Sian Joel-Edgar, associate professor in human-centered computing, told the U.K. Financial Services Club that recruitment teams that include an AI agent are likely to be more productive.
LONDON — Companies can be more productive if they embrace the idea of incorporating AI-powered agents into their talent management teams, according to a Northeastern University researcher.
Sian Joel-Edgar, associate professor in human-centered computing at Northeastern in London, has researched how artificial intelligence is being deployed by human resource departments in recent papers.
Since publishing that research, part of her outreach has involved engaging with the industry about the findings. For example, Joel-Edgar joined a webinar this month hosted by the U.K.’s Financial Services Club, a networking group for executives in business, technology and finance.
During the 45-minute talk, titled “AI & talent: smarter hiring, stronger teams,” Joel-Edgar said there is now an “AI arms race” in human resources management, with both companies and applicants using machine intelligence to gain an advantage.
She outlined how AI video bots are being used by applicants to train themselves for interviews while others are writing keywords from the job description repeatedly into their resume as white text so that, while the human eye will not pick up on it, generative AI will detect it when analyzing applications.
Firms are also using AI to give them a “competitive edge” when it comes to talent management, Joel-Edgar said.
“If a company is using AI,” she explained, “they can screen many more applications and they can do it much quicker. Good people are hard to come by, so you want to be the one that recruits them quickest — and AI can do that, so there is a real strategic element to using AI effectively.”
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Human resources is one of the most likely professions to use AI at work, according to research published by HR Magazine in the U.K.
The study found that 68% of HR professionals stated that they used AI in the workplace. Survey respondents reported that AI saved them on average three hours per week, with 89% declaring that they felt AI had improved standards in the industry.
To show how humans and AI can collaborate in talent management teams during her webinar presentation, Joel-Edgar gave an example of a three-person recruitment team that is assisted by an AI-powered agent.
“This might sound bonkers, but think about AI agents as being part of your [human resources] team,” Joel-Edgar told FS Club associates.
“So if you have a team that is part of the recruitment process, you might have Bob, Dave, Samantha and Priya — and Samantha is your AI agent. Bob and Samantha could put together a job description — Bob writes it and Samantha does the grammar check. Samantha makes it sound a bit better.
“Bob puts it out there and then the applicants then submit their CVs. Samantha, our AI agent, then does the screening.
“It is then Dave who, as the ‘human in the loop,’ makes sure it is all appropriate and that it is ethical. Dave then invites a few people for an interview and Priya conducts those interviews. That is done in conjunction with Samantha, the AI agent, who does analysis on how well the candidates did via some video analysis. And together, Priya and Samantha make a decision about who should be recruited.”
Joel-Edgar, who co-authored the peer-reviewed paper “Unlocking the value of artificial intelligence in human resource management through AI capability framework” — published by the Human Resource Management Review journal in 2023 — said the use of machine intelligence agents as part of recruitment teams would require installing “ethical practices” as a “priority.”
She said it was important for transparency reasons to understand why an AI agent had reached decisions rather than taking them at face value. AI guidance should also be checked for any biases built in as part of its software development.
The researcher told the webinar that installing bias mitigation strategies and ethical guidelines when including an AI agent in HR teams would allow companies to be “as productive as possible” when it comes to resource management.
But while AI can be useful for recruiting and in other areas of the business, including payroll and in identifying where additional staff training is required, it is important that ethics is always put first, Joel-Edgar argued.
“There needs to be human oversight and accountability,” she stressed. “There needs to be fairness and equal opportunity, avoiding excessive employee surveillance. There are key elements of ethical guidelines that need to be kept in check as the use of AI progresses very rapidly in human resource management.”