In the world of hiring, EasyRecruit Plus is making a big difference. Started by Mr. Pankaj Sharma and Mr. Neeraj Sharma within the Lexicon Group, this company uses computers to help find the best people for jobs. They have cool tools like ATT and IntAna that do tests and checks on job candidates. These tests are fair because everyone gets the same questions, and the computer doesn’t have any biases. It helps companies save time and find the right people faster.
In the future, more companies will use computers like EasyRecruit Plus to hire people. It’s like having a helpful robot assistant for hiring. EasyRecruit Plus wants to make even more tools to help companies with hiring from start to finish. So, if you’re a company looking for great employees or someone looking for a job, EasyRecruit Plus can be your new best friend!
An introduction about the founder
EasyRecruit Plus is an initiate of Lexicon Group of Pune with Mr Pankaj Sharma and Mr Neeraj Sharma as the heart behind EasyRecruit Plus. The Lexicon Group is a force to reckon with in the field of Education with Kindergarten Schools, Secondary Schools, Colleges for PGDM, Global PGDM, Hotel Management, Media and Advertisement. They have also diversified into Media through Pune Times Mirror and Civic Mirror, a chain of Fitness Centres under the umbrella brand of Multifit, Stem education through Thinker Place, Baby products through CITTA, Lawyers Platform- Rest the Case and Edtech EduCrack.
EasyRecruit Plus is a recruitment solutions company which is helmed by Anand Bhushan as the Chief Executive Officer. I come with over three decades of successful career in Pharma, Insurance, Retail, Consulting, Healthcare and has successfully launched and scaled up Businesses a Business Leader.
What inspired you to create EasyRecruit Plus, and what’s your background in recruitment?
While working as Business Head, COO and CEO I had the firsthand experience of my HR Head and teams spending a lot of time and energy in the recruitment processes, especially the initial screening. With candidates in multitudes of the open position, it was a real challenge for the recruitment teams to initially screen and shortlist the candidates for putting to line for final interview. In addition, the team also had to get the line engaged even for initial screening for specialised departments as F&A, IT, Marketing etc. This actually meant the time eating into other aspects of value addition by the HR Teams. Thus, a thought emerged, that if the time spent on initial screening can be cut down with the help of technology, without compromising on the quality of screening and in fact bringing in more objectivity, then it will greatly help the HR Teams to have time on their hands for doing more value added and productive work for the Organization. Hence the concept was born.
How do EasyRecruit Plus’s AI-enabled tools like IntAna and ATT simplify and enhance the initial candidate screening process?
Both these tools ATT and IntAna can be administered remotely to the candidates, even before the HR Teams comes to a face-to-face interaction or telephonic interview and can be administered by just sharing a link to all eligible candidates. It means that HR is saving a minimum of 20 minutes of time per candidate, which it spends on talking to the candidate. Same set of questions administered to all candidates means objective assessment and standardization of the process. The results are visible to the HR in a descending manner of scoring done by candidates, thereby making it easy for them to call up the top rankers for final interview. Since ATT assesses the candidates on Objective parameters and IntAna assesses them on cognitive parameters, both the aspects are taken care of in initial screening. A combined score of both these tests in a descending score allows the HR to shortlist the candidates with better scores for interactions and taking them forward in the hiring process.
Can you explain how IntAna evaluates cognitive aspects and how ATT aids in objective testing remotely?
The two tools ATT and IntAna are AI enabled and both can be administered remotely, and to prevent impersonation or malpractices comes with remote proctoring.
IntAna is taken while sitting in front of the computer screen and AI enabled to assess the candidates on the cognitive aspects of Verbal, Non-verbal and Sentiment analysis. On the Verbal ability parameters it captures, communication, articulation and speaking rate. On Non-verbal front it covers attention, confidence, confidence, engagement, positive and negative emotions etc, and In Sentiment analysis captures 10 plus general emotions, 80 plus mini emotions and 150 micro emotions. What it effectively means is evaluating the candidate response and replies to a question, what are the non-verbal cues he is giving while answering and how his facial expressions and eye expressions are while answering, giving a holistic picture of the cognitive aspect of the candidate, and all this is scored.
In ATT, the candidate is administered a multiple-choice question test which is proctored and the candidate can take it while sitting in his office or residence. The questions can be curated as per Organization or Department requirements, and normally comprises of Domain based questions, English Comprehension, Mathematical ability and Logical Reasoning. This ensures an all-round theoretical test of the person on job parameters and general level of understanding at their level. The scores are generated for HR to assess and shortlist.
Remote administration is a key feature. How do you ensure the integrity of testing when it’s done remotely
The whole concept of EasyRecruit Plus is built on having objectivity, quality and time save in the initial screening process, and hence Remote administration becomes a requirement. The ATT, which is a multiple-choice test is a Remotely Proctored test, in which the candidate has to take the test in front of a screen. Being a proctored test, it is ensured that all the sights sound in the area of test is captured. If somebody is speaking or helping the candidate verbally or visually, the candidate toggles to some other tab, opens a book or notes or even shifts his eyes from the screen, every action and activity gets captured. And is part of the final report. The candidates are briefed about all these in the initial introduction and instructions. Violation if any is red flagged. All these add to the sanctity of the evaluation. IntAna any way is an evaluation which is done in front of a computer screen. The video of the proctoring as well as IntAna is captured and if HR wants to review it, they can definitely do it.
How does EasyRecruit Plus address concerns about bias and discrimination in the screening process?
