Sami Koivunen

A researcher studying the digitalization of talent acquisition. I’m part of the wonderful Technology × Social Interaction research group, led by Prof. Thomas Olsson.

Feel free to reach out!

Contact: sami {dot} koivunen {at} tuni {dot} fi

Talent acquisition: Talent acquisition is a complex decision-making process that includes creating requirements, identifying talent, attracting talent, and assessing talent. The process can be improved at the strategic level, but also through tactical and practical details.
Digital tools and AI supporting talent acquisition: I’ve studied professionals’ experiences and practices with applicant tracking systems, career sites, chatbots, and interviewing tools. This includes how they use these tools to support their decision-making and how they experience the design and user interface of these tools.
Fairness and ethics in talent acquisition: Digitalization introduces various pitfalls and tensions that affect fairness, perceived autonomy, and power balances among stakeholders (including candidates, recruiters, and managers).
Developing practices to reach talent with a foreign background: This has been one of my key areas of interest since 2023. It includes considering diversity in the early stages, attracting and identifying global talent, screening diverse applications, and ensuring competitiveness as an organization, municipality, and country.
Improving decision-making with diverse stakeholders: Stakeholders often include recruiters, hiring managers, and technology developers. The tools do not often support or provide opportunities to collaborate and make decisions together.

1–12/2023 Academic project TRUST-M at Tampere University

Focused on how organizations approach, attract, identify, and assess talent with a foreign background using digital tools.
Supervised a master’s thesis
Gave presentations about conducting research and AI in recruitment.

1–12/2022 Personal grant from Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation

Continued to focus on fairness and ethics in the digitalization talent acquisition
Gave a lecture for the master’s course ”Technology-Mediated Sociality and Communication”
Published texts also in Finnish on the use of algorithms in recruitment.

4/2020–12/2021 Academic project FairMatch at Tampere University

10/2017–4/2020 Academic projects Big Match and Intelligent Society at Tampere University

Focused on how organizations conduct recruitment processes with digital tools, how they approach assembling innovation teams with digital tools, and how HRM professionals experience using chatbots in recruitment.

2024

2023

2022

Koivunen, Sami, Saara Ala-Luopa, Thomas Olsson, and Arja Haapakorpi (2022). The March of Chatbots into Recruitment: Recruiters’ Experiences, Expectations, and Design Opportunities. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 1-30.
Koivunen, Sami, and Heidi Lehtovaara (2022) Algoritmit työnhaussa ja rekrytoinnissa. Työelämän tutkimus 20(2). 273-285.

2021

Koivunen, Sami, Ekaterina Olshannikova, and Thomas Olsson (2021). Understanding Matchmakers’ Experiences, Principles and Practices of Assembling Innovation Teams. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 30(4), 1-28.

2019

Koivunen, Sami, Thomas Olsson, Ekaterina Olshannikova, and Aki Lindberg (2019). Understanding Decision-Making in Recruitment: Opportunities and Challenges for Information Technology. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 3(GROUP), 1-22.

Other Texts Online (In Finnish)

Tiivistelmä yhdestä tieteellistä artikkelista: Rekrytoinnin tutkiminen koskettaa jossain vaiheessa lähes jokaista (Tampereen yliopisto, 4.4.2023)

Interviews

It’s a match! (Suomen Kuvalehti, 16.3.2023)

Reviewer activity

Talks

Rekrytointi 2024 event, ”the role of AI in recruitment”