Recruiters and talent acquisition professionals often find themselves besieged with the latest trends, only to see them disappear just as quickly. It’s no wonder the talent acquisition world can be cynical of any technology that promises to make their jobs easier and enhance their capacity to manage their responsibilities.
A recent poll by Tidio found that 85% of recruiters view Artificial Intelligence (AI) software as a valuable tool that can replace some aspects of the hiring process. However, there is still a significant percentage who are wary of the new technology. Only about 15% of HR professionals believe that humans are indispensable throughout the entire recruitment process, and 23% believe AI will eventually replace them and are concerned about losing their jobs.
Before we debunk the myths surrounding this groundbreaking technology, let’s first understand what AI for recruitment technology is and some of its major benefits.
What Is AI for Recruiting?
AI in recruitment refers to AI technology specifically designed for use by talent acquisition professionals, including recruiters and talent sourcer. Although various kinds of AI recruiting software exist, they all utilize artificial intelligence to automate certain aspects of the talent acquisition process. It primarily aims to streamline and automate portions of the recruiting system, enabling recruiters to work more effectively, hire the most suitable candidates, and devote more time to tasks that only humans can perform, such as building strong relationships with job seekers.
By using artificial intelligence to optimize recruiting, employers can benefit in numerous ways, including saving time, improving candidate matching, making better hiring decisions, creating a better candidate experience, and enhancing diversity.
Saving Time
The recruiting process often involves repetitive tasks, such as sourcing, that consume valuable time but don’t necessarily require human intervention to add value. In fact, according to Dice’s Recruitment Automation Report, many recruiters spend up to 30 hours per week sourcing resumes. When sourcing becomes a time-consuming and tedious process, requisitions can remain open for longer periods, and hiring teams run the risk of making poor hiring decisions.
One way an AI-powered applicant tracking system (ATS) may help reduce sourcing time is by taking advantage of the power of social media. Social media has become an influential tool for connecting with talent, including passive qualified candidates who are not actively seeking a new job. When you publish a new job listing in your ATS, you can immediately share it on your company’s social media accounts, such as LinkedIn, TikTok, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Interested individuals who follow your pages can then apply for the job by clicking on the link that redirects them to your website.
Adding social sharing buttons to your job postings with your applicant tracking system is also a simple process. A visitor to your careers site can share your opportunity with anyone on their social media network with a shareable link that can be accessed with a single click.
Without a doubt, an ATS that integrates with social media can help ensure that your recruitment efforts align with your overall hiring strategy and makes finding the best candidates easier and faster.
Improving Candidate Matching
The U.S. Department of Labor reports that a bad hire costs a minimum of 30 percent of the employee’s first-year earnings, and recruiting, hiring, and onboarding a new employee can cost up to $240,000. Hiring the wrong employees incurs not only significant expenses but also affects morale, productivity, and profits. Unfortunately, it is a common mistake, with 74 percent of employers admitting to having hired the wrong person for a position, according to research by CareerBuilder.
HR can use AI-powered recruitment software to enhance their ability to identify and select the best-fit candidates from a pool of applicants. AI can assist recruiters in automatically screening thousands of resumes to identify the most qualified candidates for any job by evaluating the relevant information on resumes and comparing it against the job description using keyword match criteria. Some AI software can even be used to assess candidates’ soft skills and suggest whether they would be a good fit for the company’s culture.
Putting Data to Good Use
The proliferation of digital technology and data collection has left many companies with an abundance of information about clients and candidates. However, mistakes in data management can cause significant delays and costs in the recruitment process. AI-powered recruitment can leverage analytics and metrics to improve hiring results and drive business success. With AI technology, recruiters can accurately process large amounts of data from resumes, cover letters, and candidate tasks to streamline the process and minimize errors.
In addition, incorporating AI-powered platforms throughout your recruitment process allows for the ongoing collection of data on both candidates and employees. This provides valuable insights into the qualities of a successful hire. These platforms enable you to track and analyze the key metrics most important to your business and adjust your recruitment strategy accordingly to ensure that you meet your growth objectives.
Candidate Experience and Employer Brand
Positive communication between job seekers and employers significantly improves user experience, which ultimately enhances your company brand. Unfortunately, this component often suffers the most because recruiters have so much time-consuming responsibilities on their plate. According to Career Arc, 69% of the job seekers polled believe the response time to a candidate’s application can be improved the most.
Using AI chatbots for candidate communication can significantly improve the candidate experience and free up time for recruiters to focus on more complex tasks. Chatbots can handle initial candidate questions and follow-ups, schedule interviews, and send reminders.
