This authored article by Karunjit Kumar Dhir - Co-Founder, SCIKEY originally published in ETHRWorld.com

We now live in a PC (post-Covid) world. Covid-19 has outgrown itself to something much bigger, impactful as well as transformative in multiple sense. Over the last few months, it has not only exposed this world to the rally of infections and casualties, but also exposed massive inefficiencies, broken systems, unprepared institutions, obsolete thought processes and inhibitions that many of the businesses and individuals were living with all this while. It has been an awakening that has reset the world order and the future of work with a large part of it going virtual and remote.

Covid has been one of the single biggest factors that have forced the accelerated digital adoption and transformation for most of the businesses around the world. They have been reminded in a big way that it is only the people who are their biggest assets and therefore they certainly cannot afford to go wrong with their practices and policies around their human capital, right from hiring the right talent to managing the talent in terms of engagement, retention, nurturing, development growth. A perfect trigger to get the ‘human’ back in ‘human resources’.

With people at the centre of every business, process and change, Covid on one side made a lot of people, processes as well as hard skills redundant, on the other side it also made us realise the strength of human psychology as well as the importance of the relevant soft skills. It made us all appreciate the value of innate adaptability, resilience, learning agility to unlearn relearn, fixed versus growth mindset and a lot more; and hence, forcing organisations to have a relook at how they hire the right people by tapping into the right mindset instead of just going by the usual “get the skill-set” approach.

While some of the leading organisations did utilise various assessment techniques, application of human psychology, as a part of their hiring practices, those were not scalable enough. The right understanding and application of human psychology empowers us to appreciate a human being (or a job applicant) beyond the paper resume and hard skills. We need advanced technology like AI to enable the rapid application and implementation of human psychology based hiring tools at scale. And therefore, came in the role of human psychology as well as technology. For e.g. instead of only looking at an individual’s mindset and psychometric data came in the need for comparing and matching that data with the job personality, the team mindset data as well as the organisation’s culture data with the use of AI technology before any hiring decisions are made.

This Covid disruption has also accelerated the need for the right combination of human psychology and AI to make our hiring systems more efficient. Systems that can capture a lot of data around human behaviour and do the required data crunching with speed at scale to churn a lot of predictive insights not only about how your organisation’s current employee mindset data is structured but also of the candidates applying for a job in your organisation, so as to compare and analyse how an applicant’s addition will affect your organisation.

What we need now is a very scalable and cost-efficient way to discover the key inherent personality traits of the job applicants and how we can harness that data to arrive at the right hiring decisions by leveraging AI to power algorithms and mathematical models that can process large amount of data sets at high speed.

Other applications of AI leveraging human psychology for hiring also include AI powered assistants enabling the initial screening interviews, scenario-based gamified assessments, role plays and so on. Right from the ability to operate in multiple languages to understanding of the natural language, helping overcome interviewer biases, enabling data-driven insights and decisions with the ability of processing unstructured data to uncover hidden insights and patterns are some other good use cases. AI can also power the virtual interviews with facial recognition expression analysis of natural emotions during that virtual interview and also enabling an engaging candidate experience through chatbots and real-time engagement. It helps in making the hiring engine work 24x7, as well as optimising the diversity and candidate rediscovery utilising the past candidate data in various systems to helping you optimise the hiring costs. These are some of the powerful use-cases for the right combination of psychology and AI for hiring in the post-Covid world.

As we move forward in this post-Covid era, it will be fascinating to see how organisations leverage the power of advanced technology like AI to benefit from human psychology to hire the right people to build great teams that will help them recover from the Covid induced crises and also prepare them better to face and overcome any such crises with the collective strength or its people mindset (psyche).

About SCIKEY:

SCIKEY, is a Digital platform for Jobs, Work & Talent Solutions. Our vision is to create jobs & work opportunities for billion minds. Our mission is to help employers worldwide get access to quality talent and talent solutions in a click.

'SCIKEY Assured,' a premium managed services offering by SCIKEY, delivers the best outcomes to enterprise customers globally for talent solutions getting delivered offshore, remotely, or on-premise. We are super-proud to be working with some of the world's most iconic Fortune1000 brands.