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Relying on AI Recruitment for Accurate, Personalized, and Untapped Hiring

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AI is projected to catapult from a $643.7 million market today to $36.8 billion by 2025[1]. Bersin by Deloitte calls it one of the ten major trends changing everything about how we build and manage the world of work.

As the general population is becoming more aware of the presence of AI in their daily lives, AI recruitment is set to make fresh waves in the employment market. While it’s being accepted by many, its potential and reliability are still questioned by a significant chunk. Moreover, its ethical implications are also debated because hiring, unlike most business operations, has ‘people’ at the core. People like you, I and those our loved ones. What makes it trickier is that the recruiters themselves have been susceptible to thinking that dependence on AI recruiting will replace them completely over time. It’s a sensitive tug-of-war between efficiency and human touch!

David Green, IBM’s Global Director of People Analytics Solutions, says[2], “ 21st Century HR isn’t about playing it safe; it’s about being bold and forward-thinking. It’s about capitalizing on technological advances, new thinking and applying a data-driven and analytical approach to inform people decisions.”

With the same belief, this guide aims to paint a clear picture of AI recruitment to realize its full potential.

We will take the myths of AI recruitment being inaccurate, impersonal and rudimentary head-on by peeping behind the curtains of its decision-making. We’ll also delve into the ethical, legal and social concerns of making AI recruitment normal. All this validated with statements from industry experts in HR and Tech.

Before jumping right into it, let’s formally define AI recruiting.

What is AI Recruiting?

AI recruiting is the use of artificial intelligence (AI) technology to streamline, automate, and make decisions in the hiring process. A range of recruitment activities can be relied upon by recruiting software that uses AI, such as sourcing candidates from online communities, resume screening, candidate matching, employment market intelligence, scheduling, candidate engagement and interviews.

With all these abilities and intelligence, it’s quite obvious to expect AI recruitment to revolutionize how we have been recruiting. How exactly? Let’s look into it.

How does AI Recruiting aim to transform recruiting?

On the usage of AI recruitment for talent acquisition and management, Geoff Harris, the COO and Co-Founder of JabaTalks, states:

“The goal of AI in Talent Acquisition is to invite objectivity into a previously subjective process while simultaneously increasing the speed of screening candidates, minimizing human bias, and helping assess soft skills more precisely.”

All those developing AI recruitment couldn’t agree more.

AI recruitment is a positive disruption that improves how we find candidates and how they experience the process of being found. All along the recruiting journey, it works significantly faster and more efficiently.

Matching credentials and culture to ease applicant overload

A common pain point among recruiters is the sheer onslaught of digital applications — whether or not an applicant is actually qualified with the required skills. Job seekers spend an average of 49.7 seconds[3] reading a job description, and 14.6 seconds of that is spent on the actual requirements of the job. Then, many just hit send. According to Glassdoor, each corporate job offer attracts 250 resumes on average. Of those, four to six are called for an interview — and one gets the job.

For recruiting teams, that means a whole lot of sorting. In fact, even if you are one of those recruiters who spend an average of 6 seconds reading a resume, finding the right hire for one job may take more than 20 hours[4].

But for AI resume screening, it’s a matter of minutes!

AI can use pattern matching to connect the dots between job requirements and the skills and training listed on a resume. Machine learning means that AI also gets better at this the more it works, from building a bank of alternate phrases and variations it recognizes to tailoring its rankings to factor in other criteria. Plus, you can find soft skills just as quickly as hard skills by relying on AI recruitment. So, it can also take an educated guess about how a candidate may do in the long term, addressing concerns about ROI without bias.

Further, in AI recruiting software, you can feed past hiring and employee records that enable it to get a clearer picture of the relative success and fit of a potential hire.

Engaging candidates timely to reduce candidate ghosting

The digital environment has changed many job applicants’ perception of time. The wait — particularly if a candidate has been contacted by an organization’s hiring team — can feel like a hurry-up and wait hustle that may sour a candidate’s experience. Whether the result is a turn towards a different employer or simply an element of disengagement in the process, it can stop a recruiter-candidate relationship before it starts.

Plus, there is a radical change in the etiquette of responding to a message as well. So, while a delay in getting notified can feel like a rejection, a miscommunication can mean harm to employer branding!

