Your Recruiting Process Before and After AI Integration
In HBO’s acclaimed series Westworld, patrons pay top dollar to live out their wildest fantasies in a futuristic Wild West-themed amusement park staffed by android hosts powered by artificial intelligence (AI). Over the course of the series, these hosts slowly begin to learn emotion and evolve sentience. Then, they start to retaliate for the treatment they’ve endured.
While this science-fiction thriller is entertaining, it also helps to fuel ongoing skepticism about the use of AI. The truth is, AI can simplify various aspects of lives and work, especially when it comes to the recruiting process.
Let’s face it: The recruiting process is full of menial tasks that can make it quite a taxing experience. Furthermore, when recruiters are juggling all these tasks, there’s far more room for error.
What if AI were to enter the scene? Here’s how each stage of the recruiting process might look before and after AI integration :
Sourcing
Sourcing candidates is a necessary, but time-consuming part of the recruiting process. Recruiters have to manually sift through databases to identify the best candidates.
Sourcing is crucial to recruiting success because it impacts several vital recruiting metrics, like quality of hire, time to hire, and acceptance ratio. Perhaps this is why 38 percent of employers surveyed by LinkedIn said they would invest in better sourcing tools if they didn’t have budget constraints.
After AI
Recruiters no longer have to trawl through candidate databases to find talent. Instead, AI scans these databases automatically, locating talent who meets the recruiter’s needs. In the end, a recruiter gets a full list of qualified candidates with minimal effort on their part.
Screening
Manually screening resumes is exhausting and inefficient. Recruiters often waste time reviewing candidates who don’t meet the basic qualifications, and its all too easy to accidentally overlook a strong contender.
After AI
AI doesn’t just source candidates whose resumes have the right keywords. Through machine learning, AI actually learns to understand the content of resumes. It can comprehend the previous employers and skills listed on a candidate’s resume, and it uses this information to grade and prioritize candidates accordingly. This gives recruiters more time to focus on the talented applicants who matter most.
AI can also eliminate subconscious bias. By removing discriminatory pieces of information such as name, age, or gender from the training data used to teach the AI, employers can ensure the system learns to make decisions based on skills and objective merit alone.
Candidate Experience
The way you treat candidates is an extension of your company. In fact, a 2017 CareerBuilder study found that roughly 80 percent of job seekers see the candidate experience as an indicator of how a company values its people.
The more you interact and communicate with candidates, the better their overall experience will be. Unfortunately, recruiters are often spread too thin to maintain the right level of contact with candidates. This can make for a very frustrating candidate experience.
After AI
AI frees recruiters from mundane tasks, giving them more time to be present during the recruiting process. This allows recruiters to build more personal connections with candidates.
AI also bridges communication gaps, thanks to chatbots. Chatbots can contact highly qualified candidates to gather information, answer questions, and keep them updated on the hiring process. When this open channel of communication is combined with personal interaction from recruiters, candidates feel more recognized and engaged throughout the entire recruiting process.
Time to Hire
Keeping time to hire low is a major challenge for recruiters. Sourcing and screening candidates – not to mention time spent interviewing candidates who are not a good fit – all conspire to keep the hiring process lengthier than it needs to be.
After AI
AI ensures recruiters interview only the best matches. That means recruiters spend less time interviewing overall, and they only have to engage with candidates who are truly qualified. Chatbots can also help recruiters schedule and manage interviews.
Some interview software is already finding ways to use AI to assess candidate word choice and speech patterns. In the future, this data may be able tell recruiters more about the potential cultural fit of a candidate.
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The recruiting process has been clumsy and slow for far too long. By investing in AI, recruiters can streamline the process and cut down on the headaches caused by high-volume tasks. Along with saving time, AI also yields high-quality hires and makes it easy to discover candidates who might otherwise go overlooked.
Somen Mondal is the cofounder and CEO of Ideal.