Due to it being known for nurturing a conservative corporate culture and mindset, the construction sector could benefit from a technological touch-up. Younger, more tech-savvy workers are entering the workforce and as a result, they’ll have higher standards on everything from employee branding to job postings.
Coupled with it being a sector of many trades, the benefits of using AI to source talent as well as assess talent are many. Let’s, with this article, see how you as a recruiter can leverage AI when hiring for the construction sector.
Short introduction to AI in recruitment
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a branch of computer sciences that emphasizes the development of intelligent machines. AI learns from experience and adapts to new inputs and does so by applying machine learning, deep learning and other techniques to solve actual problems. AI exists in many forms such as robots, chatbots and computers. One recurrent issue with AI in the human world is that since it is programmed by people with biases, the AI also becomes biased. Which we go deeper into here.
That’s why it’s, as far as AI in recruitment is concerned and the fact that you work with people, important to double-check the results you attain from the AI, just as you would double-check yourself. The usage of AI in recruitment stretches wide and far, ranging from pre-employment activities to onboarding, and is becoming increasingly popular among HR professionals.
Using AI when recruiting for the construction sector
Many construction projects require fast hires due to, for example, drawn-out permit processes that suddenly are granted. Rapidly changing conditions can result in faulty hires and, if not careful, a toxic culture and junior workers who have no one to learn from. That’s why it’s good to have a candidate pool of talented construction workers that you can reach out to when a project requires fast-paced hiring decisions.
But now, let’s get to the point, how can you find them faster with the help of AI?
Resume screening with AI
Let’s assume you receive one too many resumes for a single job. Going through them all will take you hours upon hours and you’ll have issues remembering which candidates you deemed to be most suitable and why. If you would’ve had an AI to assist you in screening all resumes, the time spent could be narrowed down to a couple of hours. How does that work?
You “insert” all the resumes into the AI-tool and, with the help of filtering-settings, you let the AI know which criteria — such as experience, location, education, and skills — you value the most. With the criteria in mind, the AI begins to scour through the resumes and leaves you with a shortlist of the candidates it believes will be the most suitable. The AI will even rank the candidates top to bottom and let you know what it has based its decision on.
Go through the shortlisted candidates yourself and see if you agree with the AI suggestion. After all, the final decision is yours to make and the AI is merely suggestive, albeit, considering it has based its decision on data, you can rest assured that the output will serve you well. If you’re curious to know more, go ahead and read 5 Reasons You Should Be Using Automated Resume Screening.
Conversational chatbots
To increase your speed-of-hire even more you have the option to use conversational chatbots. These are chatbots that you use after you’ve screened resumes, as a way to get more insight before you conduct an actual face-to-face interview. You can choose to interview all the candidates or only the ones you’ve shortlisted.
A recommendation is to interview everyone who has applied because you’ll get a much better idea of the candidates from the interviews than you would from going through all of the resumes. And, don’t worry, the candidates will barely notice that they’re talking to a bot, and if they do, there’s definitely no reason to worry since people tend to be more open and honest with bots than they are with humans.
During the conversation, the bot will ask questions regarding the candidates’ work experiences, aspirations regarding the current job, and how they have handled past work-related situations. On top of that, the chatbot can conduct skill assessments. As an example, it could ask the candidate to do a calculation of how much concrete would be needed for a certain structure.
To-the-point job postings with AI
The construction sector has been, and still is, male-dominated, but, it is changing. Women all over the world are beginning to enter the workforce which means that you have to change the way you’re communicating with the people in this sector. According to linguistic studies, men, women, and non-binary people are all attracted to different types of words. Meaning that men tend to be drawn to words that are infused with some sort of powerful connotations whereas women are drawn to more empathetic connotations.
In order for you to up your non-discriminative game, you should be writing job descriptions that adhere to everyone. That is of course tricky to do but thankfully, a linguistic AI tool can help you with this. A tool like this gives you suggestions on which words you should use based on the perimeters of your sourcing. It will rank the text and let you know if you’re being biased towards a certain gender or nationality. Read more about
Direct advertising
Perhaps you used the writing tool to craft the perfect job ad. But how do you know where to distribute it and how do you know where your target group is hanging out? You do because you make use of a programmatic job ad distributor. These are machine learning-based tools that use big data in order to understand — for example, where a construction manager in the age of 37 with 10 years of experience spends her time on the web. The AI-tool then distributes the ad to social channels as well as on job ad sites. Another perk of this type of automation is that it turns off job ads that don’t get any traction. Users of these tools save 10% of their advertising budgets thanks to that feature.
You’ve now been fed with a lot of information and so you might not be pleased to hear that this was only a scraping of the surface of AI in the construction sector, or maybe you’re more curious than ever, which is great. Just know that all the AI tools in recruitment can be used for the construction sector in one way or another. This is why we recommend you to read The Ultimate Guide to AI Recruiting.
This is a guest post from Hubert.
Further reading