An AI Assistant For Hiring? IBM India’s Clients To Soon Get One

IBM India has a new AI-based solution which will help and simplify challenges faced by human resource (HR) departments in talent acquisition. The AI device is the Watson Candidate Assist (WCA), reports The Hindu Business Line. The WCA was initialised with a proof of concept (PoC) in India. The Proof Of Concept started as an idea of using AI to help candidates who are interested in a job at IBM to find the best fit.

“We receive over 7,000 job applications a day globally at IBM. We have a huge amount of recruitment and candidate interest in IBM; so the challenge we face is, how do we help candidates find the right opportunity when they are interested in IBM but have not yet applied for a job. What started as a PoC, is now one of our AI-based HR solutions,” Vice President, Talent at IBM Joanna Daly said.

The software was initially tested within the company in an experiment in which more than 15,000 candidates participated. The candidates had to interact with a Cognitive Assistant using Artificial Intelligence. It would then match their skills to the job openings at IBM. After piloting WCA internally in August, the solution went live within the company last month. The beginning of 2019 will see the solutions offered to IBM India clients as a part of its Human Capital Management offering, an executive said.

The WCA is said to be very engaging, and more than 90 per cent found the matches that it recommended valuable and relevant. WCA not only tells candidates the degree of match for a particular role and also indicates if the skills match any other role for which they may not have applied. Furthermore, it speeds up hiring time by over 30 per cent.