Mumbai: Imagine walking into a job interview with no human on the other side, just some code analysing every word, tone and response before deciding your fate. That is no longer hypothetical. The financial services arm of billionaire Ajay Piramal-backed Piramal Group is testing exactly this model to improve hiring efficiency.
In the three months to March, Piramal Finance—a non-bank financier with assets of over ₹1 trillion—hired 262 entry-level sales executives entirely using an artificial intelligence (AI) bot. Human involvement came only at the final stage of issuing offer letters.
Early adoption
While AI-assisted hiring is not new, this is among the earliest instances of a large company allowing AI to make hiring decisions.
Mint reported in January how Kearney, one of the world's largest consulting firms, is overhauling its hiring system to remove any human bias that creeps in during the selection process.
“Purely AI-driven hiring has started happening, where no human is looking at the candidate at all,” Jairam Sridharan, managing director and chief executive of Piramal Finance told Mint.
“The resume is screened by AI, and it then coordinates with the candidate to set up a time for the interview. A voice bot does the interview in their language of choice and then against the rubric, the AI assesses the candidate and decides whether he/she should be hired or not.”
The adoption of AI for end-to-end hiring for certain roles is because Piramal Finance is more experimental than peers, said Sridharan, who joined the group in 2020 from private sector lender Axis Bank, where he was the chief financial officer.
Industry trend
Other large non-banking financial companies such as Bajaj Finance and Tata Capital have also been scaling up AI usage in generating leads, making videos, and cutting credit cost, among others, as lenders amp up investments in a technology that promises to change how businesses run.
“I personally have always had a very heavy level of scepticism about the effectiveness of interviews. When I'm pushing that thought forward, it's easier for me to make this leap to say let machines do it,” said Sridharan.
He said candidates are more satisfied when they speak to an AI bot instead of a human and can shed their inhibitions. “The candidates are less shy. They feel less embarrassed about admitting some things,” Sridharan said, noting that applicants are informed beforehand that an AI bot will conduct the interview.
According to him, interviewing, especially for entry-level roles, is an imperfect process. He said that someone sitting in a branch may not have great interviewing skills. The interviewer might rush through things, ask four questions and then make up his/her mind. “(With AI hiring) I have the full log of every call that has been made,” said Sridharan.
Human resource experts said that while hiring for entry-level roles could be fully automated, those for senior recruits need a human-in-the-loop.
Monica Agrawal, chairperson and country head at consultancy Sheffield Haworth India, said AI tools can work for junior, or at best, mid- level roles, wherein selection criteria and process are more structured and standardised, and AI can enable the selection process via standardised evaluation criteria.
“But for senior-level hiring, human intervention is a must, as almost every search process is bespoke. Top-of-the-house searches are high-touch and are, in fact, successful only if the search firm and the candidate have an equation built over the years; AI cannot replace that,” said Agrawal.
Experts also said the use of AI will compress hiring timelines. “In the current scenario, this kind of recruitment is possible in frontline sales roles where there are targets, and at most a round or two of interviews are done, including KYC checks,” said Upasana Agarwal, partner, professional and financial services at ABC Consultants, a talent advisory firm.
Agarwal of ABC Consultants said this will help in optimization of volume-based hiring processes. However, she cautioned that leadership and corporate roles still require human judgement to assess softer skills, competencies and cultural fitment.