#305 From Resumes to AI: Revolutionizing Talent Acquisition in the Digital Era With Sharanu S. Shirol

0:00:01 - Mehmet
Hello and welcome back to a new episode of the CTO show with Mehmet today. I'm very pleased joining me from Bangalore, India. Sharanu, thank you very much for being on the show with me today. The way I love to do it is I keep it to my guests to introduce themselves and tell us a little bit more about what they are up to. So the floor is yours. 

0:00:20 - Sharanu
Yeah, thanks. Thanks for the warm welcome, mehmet, and I'm Sharanu. I represent the leadership team of Buzzwords and Innovations Group. I'm the Chief Digital Officer and I come from a completely HR Tech background. My previous assignments has been with Quest and Team Lease. I have over two decades of experience in HR space, largely dealing with staffing in order to be hiring, solving the employment and employability problems for the Indian region, specifically Nice, to be on the show. 

0:01:05 - Mehmet
My pleasure, Sharanu. Now the topic of HR and HR Tech and people recruitment and all this. It's always been something personally I'm interested in, because at some stage I was part of this game, being someone who was seeking the job. I spoke to HR people and now you're doing something also which is like a digitization of this. So first let's start a little bit in taking this specific market like the job market. How do you see it have evolved over the time? Because, of course, I remember when I was still fresh graduate from college, things were different. Today, things are completely different. But how have you seen this market evolve and what are the challenges that you are seeing today for individuals to get proper employment opportunities? 

0:02:10 - Sharanu
Yeah, I think you rightly put it. I think between you and me, we have seen a journey, maybe two decades ago, what kind of a job we were looking at. And the traditional, that is, at the pre-dawn of an internet era. Right, I mean almost. The internet was taking off, but the traditional jobs were to. You know, you graduate fresh out of the college, in terms of any of your engineering stream and non-engineering streams, you either get shortlisted as part of the campus or you come across, you migrate. If you're coming from a small town, you migrate to the larger cities and then possibly, you know, look at grading your skills and then, you know, try and give as many interviews and see how you could possibly, you know, get shortlisted in your jobs and then that's how your career used to take off in our times. But I think, over the period, I think the aspect of jobs, the Gen Z coming into the workforce, the internet really taking off and the network word that we live in, I think it has dramatically changed in a way. People seek jobs and I think the pandemic, I think, really took a new shape in terms of the employee preferences of a job. Right, basically, you're able to, you know, seek a job in a hybrid mode, so that means that your workforce became much more, you know, flexible enough or wanting to experiment. You have this gig economy, you know, gig workforce taking off in a manner which we had never imagined in, while each region thinks those jobs differently. Right, I mean a Uber job, you know, a Uber driver in US could be, you know, an additional income, but for the geographies like the Middle East or India, it could be a permanent job of sorts, but an end job. So I think the challenges you know the gig economy is facing today is it's a highly, you know, unregulated in that sense of the word, that the government are still thinking whether it's the right thing to do, or I mean, how do you treat your employees, how do you frame policies to it. 

I think the challenges that you have today's workforce, people who are, you know, trying to, you know, get into the job market I think the challenge that we're seeing is the disruption that is going on in terms of technology, whether it is an advent of AI, whether it is an advent of, you know, gig economy or the advent of automation. I think the technology or the kind of work expectation changes so rapidly. I think a lot of people struggle with skill mismatch. Right, a lot of skills you know go outdated and that means the change, the culture, change of the old word order of saying that, okay, once I get a job reasonably known and known work culture and I was able to do the same work you know for decades to. And now you have a situation wherein the work, the expectation, the work itself is evolving, the technology, the tools is evolving. I think that's where a lot of them are facing the heat of being up to date, becoming a lifelong learner of sorts. 

I think those are the key challenges you face. You know today's job. You know seekers are changing the market, evolving market. 

0:06:14 - Mehmet
Absolutely, and this is why I think, shalana, you know, whenever there are challenges, there are a lot of innovations that are happening and, from my humble observation. 

