3 Major Ways AI Is Augmenting the Recruiter’s Role
After being the dominant theme at last month’s HR Technology Conference, AI for recruiting suddenly seems to be everywhere. Artificial intelligence for recruiting is an emerging category of HR tech designed to automate some part of the recruiting workflow – usually low-level, high-volume tasks.
One reason for the rise in AI’s popularity is the growing pressure on recruiters to “do more with less.” LinkedIn reports that 56 percent of talent acquisition leaders predict their hiring volume will increase in 2017, but the majority of them report the size of their recruiting teams will stay the same or even shrink. This means tools that intelligently automate part of a recruiter’s workflow will be in high demand.
Industry experts believe AI is disrupting recruitment and will continue to change the recruiter’s role in the future. However, it’s important to note these experts don’t argue AI will be used to replace human intelligence; rather, they believe AI will be used to augment and enhance human capabilities.
Here are three major ways AI is augmenting the recruiter’s role today:
1. Increasing Recruiter Efficiency Through Automated Resume Screening Software
By some estimates, 88 percent of resumes received for a given role are from unqualified candidates, which is why manually screening resumes is still the most time-consuming part of recruiting. On average, screening resumes and shortlisting candidates takes 23 hours of a recruiter’s time for just one hire.
Designed to integrate with an ATS, automated resume screening software is powered by AI for recruiting in the form of machine learning. This software learns a job’s requirements from the job description and learns what good candidates look like based on historical hiring decisions.
The machine learning algorithm uses data on both successful and unsuccessful employees. It then applies the knowledge it learned about the necessary experience, skills, and other qualifications to new candidates to automatically screen, rank, and grade them.
2. Enhancing Candidate Experience Through Recruiter Chatbots
Recruiting has been called a marketing role by many experts, and similar to consumers, today’s candidates want and expect continuous feedback – often immediately.
According to CareerBuilder, 58 percent of job seekers have a negative impression of a company if they don’t hear back after submitting an application. On the other hand, 67 percent of job seekers have a positive impression of a company if they receive consistent updates throughout the application process. In today’s extremely competitive and candidate-driven job market, employers can’t afford to lose qualified talent due to an inferior recruiting experience.
AI in the form of recruiter chatbots promises to improve the candidate experience. These chatbots use natural language processing to interact with candidates in real time, often by asking questions related to job requirements and providing feedback, updates, and next-step suggestions.
By automating repetitive tasks such as answering the same questions about a job over and over, chatbots can ensure the candidate experience isn’t suffering from a lack of communication on the recruiter’s end.
3. Predicting Job Fit Through Digitized Interviews
Because they are so convenient, online interviews have grown increasingly popular. With the right software, recruiters can conduct interviews over long distances in real time or asynchronously through recorded interviews.
AI for recruiting has entered the interview arena through digitized interviews. This technology applies machine learning to recorded candidate interviews to assess factors like candidate word choices, speech patterns, and facial expressions and predict how well a candidate will fit a particular role.
The Takeaways
HR tech experts believe AI for recruiting will augment and enhance human recruiters’ abilities, rather than completely replace these human recruiters. AI is augmenting the recruiter’s role in three major ways:
1. Increasing recruiter efficiency through automated resume screening software that learns from past hiring decisions to save recruiters hours per hire.
2. Enhancing candidate experience through recruiter chatbots that provide constant, real-time feedback to candidates.
3. Predicting job fit through digitized interviews that analyze candidates’ words, speech patterns, and facial expressions.
Given the growing pressure to do more with less, recruiters will need AI tools that help them do their jobs faster, cheaper, and better if they want to truly disrupt the recruiting industry.
Ji-A Min is the head data scientist at Ideal.com.