How Artificial Intelligence Can Solve the Competency Mapping Gap in The Recruitment Sector

Organizations often face a competency gap due to their inabilities to test candidates for soft skills and secondary hard skills during the recruitment process.

This is the story of The Digital Marketers Inc. Being a digital marketing agency, the organization required highly skilled writers, editors, and copywriters. While hiring candidates, the organization focused solely on a particular set of hard skills in candidates. As a result of which, the organization landed in precarious situations. Most often, the organization ended up hiring candidates that were good writers but poor communicators. As one of their tasks at the organization involved interacting with clients over a call, it so happened that the hired candidates would end up making communication a mess. They would not be able to convey their thoughts to the clients in a simple manner, which often resulted in reworking the submitted content. Thus, they used to spend more time than required, which delayed projects, often infuriating clients, and delayed payments.

1. Understanding The Competency Gap Problem

This story is the same across various organizations and industries. Organizations often hire candidates only to realize later that they have a skills gap, which often results in a loss for individuals as well as organizations. So who is to blame here? Well, its lack of competency mapping in the recruitment process. Most candidates lie about their skills on their resumes. Organizations need to assign activities to check competencies, including soft skills and secondary skills of the candidates. But then organizations can’t have their hiring managers conduct competency tests (usually for secondary skills) for a large number of candidates. It can result in extending the time required to fill a job vacancy, which not many organizations can afford. So what can The Digital Marketers Inc. and other organizations across various sectors do to bridge the competency mapping gap?

2. Using Artificial Intelligence in Competency Mapping

Artificial intelligence looks to be a promising solution to bridge the skills gap encountered by organizations. An AI software (recruitment intelligence solution) can be programmed to conduct competency tests during the recruitment process autonomously. The AI solution can analyze, assess, and provide recommendations and reports based on the candidates’ responses. Based on the reports and analysis provided by the AI software, a human resource manager can then take a final call whether to select the candidate for the next round or to stop his candidature. For instance, the AI solution can simulate a real-life scenario of a candidate interview. The solution can ask pre-defined questions to the candidates. It can then assess and analyze the candidates’ responses with Natural Language Processing capabilities to generate a report with various parameters such as the tone of the candidate, the frequent words used, and the time required to answer the questions. However, the final call will be that of a human as we can’t (yet) be completely dependent on an AI system in its current form. The biggest advantage of employing an AI tool for competency mapping is that it allows you to conduct a large number of tests quickly, and provides accurate results and reports that can mean the difference between hiring a wrong and right candidate.

Artificial intelligence is the new way for competency mapping and making sure you hire candidates with the right skills that are needed for your organization. With recruitment intelligence, you won’t have to hire a candidate only to realize that they aren’t a fit for the organization and start searching for a new candidate within two months. Well, as for The Digital Marketers Inc., they employed an AI recruitment intelligence tool, and are since bridging the competency gap with each hire. So, when are you employing recruitment intelligence at your organization?