I would say, you know, usually we see a lot of hype behind HR tech. Now, the question that comes here is first of all, there are a lot of technologies. You mentioned some of them. So you mentioned, like AI, you mentioned you know all these things, but do you think that these strengths are really that have emerged, that are addressing the challenge of the job market, and, in European, which ones really they are making the impact? Why and this is you know, because I've spoken to a lot of people who are in this space, both as a CTOs, both, as you know, people who have also the recruitment experience and the thing that always used to come is, while we are doing all this transformation and you know you lead the, you know this in your position now so also how we can keep it human. So want to listen to your opinion about this one. 

0:07:25 - Sharanu
I think the real use cases, if you really look at it, where you know proof in the pudding right, if you really look at in the recruitment space, ai's ability to do matching, you know stack rank, the people remove the biases. Now, whether it is a region bias or agenda bias or any other biases that you put social economic biases that could exist as part of a recruiter. I think AI is maturing as they speak. You know there are really really good use cases wherein it is able to do a matching capabilities extremely, very well. You also have you know a trend in terms of really getting your labor market insights right. Your ability to line up you know it's a different thought, thought word of how do you hire a temp staff and a firm staff right In a temp staff. 

The seasonality, the ability to you know manage the trend, which were a lot of data were in Excel. You know your ability to actually pinpoint and say that, okay, here is a trend that is coming up, this is a seasonality. These are the kind of skills that would be working out and a lot of you know hiring or the onboarding experience, the automation aspect of the experience of onboarding right. Your ability to schedule the you know the job seekers, you know if you are interviewing, you do your schedules Everything today. I think it's able to manage the AI algorithms I've matured. 

In fact, some of us are actually in fact trying out, you know, conversational AI, wherein it really starts to break the barriers right. I mean, while you saw Samsung S24 having a brilliant real-time conversational AI in terms of actually switching languages, you know whether it is Spain to English or English to Hindi. There's so many aspects, I think those use cases for a blue-collared entry workers who are not comfortable talking to the recruiters, you know, or if we can bridge the communication gaps. Those are the real technology, you know aspects, interventions which would make the you know impact on the job market, you know, in terms of the hiring process. So I think that's the key area, you know use the technology for the sake of. 

We shouldn't be using the technology for the sake of using, but absolute use cases which will solve real-world problems. 

0:10:16 - Mehmet
Absolutely. And here I want to ask you Sharan about you know what are you doing. You know part of innovation groups, you know so how you are addressing. You know some of these issues you just mentioned within the job market. 

0:10:30 - Sharanu
Yeah, I think the first thing that we have done in the innovation group job app we are making it multilingual okay, so that you know a job seeker, whether it is Arabic or Hindi or any other languages that person is able to, you know, come to our app, download the app and start head start and configure. We have kept the functionality as bare minimum as possible in terms of registration, because traditionally, if you ask too many questions at the time of registration, it basically kills the interest of the person probably. You know, in fact, we have a human touch to it in terms of having a simple registration. A simple registration would be a name, phone number, get the sign in and then your backend team actually calls you and actually guides you on what is your requirement. So there's a certain degree of personalization we do in our app. We also have, you know, categorization in terms of saying that you know there's a white collar jobs available, there is a blue collar section available we are able to use, you know, certain area of interest. And then we are trying to you know input in terms of recommendation engine. Right, we're having a recommendation which engine which will smartly, you know, infuse the jobs of that you know which have a particular interest. 

We also try to give insights about the company, the kind of company. You know what kind of a company that person is expected to work, what is the kind of culture. So these are the you know small things, tactical and as well as strategic. You know pushes that we do, which helps us to gain traction. We are not into the number games. You know we don't want to be the monsters or the knockeries or the shines in terms of saying that, okay, we have X millions of users, we want it to be qualitatively good profiles, our customer should like it. That means our ability to match the job just in time so that the job seekers are happy and the you know the job, the providers, are happy. So we are not in the number game saying that, okay, we have a profile of millions of profiles, please go and search without a context. So we try to get it as much as you know contextual, as much as assist known candidates, so that the conversion ratios improve and you know it is a win-win for both the parties. 

