How Is Artificial Intelligence Changing The Recruiting Process?

While artificial intelligence (AI) may sound like a concept taken from a science fiction  TV show or movie, we are using this technology in this day and age. From online shopping to managing our smart homes, many of us depend on artificial intelligence every day.  

When it comes to the hiring process, more and more companies are also turning to artificial intelligence.

At the height of the pandemic, one job post could yield thousands of applications. Indeed, the war for talent acquisition is becoming more and more intense.

Just recently, it seems that we’re back in the candidate’s market, which is why “hiring managers” or recruiting teams must compete. And although this type of market represents a healthy economy, it does make the recruiting process more challenging to undertake.

For this reason, hiring managers or hiring teams will need to use every tool at their disposal to find and hire the best candidates as quickly as possible. For a majority of corporations, that would mean leveraging artificial intelligence to power their recruitment process.

In this post, we’ll answer the question, “how is artificial intelligence changing the recruiting process?”

Also, we’ll discuss what AI recruiting is about and how it’s revolutionizing the talent acquisition landscape. Additionally, we’ll talk about how hiring managers and recruiting teams can embrace AI recruiting tools to hire the right candidates faster.

What is AI recruiting and how does it help recruiters find quality candidates?

AI recruiting is a talent acquisition process that involves using artificial intelligence. AI has several implementations that can help a recruiting team hire faster, smarter, and without bias.

It is a bit similar to Workflow Automation but in this case, AI is used to help automate the hiring process.

The purpose of AI recruiting is to automate certain parts or streamline the recruiting workflow. This will make the hiring team work more efficiently and hire the most productive candidates. Also, it will allow recruiters to spend more time on the tasks that machines and computers can’t do such as building relationships with other employees.

Moreover, it’s not only the big tech companies that use AI anymore. According to a study, the percentage of HR managers who believe that artificial intelligence has a great potential to assist with the process of talent acquisition is 96%. Those who believe that artificial intelligence will become part of the recruitment process within the next 5 years are 55%.

How is Artificial Intelligence changing the hiring process?

The use of AI to improve the hiring process offers many advantages to employers. Implementing AI recruiting can save time, improve diversity, and create a better candidate experience.

1. Fast Recruitment Process

Employers no longer have a steady stream of relevant candidates knocking on their doors with resumes in hand. If you don’t have an efficient recruiting process, you will most likely lose the top picks to your competitors.

If you have a faster hiring process, you will most likely compete with fewer offers. As a result, you’ll have a higher chance of securing top talent.

An AI recruiting software can accelerate the hiring process by helping the hiring teams identify the best candidates faster.

For instance, AI-powered video interviews can help employers in the fast consolidation and assessment of interview feedback across the hiring team. This will improve the speed of the recruitment process without sacrificing the quality of hire.

2. Screen Candidates Efficiently

An essential part of the recruiting process is the sourcing of candidates. Yet, it should not take most of the recruiter’s time. But sad to say, nearly half of the total number of recruiters admit they spend most of their workweek sourcing for candidates.

When sourcing is a tedious and time-consuming process, requisitions will stay open for quite a while. But this can lead to bad hiring decisions made by the recruiting teams.  

Leveraging machine learning and AI technology can help recruiters automate the sourcing and shortlisting of qualified candidates.

Further, AI recruiting tools can help conduct keyword-based searches and screen resumes. This will enable recruiters to downsize the candidate pool to the most qualified candidates.

3. Reduce Bias

Even if we are not aware of it most of the time, we all have our biases.

But implicit bias, also known as unconscious bias, can penetrate its way into the recruiting process. This can cause the hiring team to miss out on the best candidate for the position.

These days, companies are recognizing the need to reduce bias when it comes to their talent acquisition process. This is the best way to avoid poor hiring decisions, lack of diversity, and legal troubles.  

And while conducting training to reduce human biases is a step in the right direction, it is not enough to eradicate bias from the recruitment process.

So, this is where artificial intelligence comes in.

An AI-powered recruitment solution can standardize interviews. It helps HR teams in the reduction of bias in the interview process. This will ensure a fair and comprehensive hiring process for all candidates.

4. Better Candidate Experience

No person applying for a position in a company wants to be a nameless cog in the wheel of enlistment. Creating scalable and efficient recruiting processes can develop deeper relationships between recruiters and candidates. Additionally, it can also promote a better candidate experience.

Those who are more likely to turn into employees are the ones who felt a strong connection with a company during the recruiting process.

An AI recruiting tool can help recruiters and hiring managers to interpret interview conversations. This will allow any recruiting team to gain more insight into each candidate.

Better candidate experience leads to more meaningful conversations, which leads to real connections and improved candidate engagement.

5. Find the Best Talent

It is estimated that there would be around 30% of an employee’s first earnings, which is the price of a bad hiring decision according to the US Department of Labor. Recruiting, hiring, and onboarding cost for new employees is around $240,000.

Hiring the wrong employees can affect morale, productivity, and profits. This means bad hiring decisions can cost a company a lot of money.

