You have a telephone interview for your dream job, and you're feeling nervous. You make yourself a cup of tea as you wait for the phone to ring, and you count to three before picking up. Now imagine that your interviewer is a robot named Vera.
Russian startup Stafory co-founder Alexei Kostarev says Robot Vera, which his company developed, is driven by artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms.
"It's machine learning," Kostarev said, as he explained that his firm programmed Vera using 1.4 million interviews, as well as Wikipedia and 160,000 books.
When Vera first started conducting phone interviews, she followed a script, but that has since changed.
"Vera understands the kind of answers candidates give," Moscow-based Kostarev told AFP by phone.
And while robot recruiters will appeal to companies trying to keep costs down, there may also be another, more subtle advantage.
"When (candidates) give feedback on a job offer for example, they (say) more honest things they would not tell ... a human," Kostarev said.
Stafory says Robot Vera currently has 200 clients, major companies which then take the selected job candidates through conventional interviews and final selection.
DANGER OF BIAS More broadly, human resources specialists are looking to AI solutions to speed up recruitment processes as a whole. US company ZipRecruiter is touting a real-time selection service, with each job offer posted immediately on as many as 100 websites.
In the blink of an eye, its algorithm then trawls through the 10 million jobseekers who have registered with ZipRecruiter to see which best suit the job description.
The prospective employer then gets a shortlist of the top candidates, making recruitment a far less time-consuming exercise.
Algorithms get better and better over time at detecting what kind of profile companies are looking for, as human resources staff give a virtual thumbs up to their preferred candidates.
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