Recruiters could soon become extinct (Blame it on Big Data)

Recruiter are people and people can only do so much. They need to eat, and sleep and do other things. Things which are not sifting through resumes or talking to applicants or checking their references. But thanks to new companies such as Evolv that are leading the charge on hiring based on predictive analytics run against applicant profiles and by using many of the techniques used in big data. The science of creating an applicant profile is one of their core competencies.

Some of their findings based on analysis of millions of data points are published in Economist (Dated: April 6, 2013).  One such finding that I want to highlight from the article is that applicants filling out a application (for hourly wage jobs) on non native browsers (example: a browser other than Internet Explorer in a Windows box) perform better than the applicants that do use Internet Explorer.  Or that applicants with criminal past do better as call center agents than those with no criminal record. A couple of findings that human recruiters using traditional methods can just not come up with. So, in the not too distant future its entirely possible that big data techniques will replace human recruiters.