Month: October 2020

Post – Pandemic Recruiting Practices

Posted on by Subhadeep Datta

Prabhakar Kumar Mandal

The COVID pandemic has transformed business as we know it. This includes recruitment. Right from the pre-hire activities to the post-hire ones, no hiring practices will be exempt from change we’re witnessing. To maintain a feasible talent acquisition program now and in the coming years, organizations face a persistent need to reimagine the way they do things at every step of the hiring funnel. 

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In my perspicacity, following are the key aspects to look at:

1. Transforming Physical Workspaces

Having employees be physically present at workplace is fraught with challenges now. We envision many companies transitioning into a fully or partially remote workforce to save on costs and give employees more flexibility.

This means companies that maintain a physical headquarter will be paying much closer attention to the purpose those spaces really serve—and so will the candidates. The emphasis now will be on spaces of necessity—meeting areas, spaces for collaborative work, and comfortable, individual spaces for essential workers who need to be onsite. 

2. Traveling for interviews will be an obsolete

It’s going to be a while before non-essential travel assumes its pre-corona importance. In a study of traveler attitudes spanning the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Australia, the portion of people who said they intended to restrict their travel over the next year increased from 24% in the first half of March to 40% in the second half of March.

Candidates will be less willing than they once were to jump on a plane for an in-person interview when a video conference is a viable alternative. 

3. Demand for workers with cross-trained skills will increase

Skills-based hiring has been on the rise now and will keep increasing as businesses strive to do more with a lesser headcount. We anticipate organizations to increasingly seek out candidates who can wear multiple hats. 

Additionally, as machines take on more jobs that were once reserved for people, we will see even greater demand for uniquely human skills like problem solving and creative thinking. Ravi Kumar, president of Infosys Ltd., summed it up perfectly in an interview with Forbes: “machines will handle problem-solving and humans will focus on problem finding.” 

4. Recruiting events will look a lot different 

It’s unclear when large-scale, in-person gatherings like job fairs will be able to resume, but it will likely be a while. We will likely see most events move to a virtual model, which will not only reduce risk but significantly cut costs for those involved. This may open new opportunities to allocate that budget to improve some of the other pertinent recruiting practices on this list. 

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5. Time to hire may change dramatically

The current approach is likely to change. For example, that most people who took a new job last year were not searching for one: Somebody came and got them. Businesses seek to fill their recruiting funnel with as many candidates as possible, especially ‘passive candidates’, who are not looking to move. Frequently employers advertise jobs that do not exist, hoping to find people who might be useful later or in a different framework. We are always campaigning the importance of minding our recruiting metrics, which can help us not only to hire more competently but identify interruptions in our recruiting process.

Are there steps in the hiring process, like screening or onboarding, that can be accelerated to balance things out? Are there certain recruitment channels that typically yield faster hires than others that can be prioritized? These are important questions to ask as you analyze the pandemic’s impacts to your hiring funnel. 

6. How AI can be leveraged to screen candidates?

AI is helping candidates get matched with the right companies. There are over 100 parameters to assess the candidates. This reduces wastage of time, money, and resources. The candidates are marked on their core strengths. This helps the recruitment manager to place them in the apt role.

The current situation presents the perfect opportunity for companies to adopt new tools. Organizations can reassess their recruitment processes and strategies through HR-aligned technology.

Post-pandemic hiring strategy

This pertains more to the industries most impacted by the pandemic, like businesses in the hospitality sector, outdoor dining, and travel to name a few. Many of the applicants in this domain have chosen to make the shift towards more promising or booming businesses.

However, once the pandemic blows over and restrictions are lifted, you can expect suffering sectors to come back with major recruitment changes and fierce competition over top talent.

Companies that take this time to act by cultivating relationships and connections with promising talent in their sphere, will have the advantage of gathering valuable data from probable candidates.

About the Author –

Prabhakar is a recruiter by profession and cricketer by passion. His focus is on hiring for the infra verticle. He hails from a small town in Bihar was brought up in Pondicherry. Prabhakar has represented Pondicherry in U-19 cricket (National School Games). In his free time he enjoys reading, working on his health and fitness and spending time with his family and friends.

Quantum Computing

Posted on by Subhadeep Datta
Vignesh Ramamurthy

Vignesh Ramamurthy

In the MARVEL multiverse, Ant-Man has one of the coolest superpowers out there. He can shrink himself down as well as blow himself up to any size he desires! He was able to reduce to a subatomic size so that he could enter the Quantum Realm. Some fancy stuff indeed.

Likewise, there is Quantum computing. Quantum computers are more powerful than supercomputers and tech companies like Google, IBM, and Rigetti have them.