Natural Language Processing technology (NLP) technology allows chatbots to understand and respond to candidates’ questions and concerns in a personalized way, making them feel valued and heard. AI matching can also help recommend suitable positions for candidates, ensuring their experience with your company is positive and tailored to their needs.
Bias Control
We all have biases, even if we’re not always aware of them. Unconscious bias can easily creep into the recruiting process despite our best intentions. These biases can lead to poor hiring decisions, legal issues, and a lack of diversity within the organization. To prevent these adverse outcomes, top organizations use AI software with comprehensive bias detection frameworks built in. By configuring the AI software to focus on relevant skills and qualifications while ignoring unrelated human characteristics such as gender, age, religion, and race, recruiters can feel safe that the best person for the job is hired without bias.
Now that the benefits of AI recruitment tools have been addressed, let’s dispel some of the most common misconceptions about the technology.
It’s Coming for My Job!
With all the hype around ChatGPT, and the number of new AI tools and features being deployed at every turn, AI in recruitment seems to be a concern for many, particularly with regard to the possibility of human recruiters becoming redundant. However, these fears are unfounded as AI is not designed to replace recruiters but rather to serve as a tool that can make their work easier and more efficient. With the aid of this tech, recruiters and talent acquisition professionals can make more informed and effective decisions faster while being relieved of mundane and logistical tasks.
It’s important to emphasize that AI recruitment doesn’t involve working alongside a sentient robot, as some people might believe. In reality, artificial intelligence is essentially a sophisticated set of algorithms and learning processes that can be adapted to various human applications to be used with ease. With AI recruitment software, these advanced algorithms and data processing mechanisms are applied to finding, screening, communicating with, and identifying the possible best candidates for job roles. This enables recruiters to make more informed decisions and streamline their workflows.
Chatbots Can Handle It All
It’s important to remember that, just as AI won’t replace human intelligence, chatbots – a key feature of AI – cannot handle the entire recruitment process on their own. While AI-based chatbots can help screen candidates and engage with them by answering basic questions, they are limited in their ability to evaluate subjective factors such as a candidate’s communication skills or cultural fit. In addition, chatbots cannot conduct a full interview, where follow-up questions are often necessary to gain a deeper understanding of a candidate’s responses.
However, AI can play a useful role in objective decision-making, such as verifying a candidate’s qualifications and work experience. It can also automate routine tasks, such as scheduling interviews and sending follow-up messages.
In short, chatbots are a useful tool in the recruitment process, but they cannot replace the human element in the job description. Aspects of the recruitment process that require subjective judgment or personal interaction will continue to be handled by human beings.
AI is Expensive
Investing in high-quality AI hiring software may come with a significant upfront cost, but it can save both money and time in the long run. According to Ideal, Companies that don’t use AI automation in their recruiting efforts can expect to incur 35% higher costs in the hiring process. Recruiters also typically spend an average of 14 hours per week on administrative tasks alone. With an overload of repetitive responsibilities tasked to HR departments, companies may have to hire additional staff to handle the workload, which can be a major expense.
While AI technology was once reserved for larger tech companies, it has become more accessible to small and medium businesses. AI hiring features found as a standalone tool or in existing platforms, can offer benefits to companies of all shapes and sizes beyond just accelerating the recruitment process. For example, smaller start-ups that prioritize cost savings can reduce expenses associated with cost-per-hire by using AI to optimize their job descriptions with a content creation AI platform.
It Is Too Complicated to Use
Although the programming behind AI hiring software can be complex, using it is a straightforward process. The user interface (UI) of most AI tools is designed to simplify the execution of tasks, and we are seeing them slowly be integrated into a variety of also existing user-friendly recruitment platforms. With just a few clicks, the UI can complete various recruitment-related tasks. For example, a good user interface for resume screening will let you input the job details and what skills your company is looking for before starting its automated tasks.
Conclusion
Asking people to make changes comes with inevitable challenges. Recruiters, fearful of their jobs becoming automated, may be reserved to adopt AI into their daily responsibilities. So, it’s important to emphasize that their roles will still require human interaction and human-based decision-making. To ease fears, companies should provide demos, live training, and opportunities for feedback prior to launch.
So, let’s leave the AI pandemonium to Hollywood, and embrace a technology that saves time on repetitive tasks, will lead to a better quality of hire, improves candidate experience, promotes diversity, and lets you focus more on the human aspect of the job that can never be replaced.