0:13:10 - Mehmet
That's amazing, sharanu, but out of curiosity, I want to ask you a question which is might be a controversial question. So we talk about technology and you're leading something which is I'm passionate about. So anything which have digitalization in it, you know, and having things streamlined, I love it. Now, why do you think, with all the technology advancement, that happened every single? And because you said you have this and this is what I like every time, you know, someone comes to me and say, hey, I applied for a job. They go to, you know, probably they see it on LinkedIn or somewhere like this. Then they go to that company HR platform and then, you know, they tell me I have to fill. You know, like lines and lines, question after question. Why this information? If you think about it, it's first, it is in the CV, right, it's in the resume and it's available publicly. So do you agree with me on this point? Do you? Do you think like we really fell behind when it comes to really digitizing the recruitment process? 

0:14:19 - Sharanu
Absolutely. 

I think the CV passing has not really matured into a resume reading or the contextual. That's where there is a use case for the AI, saying that if you are able to interpret the resume of sorts and whatever the resume, whatever the shape a person has, a profile, whether it is a Word document, whether it is a PDF document or a text, a simple text your ability to make contextual analysis of the skillset that a person has written, and also an interaction with a Word which non-evasively captures the skills that a person is interested in and that together can actually build a CV that addresses the customer's needs. Obviously, there are two ways the job works. Hr opens up a job positions at a customer and they are bombarded with millions of CVs versus your ability to actually get a CV for which your job, which means that your ability to interpret your job requirement in a contextual manner and stack crank your profiles short listed profiles. That makes the job easier rather than actually sending taking it from the portal, sending it or candidates applying without the context. 

So those are the innovation disruptions that are not. They are being developed, but they are still, in my mind, not fully matured. I have known personally some of the platforms which have begin to understand this critical area. In fact, people are purely focusing on how do I build a skill repository or how do I read the profile, the science behind reading the profile and giving it to the customer in the language that a customer understands. That is the area where a lot of trust is being done on. Many startups are doing some interesting stuff on this area. 

0:16:41 - Mehmet
Perfect. So I like this approach. Now tell me more about. You mentioned some of the technologies, so are you leveraging something like machine learning, artificial intelligence, to do these things? Because, to your point now you just mentioned, if I'm someone who's going to recruit, of course I would be bombarded with a lot of CVs and while maybe if I have a pool which I can go to, a kind of a chat GPT style thing, and say, hey, short list for me two, three people who has, let's say, full stack developer skills, or I don't know, it might be something more Absolutely, you can be more about that, yeah. 

0:17:29 - Sharanu
In fact, you can go one step ahead. Actually, if your job description is articulate enough, then you can take away the aspect of recruiter trying to search a job. You can either hook onto the database, whether it is external databases or your own internal databases, use machine learning algorithms which would search contextual in nature, like, for example, if it says full stack, a person with a full stack would be possibly knowing there is an implicit skill and explicit skills. Basically, you are saying that a person expected to know Java would have a complementary skills like JavaScript, html, whatever it is, or the backend. So your ability to those. You have to leave it on machines in terms of training the model. 

On the job description in itself, if you get the job description right, it's always the case that where people actually struggle in sourcing the CVs are people don't actually the recruiters don't apply their mind in terms of actually articulating the job description. 

People just take on a phone call saying that I want a developer, I want a full stack developer, but the contextual skills, there is an implicit skills, the explicit skills. So you are articulating it and then give AI model a chance to interpret that. Then you have a much, much better way of actually the moment you post a job description. It can look up to database in order of priority. You can look up to save your cost. You can look up to your internal database and if your internal database doesn't find out, you can look it to the create hooks whether it is a robotic process, automation hooks or API hooks go into the external databases, get it and stack rank them. That is more important that automatically you stack rank the employees with the beta edge of the skill set, their ability to join, what is the notice period, and if you do that then it becomes much faster turnaround time for you to close the recruitment loops. 

