AI Recruiting: What’s Possible Today

Artificial intelligence, or AI, is everywhere. It crafts your weekly playlist. It curates the content of your Facebook newsfeed. It suggests what you should watch next, recommends products you might like, and even takes care of simple tasks for you.

And while some worry that robots will eventually take over our jobs, for now, intelligent agents and humans are working with, not against one another. Across all industries, professionals are using AI technology to work smarter and better.

The recruitment industry, specifically, has seen some exciting AI-powered tools spring up that promise to revolutionize the talent acquisition process.

In this article, we’ll explore the uses of this latest trend in HR tech and discuss the benefits of working with AI recruitment tools.

AI in Recruiting

BetterTeam’s recruiter job description includes the following core responsibilities:

Identifying future hiring needs

Designing job descriptions

Sourcing candidates through databases and social media

Conducting interviews

Filing paperwork

That’s a lot of responsibilities, many of which translate into hours of repetitive tasks. Underlying them is pressure to make great hires without losing sight of corporate goals such as increasing workforce diversity.

To say that meeting these expectations is difficult is an understatement. That’s where AI recruitment tools might be able to help.

In some cases, AI recruitment tools can take over entire tasks, freeing up recruiters to do other important work. In others, they can assist recruiters in doing parts of their job better, ultimately improving the quality of hires.

We’ll look at three essential use cases of AI in recruiting below.

AI for Creating Job Descriptions

Seasoned recruiters know there are dos and don’ts to creating job descriptions. Sometimes, though, perfectly acceptable job listings fail to attract the right candidates, or a sufficient amount of them, or a diverse enough mix. The problem – and the solution – can often be found in language.

Consider this: a job title that includes the word “ninja” is a turnoff for women everywhere.

Other words can have a positive or a negative effect depending on where readers are geographically located. The word awesome might have New Yorkers rolling their eyes, but it actually works well with Californians.

To help recruiters say the right thing to attract their target audiences, companies such as Textio and Textmetrics have developed AI-powered technology that suggests words more likely to engage job seekers.

AI for Screening Resumes

According to Ideal, an AI recruiting software company, recruiters and hiring managers spend approximately 23 hours screening resumes each time they have to hire someone. For many, this is the most challenging part of recruiting.

A possible solution? AI software for resume screening. When integrated with your applicant tracking system, it detects patterns in past hiring decisions, combines that with information from your job description, and uses this knowledge to grade, rank, and screen candidates for you. It does this through a combination of machine learning and predictive analysis.

Best of all, you can set it to ignore demographic information such as race, gender, and age to reduce human biases, which is helpful for diversity recruiting.

AI for Interacting with Applicants

Keeping candidates informed is another task recruiters can delegate to AI.

Unlike human recruiters and hiring managers, bots are available 24/7 for real-time interaction with job candidates. When taught well, they help create a positive candidate experience, which is a 2020 recruiting trend.

Bots can come in at different stages of the recruiting process. They can help screen candidates at the start by asking questions. They can give updates and next-step suggestions throughout the process. Finally, they can provide feedback after the position has been filled.

Benefits of Using AI Recruiting Tools

By automating repetitive, time-consuming tasks such as screening resumes, sourcing candidates, and selecting finalists, AI recruitment tools free up recruiters to invest in more strategic work. They can organize recruiting events, grow their talent pool, engage passive candidates, and connect with top talent.

AI recruiting technology can also help them recruit more diverse candidates since it can remove human biases from the initial screening process.

Finally, because it brings down the cost of screening candidates and improves job matching, it can ultimately lead to increased quality of hire.

A few of the most popular AI recruitment tools include augmented writing apps, resume screening software, and recruiting chatbots. There are others – personality assessment applications and sophisticated interview software programs are examples.

As journalist Rebecca Heilweil notes here, intelligent agents are fallible. “AI systems are only as good as the data they’re trained on and the humans that build them,” she wrote.

Monitoring these systems to ensure they are working as they should is essential, as is keeping the key parts of recruiting human.