In the 18 years since its founding, Indeed has evolved from a job board into an automated matching and recruiting platform that posts more than 20 jobs every minute and reaches 300 million people every month.
The surprising way Indeed uses AI to create Career Companions
This growth (a doubling in the past three years) has been achieved in the face of a volatile economic climate, with global events dramatically impacting employment trends and activity. During this time, business strategies have focused on developing sophisticated new technological solutions based on artificial intelligence and machine learning.
As we heard from Raj Mukherjee, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Hiring at Indeed, when he joined us for a podcast discussion, the focus here is on understanding and catering to the requirements of individual job seekers and employees to create more personalized and successful connections.
Let's take a look at how Indeed has used AI and ML, and dive into Mukherjee's thoughts on how it will transform his industry (and many others) in the future.
Career Companion
Career Companion It's a phrase Mukherjee uttered during our conversation, and it perfectly sums up Indeed's AI ambitions: Broadly speaking, the business goals fit into overarching categories, including bringing the service closer to user preferences and improving the speed of processes.
Mukherjee says, “Our founding philosophy was centered around machine learning.
“We use standard machine learning techniques, we use deep learning, and now we're leveraging generative AI and large-scale language networks.”
The Career Companion concept was born from the growing understanding that an end-to-end hiring platform doesn't just help jobseekers when they're looking for their first job. Today it might be a job search, tomorrow it might be a promotion, and then later on, the jobseeker might start to get involved in hiring staff themselves.
Understanding your preferences is key: Indeed collects over 140 million data points every day, which we call “qualifications.” We use these to build detailed knowledge about applicants and determine how they might fit with open roles on our platform.
Explaining how AI technology has opened up new possibilities that can be used to improve customer experience, Mukherjee said, “The CV that I have shared with you contains a lot of data about me, my past experience, where I have worked and what skills I have acquired there.
“We're trying to understand that, and not just using analytics techniques but using machine learning at a very deep level to start extracting the right skills.”
Instant Matching
Speed is also important, which is why how quickly we can fill vacancies is one of the most closely watched metrics.
Mukherjee told me, “We know that employers want to hire fast, and when they use our paid product, they hire 19% faster.”
This is due to the fact that applicants are proactively matched with roles via AI, encouraging candidates to apply as soon as open positions are posted on the site.
But behind the scenes, a very complex matching takes place: Indeed’s algorithms mine insights based on both “stated” and “unstated” preferences: stated preferences are those provided by users to indicate, for example, that they are interested in jobs in London or Paris.
On the other hand, unstated preferences are determined by analyzing your data. For example, if you always look for jobs around London, we might determine that London is where you want to work.
We find that combining these explicit and implicit preferences can effectively speed up important fulfillment time metrics.
“The machine can start creating images, which leads to matches, which leads to better opportunities,” Mukherjee said.
“The same thing is happening on the employer side, because we have billions of job descriptions that we've extracted over the years.”
Personalized Agent
Since its launch, Indeed has been investing heavily in incorporating AI into the core of its service, focusing on providing job seekers with their own fully automated “personalized agent.”
This would help improve a metric that Mukherjee particularly dislikes: three out of four job seekers never hear back.
He told me, “If you get rejected, it's not great, but it's better than not getting a response at all.”
One simple change emerged as the most obvious way to reduce the number of times job seekers experience such frustrating outcomes: reducing the number of jobs they must apply to before being hired.
“So how do we create a world where job seekers don't have to apply to so many jobs? They come here and…I call it a 'personalized agent.'
“So you share your 140 million preferences and qualifications with a machine, and it understands you and returns jobs that you will hear back from almost 100% of the time. As an industry, we are disqualifying every individual who applies for a job and doesn't hear back.”
The Future of AI in Hiring and Recruiting
Mukherjee clearly has deep insight into the changing world of work and the future shape of the job market, which makes his statement that “many jobs will disappear” sobering.
“This is true,” he tells me. “It's happened before. Every technological revolution has led to job losses.”
“But new jobs will be created. And many new jobs will be created as part of this AI revolution.”
Those caught in the middle may find themselves in a brave new world without being fired or finding themselves in entirely new roles like teleprompter engineers or AI ethicists.
In this world, AI will be in charge of matching, determining connections, and automating the mundane elements of the hiring process.
Instead, we are active in the 'people' side of the HR role, using skills such as empathy, communication and creative thinking to deliver outcomes that maximize the benefit of everyone involved in the business.
“I believe that ultimately we will all enjoy our work more,” Mukherjee says.
“Do less of what you don't want to do and do more of what you do want to do. This is coming from the optimistic, or maybe realistic, side of me, but I want to make this happen.”
Read our interview with Raj Mukherjee here hereHere we take a deeper look at the transformative impact of the convergence of AI and HR.
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