0:19:42 - Mehmet
That's great, saranu. Now I would come to a point which you touched a little bit on it, but I want you to dissect it a little bit more for us. And what are you doing with the app that you have developed? One of the things and back in the days I faced it, a lot of people faced it, and if you put a hashtag called recruitment or HR, whatever the numbers one complaint we discussed it even here with both HR tech professionals and with full recruiters I mean recruitment agency owners in the US the number one complaint that comes usually is communication. 

Communication means you know, sometimes there is this first, first, you apply for a job and you never know what happened, right? The second complaint okay, we got like a first call, first touch, and then again nothing happened. And then, even later on, even if you go to second, third, now again, this is maybe another topic about how long it's the process is. But I mean, communication has been always a problem and let's face it, it's not something to you know, hide ourself behind it. There is a communication problem. Everyone knows that every single person I meet who's looking for a job, his or her first complaint have been ghosted, you know. So what are you doing to solve this problem? 

0:21:15 - Sharanu
Wonderful and a brilliant question actually. So I think you know the way to possibly solve and the way we are approaching. It is a lot of us don't? You know a lot of the platforms, of the shell platforms, if you take it, or a traditional, you know workers a lot of them. 

Don't necessarily pay attention to the communication charter. That means when you define a workflow, say saying that, okay, you just mentioned that. Okay, you have three rounds, three technical rounds, followed by a customer direct interaction or whatever it is. So your ability to actually do a multi-channel not necessarily omni-channel, multi-channel, that means your ability to define the workflows of friends, saying that, okay, if you have three stages of interviews, what kind of communication you would have? Right, the CV hitting your database is one communication. Your CV being viewed by the recruiter is another. You know alert in terms of communicating back your CV. You know matched stack, ranked intelligence. Saying that what is a good chance that you have? Is there a modification to your CV? Required those attributes because the profile builder will actually take over and say that, okay, these are the. You know there are better skills. If we want to know, we can have a conversation. It's either a chart TTP style conversation or automated dialer dialing up the job recruiter and trying to say that, okay, ask a pertinent question so that those can get embedded back into the CV. So every stage wise. You know, if you have enabled it, then it doesn't. You know it doesn't necessarily become a memory play for the recruiter saying that, oh, hang on, I sent a profile, I need to communicate If workflows are deeply embedded with multi-channel, whether it is WhatsApp. 

In fact, in our research we found that the reach of an email versus SMS versus WhatsApp, we were able to cover 75 to 80% reach with WhatsApp. Versus the email email, hardly people bothered to look at it. Sms people, people just ignored it. We saw, you know, whatsapp was one of the you know, good communication in terms of reach, because everybody has it and traditionally, people, people use the usage of WhatsApp is so high that people generally tend to see your messages and you can actually, you know, have bot interaction chart, ttp style bot interactions within the WhatsApp to actually, you know, ask pertinent questions and every stages, querying every stages. So your ability to actually reach, make, create a bridge of communication directly with recruiters. That becomes much more easy and it doesn't necessarily overwhelm if it is organized in a much better fashion. That's that's my you know, that's how we are working towards it. 

0:24:19 - Mehmet
You know. But you mentioned something crucial and I think it's on the recruiter whoever is recruiting, they have, as you mentioned, they have to define their you know workflow. I love this because, you know, I feel at least someone would understand. And if it would be better if they put timeframes, you know, I think this will will save everybody's time. So let's say I'm just giving an example let's say I'm hiring again, for this time for a marketing person, right? So I can tell them okay, so you're going to do three rounds of interviews. Between each round, like maybe there is one week, three days, whatever it is, we're planning to hire someone on, let's say, 1st of April, right? So when these things are clear and I think you know, even from person who sits on the recruitment side, whether it's an outsourced recruiter or an in-house talent acquisition person their life will become easy because they don't have to keep replying these emails to your point like, hey, what happened? Ah, I'm waiting, so, so everything will be clear. So I think this is very good. 

