Movers & Shakers

CASE STUDY 2

HOW AI IS HELPING SUPPORT THE MENTAL HEALTH OF CONTRACTORS

Recruitment can sometimes get “stuck” in its traditional methodologies, believes Benjamin Burns, group CEO of Hydro Energy Group, which specialises in the offshore and marine, renewables and hydrographic survey markets. Hence his att itude has always been to keep a close eye on technological developments and how the business can evolve and this, in turn, he says, hopefully leads to a bett er experience for the contractor. “Our mott o is to try things and, if they don’t work, fail fast and move on,” he says.

One of the areas he wanted to address was the wellbeing of the business’ contractors who, by the very nature of the industry, are oft en located in far-flung parts of the world, such as the middle of an ocean. He felt there had to be a bett er way of checking in on their happiness and mental health, and so the company invested in AI technology from San Francisco.

Using AI, the soft ware assesses comments and picks up on negative emotions or signs of stress and then alerts consultants who can get in touch with candidates. “The real intelligence in the system is how it learns the person’s personality and the words they use,” says Burns. “If we’re happy or sad we may use certain words. Over a period of time the system learns this and feeds it back to us.”

As well as keeping a check on their wellbeing, it also enables the recruiters to feed back to clients. “For instance, if the contractor is unhappy with the food they are gett ing, we can advise the client on this and help to fix the experience, which means they are far more likely to work for that company again.”

Burns sees this as just the start of the AI journey though. The company is currently developing a platf orm it has named Human Dynamics, which looks at the whole lifecycle of a person – from college or university, through to active working life, and AI will feed in to this and help in areas such as upskilling.

It will also input into content on a new television channel that Hydro Energy plans to launch called Hydro TV. “For instance, this will give contractors access to nutrition and workouts in tight spaces if they are on a vessel in the middle of the ocean, and it will all link into the AI system for future learning.”

Burns says the company will continue to research evolving technologies and look at how it is being applied in other industries. “How might that work in our sector?” he says. “I’m trying to drag recruitment from the dinosaur days of ‘You’ve got to do three hours on the phone’ to ‘How can we actually make it a lot more enjoyable experience for candidates?’.” other matching and automated tools for talent acquisition but they hadn’t lived up to their promise. He says the data that Picked’s tools provide is extremely granular and provides a strong indication of the capabilities of applicants, as well as whether they will fi t in to the team and have the right value set for the company.

“Th is has vastly improved our hiring over the past year and has now allowed us to proudly say that talent acquisition is not just aligned with the rest of our business, it’s actually one of our leading areas,” he says.

Th ere has been an explosion in AI tools in the past three years and, as Barb Hyman, CEO of Predictive Hire, explains, it is important for recruiters to understand that “not all AI is equal” and calls for a lot more education in the market. “Video interviews which use AI have become popular, for example, but they can lead to much more biased outcomes for candidates than text-based AI interviews, which are blind,” she says.

Indeed, one of AI’s boasts is that it can remove human bias but how can recruiters trust the algorithms deliver on such claims? Hyman reckons recruiters need to take it upon themselves “to get educated” about the technology they are using. “On our end, we try to be as transparent as we can about our technology, rather than have it operate in a black box,” she says. “We also publish all our research so it’s peer-reviewed, and recently released a framework called FAIR (Fairness in Recruiting), which aims to set a global standard for ethical AI in recruitment so that recruiters can get educated on the topic.”

Elin Öberg Mårtenzon, CEO of Tengai, which has a suite of AI-based solutions that seek to remove unconscious prejudice, including Tengai Robot and Tengai Digital Interview, agrees that the use of technology must be prompted by “a deep understanding” of how technology works to serve its purpose. “By understanding the components of the technology that recruiters use and by critically examining the outcome,