Unfortunately, it’s a mistake many companies make. A CareerBuilder study shows that 74% of recruiting teams admit they hired the wrong employee for a position.

Recruiting tools powered by artificial intelligence can help employers find and hire the right person from a pool of applicants. AI recruiting tools can help hiring managers screen resumes and find relevant candidates for any job a lot faster.

Additionally, artificial intelligence can help recruiters conduct interviews that result in stronger hires.

How is Artificial Intelligence changing the role of recruiters and hiring managers?

Using artificial intelligence, HR teams can remove repetitive, time-consuming tasks from their recruiting workflow. This will give recruiters enough time to focus on engaging candidates, developing relationships, and training hiring teams to be excellent interviewers.  

Rather than spending most of their time screening candidates and integrating interview feedback, artificial intelligence allows recruiters to:

• be more strategic
• increase organizational impact and
• boost relationships with hiring managers

Will Artificial Intelligence (AI) recruiting software replace HR Teams?

Absolutely not. AI-assisted tools can not replace human social skills, negotiating abilities, and empathy. Machine learning and AI recruiting software can help automate and improve repetitive tasks currently done manually, though.

AI recruiting technology may not replace a human recruiter, but it can make the recruitment processes so much better.

By allowing AI recruiting tools to automate the manual repetitive high volume tasks usually done by humans, recruiters can now focus on the tasks only humans can do. And thus, AI recruiting technology might be able to put back the “human” in Human Resources.

Why should hiring managers use AI recruiting technology?

Currently, more and more companies in every sector are investing in AI in their talent acquisition programs.

In fact, 9 out of 10 companies around the world already use artificial intelligence in some way for HR purposes. Also, 63% of talent acquisition professionals admit that AI recruiting solutions have changed the way talent acquisition is done in their organization.  

For a majority of companies, it’s more about how and when to use AI recruiting tools in the recruitment process, and less about if they should use such recruitment tools.  

AI recruiting software can make hiring teams become more efficient and make better decisions in terms of talent acquisition. Moreover, AI technology allows recruiters to get more value from the systems and tools like their applicant tracking system (ATS), which is already part of their recruiting tech stack.

AI-powered recruiting tools are essential components of the HR technology ecosystem. These AI-assisted tools can make organizations get more from their current technology investments during a fair, smarter, and faster-recruiting process.

A wide range of AI recruiting tools exists for sourcing, screening, and onboarding more quality candidates. But to improve your recruitment processes, you should integrate any recruitment tool with your current recruiting technologies.

There should be a seamless integration between video interviews powered with AI recruiting solutions and your current video conferencing platforms such as Microsoft Teams or Zoom. Otherwise, any interview process might cause more headaches down the road.

Essentially, an AI recruiting software should make the hiring process easier instead of making it more complicated.

The Benefits of Using Artificial Intelligence for Hiring Managers

1. Saving recruiters’ time by automating repetitive high volume tasks

Talent acquisition leaders announced that the hiring volume rate will increase in the next year but the size of the recruiting team will remain the same. And possibly, it might even contract.

With the help of AI, recruiters are expected to “do more with less”. This means their efficiency will increase in terms of talent acquisition.

Arguably, the most tedious and time-consuming part of the hiring process is the manual screening of resumes. This is especially true if most resumes submitted for a role are unqualified.  

For a single hire, it often takes 23 hours of a recruiter’s time to screen resumes and shortlist candidates to interview.

AI for recruiting can help reduce the time spent on time-consuming, repetitive tasks such as:

• Streamlining the screening of resumes
• Screening candidates
• Scheduling interviews or
• Automatically triggering assessments

The best AI-powered recruiting technology does not only automate a part of your recruiting workflow but will seamlessly integrate with your existing recruiting stack. And so, there won’t be any disruption in your workflow.

And since AI technology helps in reducing the time to hire, the chance of losing top talent to faster moving competitors is quite low.

2. Improving the quality of hire through standardized job matching

Quality of hire involves measuring what happened to the applicants after hiring them. Over the years, it has become so much easier to gather, access, and analyze HR data. As a result, quality of hire has become the top KPI with regard to recruiting.

The promise of artificial intelligence for refining the quality of hire lies in its capacity to use the information to regulate the matching between the candidate’s knowledge, experience, and the skills needed for the job.

This job matching improvement is expected to turn employees into happier, more productive individuals who are less likely to turnover.

Companies who are early adopters of AI-powered recruiting tools have seen their:

• Turnover decreased by 35%
• Revenue per employee increased by 4% and
• Cost per screening reduced by 75%

The Challenges Associated with Artificial Intelligence Recruiting

There are several significant benefits of applying machine learning and artificial intelligence in the recruitment process. However, they do come with their challenges.

1. AI requires a lot of data

For starters, AI needs a considerable amount of data to learn how to accurately screen candidates as a human recruiter does. For a specific role, this means screening several hundred to several thousands of resumes.

2. AI can learn human biases

While artificial intelligence can reduce bias during the process of talent acquisition, AI can learn human biases as well.