And the other thing, like it's funny enough, you know, when I try to explain this to for us, you know people living here in the region, in Gulf in India, you know like we're used to WhatsApp. So when I try to explain this to people in the US and North America, mainly so they fight really I say yes, we do a lot of business using WhatsApp nowadays, like it became the de facto communication tool, so I'm happy that you have integrated this. Now, out of curiosity, you know how was the reaction from both sides when because you mentioned, like the chatbots and people usually they, I can tell in some verticals when they started to implement these chatbots. It didn't do a very good job, of course, but that was like way before the chat, gpts and the Gemini and all these technologies came. So how did you see the interaction of the users with the chatbots? 

0:26:29 - Sharanu
I think, if I were to take my experiences much before the chat world and post chat, the interaction used to be like flat. Like you know, the earlier interaction in the limitations of the chat was that it used to be like a FAQ right, you know, question A, question B, question C, these are the possibilities, maximum question I, you know the recruiter get to decide, saying that, okay, I can possibly get 10 questions and and the chat GP tries to answer. I'm not the chat GP, sorry. The normal chatbots try to answer the pre prepared answers and it doesn't make sense. You know the job seeker is quite frustrated. When a job seeker uses a personalized question, contextual question, it says please get back to you know, we will get back to you. Or the chat end conversation saying that please, this is a common email ID, support ID, and go ahead, and you know, go ahead and you know, just write a mail. 

In terms of solving the problem, of course we solved even that by directing the traffic to a human agent. That means if you have run out of all the possibilities of your chatbot questions, you tend to redirect the traffic back to a human agent, which could be a recruiter or any other agent who is authorized to respond to it. We kind of managed it, but I think with the advent of the Germanies of the world or the chat DTP of the world, I think our ability to converse have a natural conversation which could almost mimic closer to human interaction, with little or no human intervention. I think that something is dramatically improved. In fact we were just testing in one of my HCM product just a couple of week back. The easiest thing that we did for training the chatbot was to have all the HR policy documents taken out. 

The organization had about 10, 15 policy documents and the policy documents were put into the chat. 

Dtp 3.5 model and you could easily have a free flow conversation with it. In fact, you could put something we wouldn't have thought few years back right. I could easily question the chat saying that give me a leave plan which is the longest, which utilizes the holidays and the weekends, and the AI took over and gave me the best plans, whether it is the Bakrits or the Christmas or the New Year's, trying to combine the leaves with the and so many use cases. Right, I think that's the key difference that we see, that the technology is becoming more democratized in that sense of the word. I think it's the utilization that eventually people will kick in using these models rapidly and scale up their workflows increasingly. 

0:29:53 - Mehmet
That's good to hear, shirano, now, because you are in the heart of all this. 

A lot of debate and a lot of ideas, a lot of, I would say, opinions came up outside the show and with me when I interview people who are expert both in AI and HR and technology, in emerging tech, and all this from what you are seeing, because what you have done, you've done something fantastic because you've brought this technology right and you're trying to modernize and digitize and streamline this. 

At the same time, there is a market shift currently because of the AI. So how have you seen or how do you expect in the future, ai will be affecting the skills that we need in the future, because I think again, as someone who provide this service to your customers, so you must be having, not a crystal ball, but at least because you have a real-time vision on what's happening, so what you can tell us about that and your expectations, of course, yeah, in fact, the other day I was just scraping through the World Economic Forum report for next five years, that is, 23 to 27, and it gave interesting insights, region-wise, whether it is how does the job market behaves in the Middle East, how does it in India? 

0:31:21 - Sharanu
And, if you really look, at in a crystal gazing if you were to do it, not fully accurate, but you see the obviously jobs will be created. Jobs will be lost over the next five years. And what are the jobs that are going to be created? You are traditionally looking at the big data, the AI, the analytics, all those and also, obviously, with the Paris Accord implementation, you have a lot of shift in the green energy technology, the renewable sources of energy, the market for that to create labor, workforce there In terms of in India, you can see the manufacturing really kicking up. In the West I mean in the Middle East you can actually see the traditional construction really picking up in terms of the projects and the environmental engineering. All those things. We see that. We clearly see that there are jobs that are going to be created. 

