The Scoop: Recruitment Trends & Industry Insights | February 2019

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Here is your February guide to the latest in recruitment trends, technology, and industry insights! Each month, we highlight the biggest news affecting the industry, and explain what to expect as new trends continue to emerge. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

EXPLORING NEW AVENUES TO FILL DATA SCIENTIST ROLES

According to LinkedIn, data scientists saw a 56% increase in job openings in the US over the past year. While employment demand is high, a recent report by Indeed shows job searches for Data Science rose by approximately 14%, outpacing the growth of jobs in that market.

The tech shortage has led companies to look beyond traditional markers of intellect, such as academic pedigree, and place greater consideration on a candidate’s skills and abilities. This strategy increases the pool of talent and also broadens the scope of candidates, accounting for diversity of learning and life experiences.  

The shortage has also spurred other alternative approaches for finding tech talent, such as IBM’s two-pronged initiative. In an effort to increase the pool of available data scientists, the company has partnered with The Open Group to develop a certification and an industry-wide agreement for assessing data scientists. Also, as a part of their “New Collar” program, IBM developed a Data Science Apprenticeship, offering 24 months of training to job candidates who might not have a college degree. https://www.ciodive.com/news/ibms-data-scientist-certification-program-works-to-fill-talent-drought/547531/ ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

AN INCREASE IN HR TECH STARTUPS

The advent of HR tech advancements has changed the candidate process, moving from the era of faxed resumes to online applications. This has increased the volume of applications recruiters must wade through in an effort to find the right hire.

There has been an increase in companies touting AI and Automated solutions to this efficiency challenge, with many of the tech startups offering unique angles to add value beyond time saving. One example is Woven, a company that helps employers adjust their job descriptions and find developers from non-traditional educational backgrounds and regions. https://news.crunchbase.com/news/recruitment-startups-realize-with-the-help-of-ai-less-is-more/ ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

ADVANCEMENTS IN TRANSLATION TECHNOLOGY  

In our increasingly global and multilingual world, the ability to communicate across languages is core to our daily lives—and Google’s 100 billion word Super Bowl commercial will make you a believer.

Beyond simple phrases, translating complex information (e.g., careers content) has been difficult to accomplish at scale while ensuring accuracy. With the evolution of AI technology, companies such as @LiltHQ have developed an offering with a human-assisted AI model that improves the speed of translation without sacrificing quality.

The Lilt tool is a human-machine partnership with a real-time feedback loop. The system provides human translators predictive suggestions for the next sentence or paragraph—as a reference for structure, tense, idiom and so on—and the translators provide feedback back to the system.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/11/lilt-is-building-a-machine-translation-business-with-humans-at-the-core/ ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

THE MACHINES ARE COLLUDING

In a Singularity-esque (nerd alert!) twist on the concept of value-based pricing, researchers in Italy observed pricing algorithms colluding with each other. Specifically, “[the algorithms] learned to respond to one another’s behavior and quickly pulled the price of goods above where it would have been had either operated alone.”

While this issue has not yet played out in the consumer marketplace, the study’s broader point of algorithmic collusion towards a single result could be applied to other multi-point AI-driven decision-making processes that impact the recruitment sector.  

https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/612947/pricing-algorithms-can-learn-to-collude-with-each-other-to-raise-prices/ ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

ROUNDING OUT THE SCOOP: PSYCH, SOCIAL, LABOR AND TECH

About Jahkedda Akbar Mitchell

Jahkedda has many years of experience providing strategic guidance, data, and insights on job-seeker trends in support of Radancy and its clients. She has also worked in-house on the candidate attraction team for a large fortune 500 company. Jahkedda has a passion for psychology and storytelling; understanding why we do what we do and how to change behaviors...only using her powers for good. Jahkedda is a member of Radancy Labs: a design thinking focused innovation lab.

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