As the modern workplace continues to evolve day by day, so does the way that businesses recruit their future employees. With recruiting technology advancing by leaps and bounds, artificial intelligence (AI) has come to the forefront to help us work better and smarter. AI recruiting becomes the new frontier and it is essential for recruiters to keep themselves posted.
Regardless of how experienced a recruiter may be, recruitment requires the ability to analyze and sort through lots of information. Many times it is too much information that leads to fatigued recruiters, capable candidates turned away, and neglected piles of resumes. Fortunately, with artificial intelligence, the most time-consuming parts of recruiting are becoming much easier. From a candidate’s perspective, it’s clear to see how artificial intelligence software tools benefit them on the path towards getting hired. Although for recruiters, taking advantage of AI in the recruitment process requires understanding just how much it can offer. Below you’ll find several ways in which AI has changed the recruitment game of today.
01. Better Candidate Sourcing
Recruiters spend countless hours each day searching for candidates on websites and professional networks. Considering that there are more recruitment platforms online than ever before, this process can be quite labor-intensive. Human resources teams spend plenty of valuable time thumbing through profiles to find the eligible candidates for an available position.
By utilizing artificial intelligence to their advantage, recruiters can find prospective applicants much faster. AI has the ability to sift through data and scan profiles for current job seekers, thus saving recruiters plenty of time. With recruiters saving their time and effort, they’ll be able to focus their energy on other aspects of the hiring process.
Furthermore, incorporating AI into the process of sourcing candidates can actually improve the quality of said candidates. Implementing an algorithm that searches for those with appropriate qualifications and experience for the open position will eliminate eligible prospects. Applying this criterion to the search will help AI find consistently better candidates for the job.
02. Improved Job Postings
Our society is always fluctuating and in a constant state of metamorphosis. The continual change that modern society is experiencing affects businesses just as much as it does to applicants. In fact, job applicants of today expect companies to be forward-thinking in terms of class, race, and gender. ZipRecruiter, the job search engine, published an article detailing their findings on how applicants respond to the use of gendered words in job postings. What they found was that 42% of applicants responded better to job postings with gender-neutral wording. Although it may seem to be a minor area to change, it significantly increased the number of applications received.
Using artificial intelligence to craft job postings that fulfill specific guidelines, such as being gender-neutral, can benefit recruiters. The number of qualified applicants for each position may even double. Not only will it boost the number of candidates for each job opening, but it will also open the doors to a more diverse workplace.
03. Facilitates Workplace Diversity
More and more companies are working to make their workplace more diverse these days. Workplace diversity brings along a whole host of benefits for companies to enjoy. Increased revenue, improved creativity, and innovation, as well as high productivity, are just a few things diversity can contribute.
However, we must remember that humans, at the end of the day, have plenty of unconscious biases. These biases arise from our subconscious when we need to make quick decisions like those necessary in the hiring process. With the help of AI recruiting, businesses can remove or block certain information that would trigger recruiter’s unconscious biases. As a result, this would level the playing field for candidates.
Allowing AI to withhold information such as names, age, sex, or race, would mean that only their skills and qualifications will be evaluated. Granted that a system to check or reevaluate candidates meet the criteria will still need to be in place. After all, as easy as it is to program artificial intelligence, it’s equally easy to reprogram it, for better or worse.
04. Quicker Selection Process
At times, the sheer number of candidates can overwhelm recruiters and bog down their progress. Reducing hundreds of candidates to a second smaller batch of candidates may feel nearly impossible. Therefore, programming AI to help recruiters narrow down their initial selection can save them a lot of stress.
Since AI is able to hunt down potential candidates quickly, why not use it to make contact as well? All that you need to do is create an interview invitation template and program your AI to send it. There are now many email marketing services that allow the integration of sophisticated external tools. Artificial intelligence can even pore through candidate resumes to see which is best for the job.
