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Human interviewers may halve over next 5 years

Your next interviewer is most likely to be a machine or a mobile robot as companies are increasingly moving to non-traditional forms of digital hiring.

M Saraswathy Special Correspondent, Moneycontrol

Your next interviewer is most likely to be a machine or a mobile robot as companies increasingly move towards non traditional forms of digital hiring. The shift is coming through to save costs and also to remove human biases.

Rituparna Chakraborty, Executive Vice President, TeamLease Services said, "With machine hiring, one could estimate attrition (early/premature as well as long-term) likelihoods and therefore, choose candidate types that are associated with lower likelihoods.”

Human resource companies have also seen a surge in demand for candidate matching and psychometric testing to first check if a candidate is fit for a particular role. Only after looking at their cultural fit with the organisation do they look at hiring the person. While traditional headhunting firms offer these services, corporates are also making use of niche startups that only offer such algorithm based testing solutions.

Consultants are expecting physical interviews to reduce to half in the next five years. Going forward, only the very senior position including Chairman, Chief Executive Officer will be conducted via face-to-face mode.

A report by TeamLease Services, ‘the new landscape of hiring’, showed that the time, cost and attrition rates in machine-based hiring are lower than in manual hiring.

Further, it said machine hiring allows companies to avoid judgment errors caused by short attention spans. Gig work—a formalised version of freelancing—is upending hiring models across the world.

More consumption of time during face-to-face interviews has led to the rise in digital interactions for hiring.

Sunil Goel, Managing Director, GlobalHunt said there are many online assessments based on personality and skills.

He added video interviews are also being conducted. “This gets recorded and is helpful in post interview assessment. It is cost effective as well,” said Goel. Hence, if one person conducts a video interview, the assessment of the entire process is done by multiple people in the company by looking at the recording.

Overall, the process of spending several hours on travel for conducting an interview is also being slowly seen as a loss of productive time. Hence, the thrust to go online and get digital.