Google had achieved Quantum Supremacy with its Quantum computer ‘Sycamore’ in 2019. It claims to perform a calculation in 200 seconds which might take the world’s most powerful supercomputer 10,000 years. Sycamore is a 54-qubit computer. Such computers need to be kept under special conditions with temperature being close to absolute zero.

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Quantum Physics

Quantum computing falls under a discipline called Quantum Physics. Quantum computing’s heart and soul resides in what we call as Qubits (Quantum bits) and Superposition. So, what are they?

Let’s take a simple example, imagine you have a coin and you spin it. One cannot know the outcome unless it falls flat on a surface. It can either be a head or a tail. However, while the coin is spinning you can say the coin’s state is both heads and tails at the same time (qubit). This state is called Superposition.

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So, how do they work and what does it mean?

We know bits are a combination of 0s and 1s (negative or positive states). Qubits have both at the same time. These qubits, in the end, pass through something called “Grover Operator” which washes away all the possibilities, but one.

Hence, from an enormous set of combinations, a single positive outcome remains, just like how Doctor Strange did in the movie Infinity War. However, what is important is to understand how this technically works.

We shall see 2 explanations which I feel could give an accurate picture on the technical aspect of it.

In Quantum Mechanics, the following is as explained by Scott Aaronson, a Quantum scientist from the University of Texas, Austin.

Amplitude – an amplitude of a positive and a negative state. These could also be considered as an amplitude for being 0, and also an amplitude for being 1. The goal for an amplitude here is to make sure that amplitudes leading to wrong answers cancel each other out. Hence this way, amplitude with the right answer remains the only possible outcome.

Quantum computers function using a process called superconductivity. We have a chip the size of an ordinary computer chip. There are little coils of wire in the chip, nearly big enough to see with the naked eye. There are 2 different quantum states of current flowing through these coils, corresponding to 0 and 1, or the superpositions of them.

These coils interact with each other, nearby ones talk to each other and generate a state called an entangled state which is an essential state in Quantum computing. The way qubits interact are completely programmable, so we can send electrical signals to these qubits, and tweak them according to our requirements. This whole chip is placed in a refrigerator with a temperature close to absolute zero. This way superconductivity occurs which makes it to briefly behave as qubits.

Following is the explanation given according to ‘Kurzgesagt — In a Nutshell’, a YouTube channel.

We know a bit is either a 0 or 1. Now, 4 bits mean 0000 and so on. In a qubit, 4 classical bits can be in one of the 2^4 different configurations at once. That is 16 possible combinations out of which we can use just one. 4 qubits in position can be in all those 16 combinations at once.

This grows exponentially with each extra qubit. 20 qubits can hence store a million values in parallel. As seen, these entangled states interact with each other instantly. Hence while measuring one entangled qubit, we can directly deduce the property of its partners.

A normal logic gate gets a simple set of inputs and produces one definite output. A quantum gate manipulates an input of superpositions, rotates probabilities, and produces another set of superpositions as its output.

Hence a quantum computer sets up some qubits, applies quantum gates to entangle them, and manipulates probabilities. Now it finally measures the outcome, collapsing superpositions to an actual sequence of 0s and 1s. This is how we get the entire set of calculations performed at the same time.

What is a Grover Operator?

We now know that while taking one entangled qubit, it is possible to easily deduce properties for all the partners. Grover algorithm works because of these quantum particles being entangled. Since one entangled qubit is able to vouch for the partners, it iterates until it finds the solution with higher degrees of confidence.

What can they do?

As of now, quantum computing hasn’t been implemented in real-life situations just because the world right now doesn’t have such an infrastructure.

Assuming they are efficient and ready to be used. We can make use of it in the following ways: 1) Self-driving cars are picking up pace. Quantum computers can be used on these cars by calculating all possible outcomes on the road. Apart from sensors to reduce accidents, roads consist of traffic signals. A Quantum computer will be able to go through all the possibilities of how traffic signals

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function, the time interval, traffic, everything, and feed these self-driving cars with the single best outcome accordingly. Hence, what would result is nothing but a seamless commute with no hassles whatsoever. It’ll be the future as we see in movies.

2) If AI is able to construct a circuit board after having tried everything in the design architecture, this could result in promising AI-related applications.

Disadvantages

RSA encryption is the one that underpins the entire internet. It could breach it and hackers might steal top confidential information related to Health, Defence, personal information, and other sensitive data. At the same time, it could be helpful to achieve the most secure encryption, by identifying the best one amongst every possible encryption. This can be made by finding out the most secure wall to break all the viruses that could infect the internet. If such security is made, it would take a completely new virus to break it. But the chances are very minuscule.

