A postdoc 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

Interests
  • Talent acquisition: Talent acquisition is a complex decision-making process that includes creating requirements, identifying, attracting, 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.
Work/Project history

2/2025–1/2026 Reilu Rekrytointi project at Tampere University

  • Along with Matti Laukkarinen and Heidi Lehtovaara, we aim to enhance recruiters’ digital competencies by providing practical, Finnish-language guidance on the ethical and effective use of digital and AI-powered recruitment tools
  • The project is coordinated by the Work Research Center at Tampere University and funded by the AMI Foundation
  • We develop accessible learning materials, including:
    • Webinars
    • Podcasts
    • Written content published across various industry platforms

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

  • Focused on fairness and ethics in the digitalization of talent acquisition.

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.
Selected publications

2024

2023

2022

2021

2019

Other texts online (in Finnish)

Tekoälyn riskit rekrytoinnissa: parhaat hakijat jäävät jo etukäteen rannalle? (MustRead, 18.6.2024)

Väitöksen esittely: Sami Koivunen: Digitalisaatio hyödyttää ja haastaa rekrytointialan ammattilaisia (Tampereen yliopisto, 2.2.2024)

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

Algoritmit rekrytoinnin tukena – yhdenvertaisuutta vai epätasa-arvoa? (Politiikasta.fi, 21.2.2022)

Interviews

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

Reviewer activity
Talks

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