By relying on AI recruiting, the heavy data sorting is allocated to AI; it gives recruiters more time to read the resumes that actually matter. This means that unqualified candidates can be notified faster, and qualified candidates can be engaged further for the next recruitment steps.

Or, let AI do the talking.

Yes, AI chatbots can work as a messenger that’s available 24×7. When a promising candidate is found with the qualifications and skills that match, Arya can reach out with a personalized message. If a candidate is interested, the connection has already been made — and a recruiter can take it from there.

Suggested reading on Candidate Engagement: Why candidate engagement is critical: How to measure & improve

There it goes. The myth of AI recruitment being impersonal and inaccurate tossed away like that.

While convinced AI recruiting has the power to revolutionize the hiring scape, you might be intrigued to understand what fuels the machines powered by AI. Next, we peek behind the doors of AI recruitment tools.

What powers AI recruiting to shape the future of hiring?

HR and recruiters don’t tend to take things at face value. They’re called on to rely on our educated judgments for a good reason. Safe to say, they’re in the business of future casting. And AI conducts its own version of future casting. But as it’s like a fast and efficient team player, so by embracing AI recruiting, they can scale up their efforts and free up some bandwidth to focus on the one-to-one.

Even if you’re already relying on AI for hiring, you could still scratch your head on being asked for a simple basic explanation of what and how AI recruiting works. So, below is a breakdown of five ways AI is taking recruiting to the next level.

Machine Learning

Machine learning is sometimes defined as the ability to “act without having to be programmed”. What that means is that AI can comprehend, reason, and learn from every data point, interaction, and outcome.

Clearly, AI puts incredible muscle and speed into analyzing vast amounts of data and arriving at very specific, data-driven observations and predictions. Chris Cancialosi, a Culture Leader and a veteran, rightly says that [5] – “Finding the right fit and mutual evaluation inevitably requires more interaction and time and energy. And in order to evolve the talent process to meet this new operating environment, companies are leveraging technology to do a lot of the heavy lifting for them.”

So, by integrating AI in the recruitment process, a recruiter adds the power of data to his intuition for discerning whether a particular hire might be a good fit or whether an employer is going to suffer from a skills gap. It can look at how we’ve been recruiting and find the weak points to make predictions and recommendations. And it can refine its processes, looking at prior successes and failures to amplify or reframe its approach.

Big Data

The cloud has essentially blown open the universe as far as the capacity for data. We’re now measuring data in hundreds of zettabytes, being processed, archived, reprocessed, and parsed at incredible speed. What we have to work with now was inconceivable even a year ago, let alone a decade, and it’s revolutionized talent sourcing. It’s not just about static information: this is data that can be accessed and analyzed from countless angles — with statistical models, predictive algorithms, innovative filters, with actionable results.

“Big data truly is altering the recruitment method in a way that not only makes it more efficient but affords recruiters and hiring companies far greater insight into the recruitment market as a whole.”

– Milton Keynes of Principal Consultant with Bateman Fox.

In line with what Milton says about data and its importance to AI recruitment, we say these data create a recruiting nerve center; saving recruiters from devoting long hours to manually search through 200 contacts on a ten thousand-row spreadsheet.

Pattern Recognition

Old-school recruiting, particularly for rapidly expanding organizations, could feel like searching for a needle in a haystack and reinventing the same wheel repeatedly. AI can identify and learn from a recruiter’s most successful patterns — and then replicate them, adjusting for all manner of contexts or requirements. It can also find instances of bias and create ways to overcome them.

“HR leaders must increasingly turn to predictive intelligence to transform the HR function. The only way for them to get a seat at the table is by helping business leaders look ahead and anticipate their resource needs long before they need it. That’s the power of predictive analytics.” – Jason Roberts, VP of Operations America, Randstad Sourceright [6].

This is where another aspect of personalization takes place in AI recruitment — we can take a job description and use hiring successes from the past to find the most likely qualified candidates — wherever they are, from a database to a job board to social media. We can identify the likelihood of hire being a success, identify the potential skills gaps or blind spots, or weak points, clarify our best sources, and retain the information. It becomes part of an organization’s proprietary wisdom, building up a strong foundation for recruiting successes to come.