Moreover, once AI has done its job, it will be able to present a slimmer stack of candidates for recruiters to review. Speeding up the initial selection process benefits both recruiters and candidates. The sooner a candidate knows they’ve got the job, the sooner they can begin working. Consequently, quickening the pace of the selection process is in both party’s interests.
05. Preliminary AI Interviews
Some companies are expanding AI’s reach in the recruitment process beyond mere data collection and analyses. While you may not want artificial intelligence to conduct interviews at every level, in the preliminary stages, it can help. That’s why companies are beginning to use AI for initial interviews.
Of course, it takes a skilled recruiter to know which pre-screening interview questions to ask. So, recruiters are now taking the time to generate interview questions and program AI with them. These days, plenty of companies invite prospective candidates to Skype interviews with an AI. Consider that unless it’s a video call, there’s almost no way for candidates to even know!
One on hand, it helps companies standardize and specialize their hiring process. On the other hand, Nancy Flinn, HR specialist at Studicus, says that “these kinds of interviews can bring about their own set of issues. With the human aspect removed, there are no emotional or social clues for candidates to pick up on.” Going forward, this will be one area of recruitment that will continue to advance and evolve.
06. Enhance Candidate Experience
Recruiters often have plenty of things to juggle between applications, interviews, and all the paperwork in between. Nonetheless, it’s vital not to forget about a candidate’s experience during the entire recruitment process. Applying and interviewing for a job can be stressful, especially if there’s a lot of paperwork and waiting involved.
Luckily, with AI recruiting, that level of stress can noticeably decrease for candidates. Streamlining the recruitment process makes it less intense for both recruiters and candidates alike. Although accelerating the speed of contact, evaluation, and initial interviews can be particularly helpful to candidates.
Not to mention, a quick, thorough, and professional AI recruiting process gives a candidate a good impression of the company. If a candidate is qualified and interviews well, but didn’t enjoy the hiring process, they may not accept the position. Indeed, the way a business recruits says a lot about the way they operate. Ergo, bearing a candidate’s experience in mind is just as important as finding a good candidate in the first place.
07. Revolutionize the Recruiting Process
The process of recruiting seems to be progressing steadily, but the reality is that it still uses antiquated techniques. While standardized resumes and interviewer’s opinions are cornerstones of the hiring process, they come from the past. Both of these aspects of recruitment are limiting and can create biases.
Hence, striving to delegate more work to artificial intelligence can revolutionize the process and bring it into the future. In AI recruiting, logic, data, and facts are prioritized above all else, that’s why so many marketing agencies around the world started implementing it. Algorithms focus on the criterion they are searching for, not the format of a resume or a personal opinion. In essence, AI turns the recruitment process on its head by making it impartial.
Honestly, people aren’t always great at selecting the best candidate out of a sea of applications. So, by giving the fact-based, busy work of the recruitment process to AI, companies can choose from better candidates. Once artificial intelligence programs have narrowed down the options to the best of the best, recruiting will be that much easier.
Back To You
Artificial intelligence still has a long way to go before it will entirely assume the responsibility of hiring. Although for now, this rapidly advancing technology can significantly help recruiters’ find better candidates. With the help of advanced algorithms, recruiters will be able to recruit faster and smarter.
However, merely finding better candidates isn’t all that AI can do. Artificial intelligence is already helping recruiters analyze demographics and evaluate resumes. These programs can even go so far as to conduct preliminary interviews with prospective candidates.
In spite of all that, recruiters need not worry about losing their jobs to robots anytime soon. The modern recruitment process still requires humans in the human resources department. For now, AI is simply taking on the more mundane and time-consuming tasks required of the recruitment process today.
About Author
Estelle Liotard — A senior content writer and editor at Trust My Paper and Grab My Essay, with years of experience in different fields of marketing. Her passion is teaching people how to overcome digital marketing obstacles and help businesses communicate their messages to their customers.
This blog post originally appears on Rakuna’s blog.