Recruitment is an investment. An investment of time and money into a process you hope will pay dividends when you hire an up-and-coming star or a seasoned expert who will lead your team to success. Unfortunately, recruitment is also an inexact science. A poor judgment call along the way or a missed detail about a candidate’s work experience or lack thereof can derail your plan and have costly consequences, landing you back at square one.
While there may not be a way to eliminate hiring mismatches entirely, an increasing number of recruiters are incorporating AI into their recruitment process. The technology is still developing and admittedly has its weaknesses. However, it is proving adept at streamlining and automating labor-intensive processes. It is one way to reduce your investment into candidates that may not pan out and hedge your bets against hiring a poor match.
Let’s examine seven steps in the recruiting process where AI can reduce HR professionals’ workload and increase recruitment outcomes’ accuracy.
1. Writing Job Postings
Using the correct words to describe an open position is vital to attracting the ideal candidate. Choosing words that favor one gender over another or discourage applicants belonging to a minority group from applying limits your choice of applicants. AI tools can help identify biased language in job descriptions and suggest alternative wording. Casting a wide, inclusive net will allow you to attract top talent from a variety of backgrounds and foster an environment of diversity in your organization.
2. Identifying Candidates
While professional job recruiters have an extensive network of talented individuals, their list is not exhaustive. Finding the right individual to fill a niche position may require more time and effort. AI tools leverage search algorithms and machine learning to quickly identify qualified candidates from internal databases, social media, and job boards. These automated tools can recommend open positions to qualified individuals, answer questions about the position, and invite them to apply. AI tools have different strengths. Determining what information would be most helpful to your organization will determine which is best suited to your recruiting needs.
3. Screening Resumes
One of the most time-consuming steps in the hiring process, screening resumes to determine which applicants have the required skills, background, and experience to be successful, is a task AI is well-equipped for. Masters of sorting and summarizing data based on provided criteria, AIs can pull important qualifications from resumes, hone in on skill or cultural mismatches, and compile assessment data. Automating the screening process frees up time typically spent manually reading documents for tasks that require human interaction.
4. Running Background Checks
Resumes don’t always paint an honest or complete picture of your candidate. However, with access to a plethora of data, AI can quickly and easily compile a profile of your favorite candidates. Pulling information from multiple sources, AI can inform you about your candidate’s past work experience, personal achievements, and skills.
5. Assessing Skills
The skills required to perform the job are not always the ones applicants list on their resume. They may have all the technical skills required, but how do they perform under pressure? Do they get along well with coworkers? Can they solve problems when the answer is not immediately obvious? Interviewing your applicant or talking to a former employer could help you answer these questions. However, AI might be able to do it faster and with less involvement from you.
Online questionnaires and gamified assessments can help uncover the soft skills a candidate may or may not possess. These results, combined with the results of personality tests and skills assessments, will allow you to determine whether an applicant is worth pursuing.
6. Conducting Interviews
Have you had one of those interviews where you start to wonder how the person sitting across the table from you made it to the interview stage? And now you’re not sure how to fill the interview time because you’re sure this candidate is not the right person for the job? Pre-screening candidates through an AI pre-interview can cut back on the time you spend interviewing the wrong applicant.
How does an AI interview work? Rest assured, it’s not like the last conversation you had with ChatGPT. Recruiters still control the conversation. AI simply follows a pre-programmed script through video or chat. At the conclusion of the interview, the AI can provide not only the answers the applicant gave but it can analyze their facial expressions, tone of voice, and body language to give you deeper insights into the conversation.
7. Onboarding
A new hire’s first experience with the company creates lasting first impressions of what it will be like to work for the organization. Ideally, the onboarding process is positive, encouraging, and personalized. In the real world, onboarding can be tedious and uninspiring. Personalizing the experience can be especially challenging when done at volume.
Enlisting the help of AI to welcome new employees to the company can enable you to provide an engaging experience to every employee. It can help you tailor the experience to each employee’s needs while also allowing you to scale the process to accommodate for volume hiring as well.
A Word of Caution
In the business world, AI is the new tool of choice. Every company is searching for ways to streamline daily tasks with this new technology. While it is proving extremely useful in many industries, including recruitment, it is essential to remember that it has limitations.
As a leading recruiting firm in Salt Lake City, we hold ourselves to the highest standards as we place applicants with our clients. AIs have not been around long enough for us to understand how they operate or how they will change and evolve over time. Will they learn our hiring preferences and feed us the candidates they think we will like, favoring one gender or ethnicity over another? Will it gather data or make inferences about candidates that it should not?
Time will answer these questions. Until then, we will continue to use AI where appropriate and rely on our recruiting skills that have served Utah businesses well for over three decades.