When you talk about the future of any aspect of daily life, you are actually talking tech. Because we are moving towards everything digital, machine learning will have a major role. Let’s talk about what machine learning is, how it will impact future recruitment processes and why it is important to get up to date.

Q1: What is machine learning?

Machine learning is based on data science, but being a subject with many ramifications, giving a proper definition is not possible. But in order to simplify it to our understanding, machine learning is a computer’s ability to learn through patterns of data. The more patterns it processes, the more it learns to improve its recognition ability. By going over these patterns or samples of data, the machine is able to predict or decide on different matters.

Another way of explaining it is this: “A computer program is said to learn from experience E with respect to some task T and some performance measure P, if its performance on T, as measured by P, improves with experience E.” – Tom Mitchell, Carnegie Mellon University

Task T: predict shopping patterns in the Tesco store

Experience E: run an algorithm on past patterns in the store

Performance measure P: improves predictions for future shopping

If your machine successfully learned from running past patterns, it should make better future predictions.

Q2: How does Machine Learning influence recruitment processes?

First of all, recruitment relies on large amounts of data. This alone creates a strong connection with machine learning. If we look closely, we will easily infer that Machine Learning will have a major role in predicting job trends, demand on skills, shortages or over-demand based on location, human resource spread across areas and so on.

This gets the work cut out for recruiters who now need to source out prospective candidates, adapt to changing trends in the industry and analyze working patterns of candidates and employees. ML will also provide info on a company’s’ hiring habits, the lifespan of employees inside the company, satisfaction with jobs and migration tendencies.

The ability to “see into the future” and prepare for a shift in industries is invaluable information for recruiters when putting up a plan and sourcing out people.

With data analysis out of the way for the humans in HR departments, you get to focus more on quality of relationships, building valuable connections and nurturing long-term collaborations. Let the machine do the number crunching and you, the recruiter can develop your soft skills: intuition, empathy, approach, coping with changes and better supporting the people you meet in the process. Machines can do an assessment of skills and place in suitable positions. This will eliminate missing potential candidates because there was a mismatch in term use.

Futuristic as this sounds, you need to gear up for this change in approaches to make your recruitment successful.