Artificial Intelligence is becoming increasingly broadly integrated across global economies. We are still only at the tip of what it could potentially achieve but machine learning provides a wealth of opportunities for businesses to integrate solutions such as automation and to find new ways to benefit from greater use of data and analysis too. Since 2017 it has been a hot topic in recruitment, particularly with respect to simplifying and speeding up many of the time consuming, repetitive or complex processes that are involved. So, where and how is it likely to make the most impact?
The Role of AI in Recruitment
At its most basic level, the automation that AI has the potential to introduce into workflows can have a big impact on the recruitment sector. This can help to reduce administrative workload and provide more data for decision makers to use. AI is also evolving for a more complex range of uses in recruitment, for example being used to test candidates through automatically generated challenges in their field of expertise. A number of other key uses are also beginning to emerge, including:
- Chatbots. Many financial and retail organisations are already using chatbots to interact with customers. This AI tech is useful in recruitment in many ways, from answering candidate questions, to filling in gaps in CVs and using Natural Language Processing to analyse whether an individual has certain skills.
- Recruitment ads. AI can be used to post ads with effective targeting that ensures they will be seen by the right people at the right time. AI can quickly integrate a very wide range of different factors, from histories of online browsing to data showing candidates who have visited a firm’s web page to help ensure that those who are searching for a role see an ad for a specific business when they’re most likely to be looking for work.
PREMIUM CONTENT: Preparing your staffing company for a world with AI
Why Is AI important for Recruitment?
- Improving the effectiveness of the process. The ability to better target ads, to use AI to assess skills and to improve the speed and focus of the recruitment process means that overall quality of hire will increase.
- Higher levels of accuracy. AI has demonstrated higher levels of accuracy than human recruiters and will increase the use of analytics in the hiring process. This has the benefit of improving the matches made between businesses and candidates and creating more productive outcomes.
- Reducing the time involved. AI can complete complex processes in seconds whereas this could take human recruiters hours to do. As time is precious in any business this is a resource that could ensure that key people aren’t away from their day-to-day roles for extended periods of time when it comes to handling recruitment.
- Reducing conscious and unconscious bias. Despite best efforts many recruitment processes are still inherently biased due to the high level of human involvement. Although AI will always have the biases of those who created it inbuilt to a certain extent it also has the potential to be more objective and this has the benefit of using recruitment to create a more diverse and productive workforce.
AI has a big role to play in recruitment and there are many advantages for those in the sector who are willing to be early adopters.