Development of Solution for Automation of Sourcing and Recruitment Process

The recruitment sector constantly undergoes a ton of changes as it must adapt to everything happening in the labor market immediately. Flexibility, automation, and unbiased opinions are the key features of successful HR management and hiring processes.

With focus shifting to decision making based on CV, job experience, and knowledge over the appearance and personal attitude, it plays a pivotal role in the recruitment process. In the article, we are sharing our experience with extending the platform’s functionality and building new features to make the hiring process smooth, unprejudiced, and successful for both employers and employees by utilizing the latest AI technologies for the automation of the candidate selection.

About the recruitment platform to hire top talent

The existing platform had a rather complex architecture and used several technologies, including MongoDB databases, NodeJS, and Angular. While finding specialists knowledgeable in these and other technologies necessary for further work with the platform was rather challenging per se, Agiliway had specialists with the required skills and levels of expertise on its team.

The initial set of goals focused on stabilizing the system, i.e. setting up a dev/test environment, continuous integration (CI) and continuous development (CD), optimization of hosting of the platform, and fixing the existing bugs and issues.

Secondly, the development of new features necessary for the work of HR departments to help the owner successfully secure its niche was requested. These included:

• GDPR-compliant functionality,
• Integration with FTP server,
• Error handling for FTP and partnering recruitment platform,
• Improved content module,
• Interview set up process improvement, etc.

What we did to automate the recruitment process

Agiliway leveraged its expertise in development and understanding of the industry needs to make major improvements to the platform. As to the stabilization of the system, our team

• set up unit tests that check the code for validity – such step prevents issues in the performance of the platform, which may occur when new features are developed and added,
• fixed SSO issues so that recruiters and HR specialists can easily access the platform without spending extra time for authorization,
• set up CI and CD that dramatically cuts development time and, thus, time to market the product,
• optimized the performance of NodeJS responsible for the server part of the platform and AngularJS carrying all business logic,
• configured optimal hosting of the platform on Heroku and storage of BI data it uses in MongoDB databases,
• developed an API for the platform, which allowed to integrate the client’s platform with one of the largest HR systems in America recruiters commonly use in their work;

This way, recruiters may still use the national or corporate HR system as their single point of work, but let the platform perform its functions and return results automatically.

Our engineers also added new features, hence, improving the performance and scope of the existing functionality, so that the platform now allows us to automate the following processes:

1. 1. Unbiased resume reviewing. The system automatically hides information on the name, age, gender, previous jobs, and social media account links of applicants in their resumes as well as photos, so that a reviewer does not risk unconsciously favoring one applicant over another.
2. 2. Prioritization of job skills. A recruiter or an HR manager gives each job skill a value so that when the tests or interviewers assess the skills of applicants, each applicant receives an objective score showing how fit s/he is for the position. It is important that if a manager decides to change the priorities, the scores are automatically recalculated.
3. 3. Structured and improved interviewing. The system suggests the questions that align with the predefined hiring criteria. Such a solution not only makes interviews more effective but also considerably reduces preparation time.
4. 4. Writing of job description. The system analyses the structure and wording of a job description and returns the grate and tips that will help a recruiter improve the text and receive maximum responses.
5. 5. GDPR-compliant functionality. All the data in the system can be removed upon request of the users. This decision is a custom setting within an organization that utilizes the system. For example, an employee when leaving a company can require all his data to be removed from the database. This can be set automatically within a certain time to remove all the information on the specific users, individually or in bulk.
6. 6. Pausing the interview and proceeding from the same place. The earlier version didn’t allow to continue the interview from the place a candidate stopped due to, say, unintentionally closing the question window or other technical issues. Now it is possible to go on with it regardless of the reasons that may interrupt the interview.
7. 7. Integration with FTP server. Uploading files containing information on a job with its descriptions, and candidates’ CVs attached via an FTP connection. The system then automatically checks the description and resumes based on the settings from the company and returns the review score.
8. 8. Integration with one of the leading recruitment platforms. The two systems synch and send the newly created files containing the requested information about, for instance, the candidates or jobs. All the changes introduced to the files are immediately updated and synched in both systems.
9. 9. Error handling for FTP and partnering platforms. Users can catch all errors that appear during synchronization and report them.
10. 10. Setting up disposition ticks for every candidate by an admin and job owner so that all the participants of the hiring process decide whether the candidate is suitable for a position.
11. 11. The improved content module helps to analyze the text in the system and shows what shall be changed.
12. 12. Resume sorting through association lists. Now admins can upload association lists for further analyzing and sorting of the CVs.
13. 13. Separate access to each module (depends on permissions). Since the system has different modules for file uploading, conducting an interview, etc., access to them is granted based on the position in the company and the assigned roles.
14. 14. Report tab for companies who use the platform for sourcing and hiring – from these reports we can see and analyze the number of created jobs and job descriptions, carried out interviews, CV views, hire or approved candidates, and many other features. A user can get these reports automatically generated via UI and sent as a link to their e-mail. Before that, our client had to make a request and we would generate such reports based on the requirements. Now, there are certain roles for each company registered to the platform. These are Sysadmin and Superadmin that are assigned a specific scope of permissions, therefore a specific level of access to various data.
15. 15. The company content tab allows adding new types of skills, questions for the candidates, etc. to the platform. Through this tab, we check whether these requirements or questions from a company do not fall under the biased terms of the platform. These are related to race, religion, sex, etc. Therefore, whenever administrator types in job requirements, those that are considered biased would be highlighted by the system with suggested replacement vocabulary to avoid breaking the rules of the platform.
16. 16. The number of roles increased – HR Admin and Sysadmin roles were added with limited access to their respective duties and roles within the company.
17. 17. Export/import a company’s content (skills, value, questions) from the platform to their PCs and vice versa. This simplifies the recruitment process as they will be in the system prior to the interview. Therefore, this feature allows having a pre-made list approved by the platform.
18. 18. Additional integration of our application with a third-party organization using API to analyze and produce the score of CV or redacted resume based on its content. This helps organizations save time on sorting out resumes that do not meet the requirements for the job.

Summary

The progress the world is making nowadays toward equal rights and opportunities for everyone regardless of their sex, race, and other belonging is what is necessary to make it a better place. Having a platform that analyzes the CVs solely based on professional skills and experience is crucial to promoting the tendency of equal opportunities for people.

What attracts organizations is the automation of the majority of the HR processes. It helps save a lot of time and effort, and money for the employers in the long run. Moreover, adding new functionality that is scalable and easy to maintain leads to reduced expenses for tech support as well.

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