Quantum computing has its share of benefits. However, this would take years to be put to use. Infrastructure and the amount of investment to make is humongous. After all, it could only be used when there are very reliable real-time use cases. It needs to be tested for many things. There is no doubt that Quantum Computing will play a big role in the future. However, with more sophisticated technology, comes more complex problems. The world will take years to be prepared for it.

References:

About the Author –

Vignesh is part of the GAVel team at GAVS. He is deeply passionate about technology and is a movie buff.

Reduce Test Times and Increase Coverage with AI & ML

Posted on by Subhadeep Datta

Kevin Surace

Chairman & CTO, Appvance.ai

With the need for frequent builds—often many times in a day—QEs can only keep pace through AI-led testing. It is the modern approach that allows quality engineers to create scripts and run tests autonomously to find bugs and provide diagnostic data to get to the root cause.

AI-driven testing means different things to different QA engineers. Some see it as using AI for identifying objects or helping create script-less testing; some consider it as autonomous generation of scripts while others would think in terms of leveraging system data to create scripts which mimic real user activity.

Our research shows that teams who are able to implement what they can in scripts and manual testing have, on average, less than 15% code, page, action, and likely user flow coverage. In essence, even if you have 100% code coverage, you are likely testing less than 15% of what users will do. That in itself is a serious issue.

Starting in 2012, Appvance set out to rethink the concept of QA automation. Today our AIQ Technology combines tens of thousands of hours of test automation machine learning with the deep domain knowledge, the essential business rules, each QE specialist knows about their application. We create an autonomous expert system that spawns multiple instances of itself that swarm over the application testing at the UX and at the API-levels. Along the way these Intelligences write the scripts, hundreds, and thousands of them, that describes their individual journeys through the application.

And why would we need to generate so many tests fully autonomously. Because applications today are 10X the size they were just ten years ago. But your QE team doesn’t have 10X the number of test automation engineers. And because you have 10X less time to do the work than 10 years ago. Just to keep pace with the dev team requires each quality engineer to be 100X more productive than they were 10 years ago.

Something had to change; that something is AI.

AI-testing in two steps

We leveraged AI and witnessed over 90% reduction in human effort to find the same bugs. So how does this work?

It’s really a two-stage process.

First, leveraging key AI capabilities in TestDesigner, Appvance’s codeless test creation system, we make it possible to write scripts faster, identify more resilient accessors, and substantially reduce maintenance of scripts.

With AI alongside you as you implement an automated test case, you get a technology that suggests the most stable accessors and constantly improves and refines them. It also creates “fallback accessors” when tests run and hit an accessor change enabling the script to continue even though changes have been made to the application. And finally, the AI can self-heal scripts which must and update them with new accessors without human assistance. These AI-based, built-in technologies give you the most stable scripts every time with the most robust accessor methodologies and self-healing. Nothing else comes close.

The final two points above deal with autonomous generation of tests. To beat the queue and crush it, you have to get a heavy lift for finding bugs. And as we have learnt, go far beyond the use cases that a business analyst listed. Job one is to find bugs and prioritize them, leveraging AI to generate tests autonomously.

Appvance’s patented AI engine has already been trained with millions of actions. You will teach it the business rules of your application (machine learning). It will then create real user flows, take every possible action, discover every page, fill out every form, get to every state, and validate the most critical outcomes just as you trained it to do. It does all this without writing or recording a single script. We call this is ‘blueprinting’ an application. We do this at every new build. Multiple instances of the AI will spin up, each selecting a unique path through the application, typically finding 1000s or more flows in a matter of minutes. When complete, the AI hands you the results including bugs, all the diagnostic data to help find the root cause, and the reusable test-scripts to repeat the bug. A further turn of the crank can refine these scripts into exact replicas of what production users are doing and apply them to the new build. Any modern approach to continuous testing needs to leverage AI in both helping QA engineers create scripts as well as autonomously create tests so that both parts work together to find bugs and provide data to get to the root cause. That AI driven future is available today from Appvance.

About the Author –

Kevin Surace is a highly lauded entrepreneur and innovator. He’s been awarded 93 worldwide patents, and was Inc. Magazine Entrepreneur of the Year, CNBC Innovator of the Decade, a Davos World Economic Forum Tech Pioneer, and inducted into the RIT Innovation Hall of Fame. Kevin has held leadership roles with Serious Energy, Perfect Commerce, CommerceNet and General Magic and is credited with pioneering work on AI virtual assistants, smartphones, QuietRock and the Empire State Building windows energy retrofit.