Messaging

There’s message — the DNA and brand culture an organization conveys. And then there’s messaging — which is often how DNA and culture are carried out into the talent market.

What AI does is facilitate fast, effective, and dynamic messaging.

It begins to build relationships with the right candidates as soon as they’re identified, engaging and even pre-screening them before they have their first real contact or interaction with a recruiter. But it’s not an alienating or generic form of messaging. It’s multilayered, highly attuned and customized to the individual organization and the candidate — based on the information already learned, collected and integrated with an ATS.

Chatbots that form part of AI recruiting are no longer an alien life form online: they’re a part of our entire system of communication, commerce, and fact-finding, an accepted form of exchanging information. AI helps it provide meaningful, relevant answers to candidates’ questions and then shares this with the recruiter. It makes it possible to spark engagement, maintain and build a connection, and then pass the best candidates to the recruiter to get them started on the actual process of hiring; all without cumbersome email threads, phone tags, or awkward texts.

Candidate Pipeline

AI enables recruiters to move candidates into the pipeline and keep track of them automatically, an effective way to maintain visibility across the broadest possible spectrum of talent that enables recruiters to act when they see a potential great fit. It’s also another way to overcome unconscious bias and increase diversity and inclusion.

Now that we’ve put light on the smoke screen, AI recruitment is convincingly the game-changing innovation that brings the best of HR to organizations no matter their size, location, or field. But not everyone is convinced. Just look around and see how many of the organizations you know that is completely reliant on AI recruiting.

So, where is it going wrong? And what can be done to fix it? We discuss these in the next sections.

What’s in the way of the promises of AI Recruiting?

The hiring process costs time and money while offering zero guarantees. This is why innovative recruiting solutions like artificial intelligence (AI) pique the interest of hiring teams.

In theory, AI hiring tools would expand talent pools, automate processes, and bring dream candidates to our attention quicker so jobs could be filled faster. We’d see an era of people-first recruiting that benefits both candidates and companies. But don’t treat this as a current reality, though.

To start with, there is the fact that AI recruiting being a relatively new tech integration to companies that takes time to be fully understood. Other factors include:

Costly

The process itself is still convoluted, and it hasn’t gotten any cheaper.

Isolated

The notion of pulling from more sources has quickly dissipated as platforms continue to cull candidates from the same rotation of networks.

Biased

Innovative AI hiring solutions aren’t slant-free; vendor partnerships are still dictating which candidates rise above others. The machinery also isn’t calibrated to allow for recent pushes for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) sourcing.

Suggested reading for DEI hiring: Blueprint to drive DEI hiring in the workplace

Misaligned

Disparate solutions got stacked on top of one another in hopes they would somehow coordinate. But they struggle to speak to one another, making hiring process optimization that much more difficult.

Lastly, there is the complaint that aiming to simplify the employment process has resulted in people-first recruitment being overlooked. AI recruitment innovations incline to trump the humanization of the hiring process.

That said, AI recruitment and associated technology that place ‘people’ at the centre position themselves well. So, one promise that works in the favour of AI recruiting is — it’s still evolving. In fact, among all the tech out there, AI by design is an ever-evolving one. It’s reflected in the thoughts of Josh Bersin, Principal and Founder of Bersin by Deloitte that [7]

“The HR technology market is undergoing one of the most disruptive years it has seen this decade. The HR technology industry is on the precipice of a total reinvention.”

Decoding ethical, legal, and social boundaries of AI recruitment

We’ll get right to it — in current times, AI, in general, raises ethical, legal, and social concerns.

From an ethical standpoint, in regard to AI recruiting, the use of AI can potentially result in biased decisions, therefore, AI systems should be designed to eliminate any potential biases and promote fairness and equal opportunity. From a legal perspective, companies must ensure that AI systems comply with labor and employment laws and data privacy regulations[8]. AI recruiting must be transparent and explainable, and candidates must be aware of how their data is being used. And when it comes to the social perspective, the widespread adoption of AI recruitment could lead to job losses in the industry. This may be true in the short term, but think of what happened when cars came in in the early 20th century to replace horse carriages. Aren’t we happier about that transition to high technology?

