to assess how long an individual is likely to ‘survive’ at an organization.

Machine learning algorithms can be trained with videos and other supporting data pertaining to the ideal employees working at an organization. In these videos, you can ask your employee to perform a task such as answering a few personality-related questions on camera. By using this data, you can build a model of the perfect employee for your organization or for a specific role. Then you can use the same model as a reference to assess new candidates by asking them to answer the same questions. The video of these candidates can be fed to the same algorithm, and their likeness to your existing top performers can be predicted to a reasonably accurate degree.

Video analysis for personality assessment

AI-driven video analysis tools have been proven to be capable of assessing certain personality traits of candidates like openness, extraversion, and agreeableness. In fact, more and more refined versions of such tools have continued to emerge in recent years. These tools are able to extract data pertaining to the subjects’ voice, facial muscle movements, and eye movements to assess their key personality traits with increasing accuracy.

While it is too soon for organizations to completely rely on AI in recruitment, it is fair to say that the technology has made life simpler for organizations. With the continued adoption of and development of the technology, the use of AI in recruitment is sure to become commonplace in the near future.