An essential characteristic of artificial intelligence is that it pulls out patterns and insights from large data sets. It will then make predictions based on data analysis.

This is exactly what makes AI-assisted recruiting extremely useful. But it can also make its algorithm become susceptible to past biases.

A good example would be the case of Amazon, which got rid of its AI-powered recruitment tool. The eCommerce giant discovered that its recruitment tool did not want to hire female candidates for technical roles such as software developer jobs.

Why?

Amazon’s AI-powered recruitment software models were trained to screen potential candidates, which involves learning the patterns in the resumes acquired by the company during the previous 10-year period.

Since a majority of the resumes submitted for technical jobs came from men candidates, the AI-powered recruiting software learned by itself that men are the most preferred technical candidates.

3. Skepticism of new technology

HR professionals are often stormed with the latest trends that disappear quickly.

For this reason, recruiters have become skeptical of technologies that promise to make their jobs easier.

Talent acquisition leaders and recruiters want to be sure that any recruiting technology software that can automate some of their tasks would deliver exactly what it promises.

Innovations in AI in the Hiring Process

AI designed for recruiting has various potential applications that will automate repetitive high volume tasks such as screening resumes and pre-qualifying candidates.

1. Intelligent screening software

Intelligent software that can automate resume screening uses machine learning on your company’s current resume database.

The software teaches itself to decide which candidates will move on to become successful and unsuccessful employees. Such hiring decisions will be based on a candidate’s performance, tenure, and turnover rates.

Specifically, AI for recruiting is also programmed to learn the experience, skills, and other qualities of current employees. It will then apply this knowledge to new applicants to automatically grade, rank, and select the strongest candidates.

Additionally, the software uses public data sources like previous employers and public social media profiles to enrich candidate resumes.

Recruiting software that can automate resume screening offers massive opportunities for your organization since it will integrate with your current ATS. This means there will be no disruption in the candidate workflow and your recruiting workflow. Plus, it requires minimal IT support.  

2. Recruiter chatbots

Recruiter chatbots can provide real-time candidate engagement by asking questions based on job requirements. These AI chatbots for recruiting will also provide feedback, updates, as well as next step recommendations.  

The percentage of job seekers who have a negative impression of companies that do not reach out to applicants after submitting their resumes is 58%. And the percentage of job seekers who have a positive impression of companies that regularly give updates to the candidates who submitted their applications is 67%.

3. Digitized interviews

Video interview software is nothing new. However, today’s online interview software claims to use artificial intelligence to assess candidates in their word choices, facial expressions, and speech patterns.

The main purpose here is to assess the candidates if they are fit for the role. And possibly, if they fit for a role in the organization and its culture.

FAQs on AI in Recruiting

How many companies use AI to acquire the best talent?

According to a study by The Sage Group, businesses that are using AI to hire productive candidates are 24%. Those who plan to adopt AI recruitment technology in the next 12 months are 56%.

How does AI affect recruitment?

You can recruit passive candidates more easily with recruitment AI technology. You can bring in more quality candidates than you could have otherwise.

What is the role of Artificial Intelligence in recruitment?

AI automates repetitive high-volume tasks regarding recruitment to reduce the burden on recruiters and hiring managers. Aside from saving time, recruiters can focus on other important tasks when using it.

For a single job opening, companies receive hundreds to thousands of resumes. AI can help sort this massive influx of data in a short period.

How has Artificial Intelligence become a trend in recruitment?

AI is being used for talent field data analysis since it can quickly automate recruiting processes and estimate options. Companies are integrating AI into their recruitment processes to automate them and discover new methods of screening candidates.

How is Ai transforming the recruiting process?

With the use of AI, recruiters can implement a candidate-first approach, which reduces hiring bias through automation. In addition to talent field data analysis, organizations can make better hiring decisions through consistent digital communication with productive candidates.

How do recruiters use Artificial Intelligence?

Recruiters use AI to schedule interviews, automatically screen resumes for keywords, and automate the application process. Typically, it will take around 40% of the recruiter’s time to sort the resumes or enter them into an Applicant Tracking System (ATS).

How does AI affect the hiring process?

Predictive analytics within the AI pre-selection software can help determine a candidate’s success in a particular role. By analyzing talent field data, recruiters can make the best hiring decisions instead of gut feel-based ones.

Can Artificial Intelligence replace the human recruiter?

AI won’t replace the role of human recruiters. Instead, AI will improve the recruiting operations of companies and organizations. The use of AI promises to make the recruiting process more human and efficient. What’s more, it can promote equitability in an organization.

Embrace AI in Recruiting and Let Us Develop the Best Recruitment Software for Your Organization

AI in recruiting can help you accelerate and make the hiring process easier. On top of that, it can help you reduce bias and consistently hire the right people in the right role.

Dom&Tom is a top mobile and web development company that builds digital solutions for Fortune 500 companies and next-generation startups. If you need help developing an AI-assisted recruiting app for your organization, contact us today.