Workday has announced a number of new AI capabilities today aimed at helping its customers improve how they hire and manage talent. Central to the announcement is the introduction of HiredScore to the Workday platform, a company that it acquired earlier this year.
HiredScore uses HR data to deliver AI insights and suggested actions to recruiters and managers, to more effectively manage talent and match skills to available opportunities. Interestingly, and refreshingly, the HiredScore announcements today don't rely on Generative AI - but rather lean into using AI to support efficiency, transparency and instilling trust into hiring and skills-based decisions.
Speaking with Athena Karp, HiredScore CEO, she said:
I think a lot of it depends on the types of algorithms that are being used to do this. I can tell you, at HireScore, all of the technology that we use is proprietary and built in-house. That's really to make sure we're looking at each specific point of the problem. We're not just 'Gen AI-ing' everything, which has a whole bunch of challenges, especially when applied to this specific problem.
We actually are not using Generative AI in our products. People are surprised by that. But that's because you want explainability, auditability, consistent treatment for each and every person. You want to know: 'I have only scored someone based on the criteria listed in this job, I am 100% certain and I have auditable logs and records of that'.
Enterprises face a huge swathe of challenges when it comes to recruiting talent and then managing hired skills internally. Parsing thousands of applications for each job is a laborious process, one which can be aided with improved data insights. Additionally, being proactive in ensuring that you recognize internal talent - without losing out to competitors - is difficult to do manually. On top of all of this, the job market is adapting, with both employers and workers becoming more flexible in how they match skills to jobs and/or projects, driven by tense supply and demand issues.
There is plenty of opportunity to adopt AI technologies in HR practices to improve the efficiency of skills matching and talent management, which can often feel obscure without necessary data to hand. However, given the people-based nature of HR decisions, transparency is needed to ensure the use of AI is being conducted fairly and without bias.
There are a number of aspects to this. It's important to take into consideration the experience of the employee, the candidates, the hiring managers, and how fostering the skills and work practices of all these people can be aligned with a company's broader business strategy and ambitions.
With this in mind, today Workday is announcing the launch of HiredScore AI for Recruiting and HiredScore AI for Talent Mobility. It says that these solutions provide customers with access to "AI-powered talent orchestration" that can deliver measurable outcomes in productivity, time-to-hire, candidate experience, manager experience and employee growth.
With HiredScore AI for Recruiting, Workday says that customers can:
With HiredScore AI for Talent Mobility, Workday says that customers can:
Speaking to the HiredScore acquisition and integration into the Workday platform, Cristina Goldt, General Manager for Talent Optimization at Workday, said:
We were super impressed with HireScore. We've been partners for quite some time, we have joint customers, and we were seeing the value that our customers were getting out of our joint solutions. And it also was a nice addition to what we were doing.
When combined with Workday, it makes Workday that much more powerful. The use case today is in talent acquisition primarily, but we don't think it stops there. We really think that we are able to use what they call 'orchestration' throughout our entire product and the employee lifecycle.
We're also of like mind and value, in terms of making sure that when we think about AI, we are thinking about the responsibility. We're thinking about trust. We felt that Workday and HiredScore combined was a really strong proposition for our customers.
In addition to the HiredScore announcements, Workday has also introduced new AI capabilities in the Workday Job Architecture, which helps customers set the right framework to define and organize jobs within an organization. Well-defined roles and responsibilities are crucial in not only enabling efficient hiring practices, but also in allowing recruitment practices to align with a company's strategic goals.
The new AI capabilities for Workday Job Architecture allow customers to:
Both Karp and Goldt cemented the point to diginomica that the use of AI in hiring practices and skills management should be centered around the principles of transparency, fairness and trust. For instance, Karp said that HiredScore doesn't incorporate irrelevant data to help match candidates to jobs, such as external social media data or other public data, but rather just focuses on the skills:
We'll ensure that it's just what you as a candidate submit. Also, we're only looking at the information that relates to you in the job. There's a number of systems, for example, that will include your extracurriculars, or your zip code, or other things that a different algorithm might have picked up correlated to selection...we're not doing that. We actually don't care what correlates to selection outside of the job requirements. So I think it's having the right mechanisms in place for problems where that really matters.
And HiredScore is aiming to ensure a high level of explainability for hiring managers when using AI:
Whenever the algorithm's reaching out to you, it's not going to just tell you something, it's going to give you the thing you need to do now to go align with those goals. Our system is transparent, so it tells you 'why', it's letting you know and what it needs you to do.
Goldt also reiterated the point that whilst AI can be used to help organizations become more efficient, productive and help align hiring practices and talent management with broader company objectives, it's important to remember that these systems are centered around people:
We want to make sure, in HR in particular, that this cannot be where everything's taken over by a machine, right? You really do have to have a human in the loop for so many of the processes, because you're dealing with people. You want to make sure that that's transparent. Because of the transparency and being presented with what you need, when you need it, that personalization really changes the experience. However, you [need to] know why it's happening. It tells you why. And then that actually is even better information, so you make better decisions. That helps you to do things faster, to be more productive.
Goldt added that without data, these HR decisions can be extremely subjective - and that the transparent use of AI can help improve judgements that in the past may have seemed opaque:
You're able to use this in a way that is more equitable, across whether it's hiring, mobility, planning decisions. Don't just think about talent acquisition, think about all the things that can help fuel your organization.
Karp spoke about the need for organizations to focus on outcomes when incorporating AI into these processes. She said that some uses of Generative AI, for instance, are helpful, but that they only really improve efficiency around certain tasks by 1 to 3 percent:
It's not giving a kind of exoskeleton to the persona and transforming the persona and the process in meaningful ways. Our clients consistently get over 25 percent recruiter capacity back in under a year. It elevates someone who is less experienced, with less know-how and less expertise in recruiting, to be uplifted.
Looking at the internal mobility of candidates, Karp said that it's a similar thesis. HiredScore has found that fewer than 20 percent of employees, on average, proactively go to their internal career site to find their next job, with candidates then often getting approached by former co-workers or competitors on LinkedIn. By pushing information to employees about personalized opportunities, as part of their workflow, an organization can better progress their talent:
Why aren't companies gaining that same power? You know who your top performers are. You know what the next step in their careers could be. So we've turned that directly to the employee within their flow of work in Microsoft Teams. And we've seen across our clients, over half of employees engage with the job recommendations the system is sending them, which is a tremendous boost to the efficiency effectiveness.
The complexity that comes with talent management and hiring - which is often shrouded in what can often seem like obscure personal judgements - could certainly be aided by the better use of data. However, with these decisions centered around people and their careers, the use of AI will always be sensitive. The way HiredScore and Workday speak about the transparency and explainability of these AI-enabled judgements, will go a long way to instilling trust in using these tools. Particularly in what is continuing to be a demanding and complex labor market.