E-commerce goes without saying and, in fact, all the jobs that will be taken out is anything that can be done on the desk right, whether it is account keeping or data entry jobs or anything. So I think that presents a very interesting dynamics for the job seeker right, the job seeker really needs to understand these trends. That means our ability to give interesting trends back to the users or job seekers, saying that where is the industry going? Where is the industry headed? Have some thought of research papers published out to the job market, secret job seekers, so that the and also give today's Gen Z has a, you know, attention span in less than few minutes, right, or probably in less than minutes. So you, from a learning platform, you have to go towards the micro learning platform. 

Capabilities. That means your ability to give a short, you know, ability to learn new skill sets, adopt new skill set, changing, ever changing needs, which requires reskilling and upskilling. Those are the platforms interventions really, you know the service providers have to really work on. You know, the skilling, the skilling is going to be the biggest challenge in coming years because the rapid pace of skill, you know skilling is not happening. Either people are leaving, falling off from the job market, or, you know, new people are coming in back. 

0:33:46 - Mehmet
So yeah, and just out of curiosity, I'm looking forward to start to see the Gen Z in the managerial positions and director positions, because I want to see how they will handle all this. 

0:34:00 - Sharanu
Sharan, by the way, I've seen something you know like. 

0:34:03 - Mehmet
you've really have good footprint, I think, even here in the GCC region, right so, and congratulations on this. So usually this is the final question I ask Is there anything you would like to add, maybe something I didn't touch on and where people can find more about your platform and app? 

0:34:26 - Sharanu
I think you know we in Innovations Group you know we are actually striving hard to be a true global blue-colored workforce kind of a thing. I mean, we're trying to really solve problems and we are trying to see if we can form community based on skills right across the board. Because I think the biggest challenge of building a tech platform is how do you engage them right. You know what is in it for the customers, what is in it for the job seekers to stay in your platforms. That means customers don't come to you if there are no job seekers. Job seekers don't come to you if they're not enough customers and you need to have a right. You know talents as well as have some sort of a move beyond job offering to the training recommendations, your ability to create communities, engage them. Those are the important dynamics in the job market to stay relevant. I think that's my limited point. 

0:35:33 - Mehmet
I would like to add yeah, where we can find about the app and the portal, can I know? 

0:35:40 - Sharanu
The app is already on the stores. It's called as Innovation Group. That's the, in fact, pr releasing multiple languages as we go along, maybe a week away to actually have Arabic language translation going on. So those are the things that we're innovating. I think we will continue to make it simpler. As I said, we are not in the number game, but we want quality and quantity. Quality is key for us to make them engage. Also, we are doing a personal touch by reaching out to each candidate who is registering it so that we understand what are the job seekers need and take the feedback continuously from the job seekers and customers. 

0:36:34 - Mehmet
That's great. I will put a link in the show notes so people can find the portal and the app. Sharan. Thank you very much for joining me today. I really enjoyed because this is one of the topics Again. I like to keep discussing it with people like yourself. With the experience that you have. I'm happy to see we have advancement in that specific use case around HR and HR Tech, of course. So thank you very much for sharing your insights and congratulations on the achievements that you have done so far with Innovation Group, and thank you very much for being with us. This is how we usually end every episode, so this is for the audience. 

If you just discovered this podcast. Thank you very much for passing by. I hope you enjoyed. Please subscribe. We are available on all podcasting platforms. We are available also on YouTube If you are one of the loyal followers that keeps sending me their notes and suggestions. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it and keep them coming If you are interested to be on the show. You're doing something special. You are disrupting an industry. Maybe you have an idea. Just you want to share it with people. So don't hesitate to reach out to me. This is a platform where you can share your ideas, because we want to have insights, ideas and innovation on this platform. So thank you very much and we will be again in a new episode very soon. Thank you, now you're on it.