Meet Vera. She is engaged to take care of initial job interviews for IKEA in Russia. In this connection, she can handle up to 1,500 interviews daily. She works full time, for free and never gets tired. What is her secret? She is, of course, a robot, writes the Washington Post.
It is the Russian company Stafory that has developed the robot Vera. She takes away much of the time-consuming and expensive groundwork. Not only does she interview you using machine learning and artificial intelligence, she also sends out customized follow-up emails.
To the Washington Post, IKEA’s spokesperson, Daniela Rogisic, says that they receive thousands of CVs every year from people who want to work for them. Screening out candidates they want to proceed with is time-consuming work and the motivation for them to try out the software.
The software is currently used by a couple of hundred companies in Russia (including Pepsi and L’Oreal) and currently conducts approximately 50,000 interviews daily. This according to one of the company’s founders, Alexei Kostarev. Vera was created to get in touch with potential job seekers, she seeks you out almost like a “headhunter”.
“We wanted to create a software that worked like Uber for job hunting, but instead of calling for a car, the company could use the system to call a large number of job-seeking people” – says Kostarev.
The process starts after the employer has given Vera a job description and tailored interview questions. Vera then takes a proactive role. The robot is linked to large CV databases, where she can match applications and CVs. When she has found a match, then she calls the candidate. So far she only knows Russian and English and starts the conversation with “Hi, my name is Vera, and I am a robot – are you still looking for a job? If you answer “yes”, the interview starts. After an approximately 8-minute long interview, Vera will forward potential candidates to a human recruiter. Kostarev says the interviews can take place both over the phone and in the form of video chat. You can even ask her questions, to which she probably answers well in 82% of cases.
Kostarev still believes that ultimately it is people who should decide who is hired, especially when it comes to more qualified roles such as management. His solution is most effective for working with mass recruitment, for example in the business area of sales and building the industry, he says.
The only question that remains now is when we in Norway also get a phone call with the voice “Hey, it’s the robot Vera calling – are you still looking for a job?
Jan Erik Stuedal | Post Social
