New Delhi, May 12 : As the enterprises of all sizes stare at talent crunch in new-age technologies, especially lack of AI skills, recruitment and hiring platforms like SquaREcruit have doubled down on creating a pool of skilled professionals for the generative AI era. According to IT industry's apex body Nasscom, India currently ranks first in terms of AI skill penetration and AI talent concentration globally. However, the AI skill shortage is now being felt across the spectrum. The demand for AI talent has grown 11 per cent in India over the last six months, driven by job demands in sectors like IT, retail, telecom, BFSI and advertising/market research sectors. By the end of 2023, AI is expected to create 2.3 million jobs, with the highest demand for roles such as AI developers, data scientists, and machine learning engineers. Kedar Deshpande, Founder and CEO and Sarath Sribhasyam, Co-founder and CTO of SaaS-based recruitment and talent management system development company SquaREcruit told IANS that chatbots can help recruiters automate the initial screening and scheduling process, reducing recruiter workload. According to them, SquaREcruit is helping clients to find right candidates 60 per cent faster and reducing cost of hire by 32 per cent. Here are the excerpts from an interview: Q: What is the mission and vision of SquaREcruit? What is your USP/how do you differentiate yourself from your peers? Deshpande: SquaREcruit's mission is to open up a world of easy recruitment management everywhere. Inefficiencies and a broken recruitment model has made the situation so bad that candidates and employers cannot find each other easily. SquaREcruit's vision is to provide a solution where job seekers get jobs faster, and hiring teams get the most suitable candidates quicker. SquaREcruit is an intelligent platform which automates everything from interview scheduling to candidate follow-up. Connected Architecture and all-in-one automation make SquaREcruit stand out from other players. Intelligent connected architecture helps customers to connect with their vendors, end-clients, and candidates on one unified platform enabling seamless communication throughout the hiring process. Q: Can you tell us about some of your customer success stories? How have you added value to them in terms of reduction in cost to hire, candidate engagement, reduction in time to fill, etc? Deshpande: SquaREcruit is domain agnostic and currently more than 150 companies are using various products of SquaREcruit in various geographies. One of our early adopters is a leader in digital transformation in the retail industry and also part of a large retainer of US. SquaREcruit deployment has made the entire hiring process automated. Connecting all stakeholders within the hiring process, sourcing channels like Recruitment Partners, Employee Referral and Career page made their entire sourcing seamless. With the connected architecture of SquaREcruit, more than 50 Recruitment Partners are seamlessly connected to clients enabling end to end communication and status updates reducing enormous time previously spent in doing it manually. One of the recent deployments of SquaREcruit is with a leading microfinance organisation with more than 6,000 employees in India. SquaREcruit helped to digitalise their entire hiring process including QR code based application receipt, evaluation workflows, in-built Video interviewing, house verification, location coordinate capturing, pre-employment training till onboarding. SquaREcruit is also integrated various other platforms like WhatsApp, background verification companies to give seamless hiring experience to clients. SquaREcruit is helping clients to find right candidates 60 per cent faster and reducing cost of hire by 32 per cent. Delivering all these benefits with an all-in-one intelligent hiring platform. Q: What emerging technologies most excite you when it comes to impacting the talent acquisition/hiring landscape? How will AI impact this space? Sribhasyam: Chatbots can help recruiters automate the initial screening and scheduling process. They can also provide candidates with real-time updates on their application status and answer frequently asked questions, improving the candidate experience and reducing recruiter workload. Predictive analytics can help recruiters make data-driven decisions throughout the hiring process. By analyzing past hiring data, recruiters can improve their sourcing strategy and reduce cost to hire. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) techniques greatly enhance the predictability of which candidates are most likely to be successful for a particular role. Video interview insights using AI / ML will help evaluate candidates' fitment and soft skill to company culture. Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) can help recruiters in enhancing onboarding experience for candidates, allowing them to experience a virtual tour of the workplace, perform simulated tasks, and interact with team members. This technology can help candidates get a better sense of the company culture and work environment, leading to more informed decision-making. Q: What has cloud technology and AWS enabled you to do better? Sribhasyam: Cloud technology has helped to focus completely on product architecture design and development without worrying about infrastructure nuances. AWS is well equipped with all the latest and state of art technology made easily available to our product engineering team. Q: In terms of business outcomes, what benefits have you experienced because of running on AWS? Sribhasyam: AWS gives us the ability to architect the infrastructure at a speed that is required to our changing product requirements. It has greatly helped us in reducing time to market. Some of the core technologies like RDS (Amazon Relational Database Service) has helped to manage our uptime commitments to our customers. /IANS