So, it’s neither unethical nor illegal to use AI for hiring. The digital society has been exposed to invisible AI for years in various ways, including Google SERP, Netflix recommendation, and Instagram feed. Once more aware of the benefits of AI recruitment, they might accept it (and even overlook it gradually) once its benefits of connecting the right people with the right job become more mainstream.

With the good, bad, and ugly of AI recruiting all in front of us, we are now left with one crucial question —

How to maximizes hidden recruiting potential with AI?

AI recruiting tools are tailored to analyze and understand your recruitment needs and the candidate market. However, with so many platforms available, selecting the right one means employing AI recruiting correctly to realize its full potential. The ideal platform should fill a role and align with your business goals, such as broadening your candidate pipeline, refining workflows, and improving efficiency.

A very practical approach is to start by appreciating the value of data and the insight that comes from them. So, if your AI recruitment practices or solutions seamlessly integrate market intelligence into its AI sourcing tool, the battle for attracting the top talents is half won. This empowers you to define and refine your candidate search based on solid metrics around the companies, industries, salaries and locations relevant to the job you are sourcing. It automatically results in a strong and diverse talent pool.

So, the key to successful AI recruiting is having the right balance of resources – market insight, pattern recognition, and follow-worthy past data, to effectively complete the recruitment lifecycle and uncover your full recruiting potential.

Final words on the promises of AI recruiting

AI packs a powerful punch: it can process massive amounts of recruiting, hiring, engagement, performance and behavioral data from millions of prospects. It can focus and search for hard and soft skills, and even cultural matches. AI is changing the game, but to make the most of AI recruiting, we have to change how we see it as well. How? On it, Madhu Modugu, CEO and Founder of Arya AI recruiting solutions, says:

“The bottom line is, companies are sitting on gold mines of data that can streamline recruiting. AI allows them to run deeper searches, screen more candidates, and make quicker smarter decisions. They can use intelligence to discover and strive for more. As they embrace artificial intelligence, they become experts in emotional intelligence, putting them one step ahead of the competition.”

We couldn’t have said it better.

Arya by Leoforce is a comprehensive recruiting solution powered by AI. It enables access to ovee 800 million candidates, comes with built-in diversity filters, and provides actionable employment market intelligence. To see how AI recruiting can supercharge your recruiting team, take a demo today.

FAQs

What is AI in recruitment?

AI in recruitment is the use of artificial intelligence technology to automate or enhance aspects of the hiring process, such as candidate screening and selection.

What percentage of companies use AI in hiring?

Nearly one in four organizations already use automation or AI in hiring[9].

Can AI replace human recruiters?

While AI can automate certain tasks in the recruiting process, such as resume screening, it cannot fully replace the human element in recruitment, such as building relationships with candidates and assessing soft skills.

What are the cons of AI in recruiting?

The cons of AI in recruiting include the potential for algorithmic bias, lack of transparency in decision-making, and the risk of relying too heavily on technology and neglecting the human aspect of recruitment.

How companies are using AI for recruitment?

Companies are using AI for recruitment to improve the efficiency of hiring, reduce bias, and enhance the candidate experience. Examples include using chatbots for initial candidate screening and AI resume screening for resume analysis and candidate matching.

Resources

[1] https://www.techemergence.com/valuing-the-artificial-intelligence-market-graphs-and-predictions/

[2] https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/hr-tech-investors-execs-sound-off

[3] https://medium.com/@laurenholliday_/7-crucial-tactics-for-writing-a-wildly-successful-job-description-2e7bfd202e72

[4] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/recruiters-take-6-seconds-read-your-resume-why-thats-exactly-reagan

[5] https://www.forbes.com/sites/chriscancialosi/2016/07/18/how-important-is-your-recruiting-process-to-your-culture/

[6] https://insights.randstadsourceright.com/h/i/147857593-5-tips-for-using-talent-analytics-predictive-workforce-intelligence

[7] https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/hr-tech-investors-execs-sound-off

[8] https://www.techrepublic.com/article/ai-recruiting-regulations-company-ready/

[9] https://observer.com/2022/12/a-growing-reliance-on-ai-in-hiring-is-making-regulators-and-lawmakers-nervous/

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