One of the key features of EasyRecruit Plus is elimination of bias and discrimination in the screening process. Since the same test is being administered to all the candidates for a particular role, the results collated are more objective. The unconscious bias that at times creep in the initial shortlisting because of the HR recruiter coming from different back ground and different liking and biases is eliminated as machine has no bias and no discrimination. We have benchmarked our model of Sentiment Analysis in IntAna on the FER2013 Facial Expression Recognition 2013 dataset. The general accuracy of the FER2013 dataset is 70%, whereas after our training, we have been able to achieve 85% accuracy on the same.
Can you share a success story or example of a company benefiting from EasyRecruit Plus?
When we started with EasyRecruit Plus, we used the tools of ATT, IntAna and IBG (Background check) on the companies which are part of the group. ATT, IntAna, IBG was administered to the candidates for various roles in Organizations like Multifit, Academy for Fitness, Thinker Place, where the Organizations were able to cut down on screening time as well as bias in the screening process and were able to place the candidates in front of Senior Managers and final selection done. The candidates are settling down well in their roles. Back Ground check of ours, eliminated a possible issue of wrong hiring of a candidate in a very senior role, preventing immense loss to the Organization. PBPA (Psychometric Analysis) used for faculty hiring for the Management College helped getting the right fit. The outside Organizations have also started with EasyRecruit Plus and initial response is good and the benefits would be assessed soon.
How does EasyRecruit Plus save time and resources in the initial screening phase?
Just to reiterate, the initial screening is a time-consuming process where HR does not have any inkling of the calibre and fitment of the candidate, and thus they need to spend a minimum of 20 minutes per candidate to ascertain that they do not miss out on some of the aspects they are looking for. HR also has to take time of Line to screen candidates for specialized departments and position. And then there is always a possibility of the domain knowledge remaining untested. The tools of EasyRecruit Plus ensures that Cognitive aspects and Aptitude along with Domain basics, are tested even before the HR starts interacting with the candidates. This means objective assessment and the HR time getting freed for other activities, adding value to their work and organizations without losing on the quality of screening. In fact the screening would be more objective, time saving, easy for the candidate as he does not have to travel to meet the HR or block time for virtual interview in the initial screening, unbiased and more robust.
In which industries and roles has EasyRecruit Plus had the most significant impact, and where do you see its growth potential?
While, I would want EasyRecruit Plus to be used successfully in all the industries and roles, to begin with we are focussing and making impact in recruitment of customer facing roles for ATT and IntAna in the industries like Hospitality, BFSI, Retail etc. The customer-facing roles require cognitive skills as well as Domain expertise and aptitude, and hence they are the front runners for the use of these tools and have the most significant impact. IBG and PBPA are tools that can be used and are being promoted in all industries.
What’s your vision for the future of AI in recruitment, and what innovations can we expect from EasyRecruit Plus?
AI is a growing field and every day you come across something new. With new things coming in , the future of AI in recruitment is going to have a paradigm shift in the coming years. Some of the changes would be difficult to think about currently. Yesterday I was attending a forum of HR Managers, and when a question was put up to them whether they would want to have AI being used for Hiring and other HR processes, ninety percent plus said yes to the question. When the second question was put to them, how many of your Organizations are using AI in HR processes, the percentage dropped to less than Forty.
Going forward, what I would like to see is more Organizations and Industries using AI enabled tools in recruitment. EasyRecruit Plus would also like to come with more innovative products and would strive to get into back ward integration and forward integration for the entire life cycle of recruitment-right from The JD being created to final onboarding of candidate and his settling down in the Organization-all enabled by AI. Some of the tools would be innovative and a few may be extending the usage of the tools available. It may take some time, but getting there is the objective.
What advice would you give to HR professionals looking to use AI in hiring, and why should they consider EasyRecruit Plus as a solution?
The biggest advice I would give to the HR professionals is to ‘Start using AI’ in recruitment. It is going to be a great help and support to them. Right now I find a lot of apprehensions in the HR community-Do I really need it, Will it work for me, Will I be cut out from the recruitment process, will it mean loss of manpower in my department, Is it worth handing over the data to a third party – etc etc. I would like to tell them that a new technology always brings about a lots of concern in the stake holders-computerisation, digitization, e shopping etc to name a few. However, over a period of time, it has been proved that handled correctly , all these things are things, we can not live without . Most of the worries and fears were unfounded. So is it going to be for AI in recruitment. The rote work will be taken over by AI, Yes. But it also means that millions of man hour will be freed for HR to take on more productive and valuable work for the Organizations. It will open window for new roles and avenues, creating in fact a greater number of jobs, enriching the lives of HR professionals and thus the Organizations.
EasyRecruit Plus being a home-grown platform doing pioneering work at the onset of the revolution of AI in Recruitment, should become the partner in progress for them in Recruitment processes. The products are easy to use, come with convenience of support and very affordable for even small Organizations to start on the Tech and AI enabled recruitment journey.
To sum it up, EasyRecruit Plus is changing how companies hire people. Founded by Mr. Pankaj Sharma and Mr. Neeraj Sharma in the Lexicon Group, they use computer tools like ATT and IntAna to make hiring faster and fairer.
In the future, more companies will use these kinds of tools for hiring. It’ll be like having a helpful computer assistant in the hiring process. EasyRecruit Plus aims to keep making new tools to help with hiring from start to finish. Whether you’re a company looking for great employees or someone looking for a job, EasyRecruit Plus is here to make the hiring process better and easier.
