AI In Recruitment: How To Benefit

AI In Recruitment

Discover how AI Recruiting can enhance your hiring process. Learn about the advantages of using Artificial Intelligence in recruitment with our comprehensive guide.

It’s an old cliché that companies that fail to innovate get left behind. From Blockbuster’s failure to embrace streaming to Kodak’s dismissal of digital cameras, plenty of businesses in the past have refused to embrace new technologies and have suffered – or collapsed – as a result. This is true for every aspect of a firm, including recruitment.

The process of hiring someone has evolved rapidly over the past few decades. It wasn’t that long ago that recruitment involved little more than placing a job ad in a newspaper. Since then, developments such as online job boards, passive candidate sourcing, video interviews and more have completely transformed the recruitment landscape.

The latest innovation that is set to transform the world of recruitment is artificial intelligence (AI). The technology is arguably still in its early stages; however, already a Gartner study has found that 76 percent of HR leaders believe that failing to adopt AI in the next 12 to 24 months will lead to their organisations lagging behind the competition.

Companies looking to innovate in 2024 will need to integrate artificial intelligence into their recruitment process, and this guide is set up to help you do exactly that. We will cover the key features and benefits of AI-based recruitment, as well as looking at some of the organisations that have successfully implemented the technology into their hiring processes. Read on to find out everything you need to know about AI in recruitment.

What Does AI In Recruiting Mean?

First of all, what do we mean when we talk about integrating AI into recruitment? Artificial intelligence is a broad term, covering everything from advanced search engines to language models that can help with creating job adverts, and there are a number of aspects of the recruitment process into which businesses can integrate AI.

One key thing to understand is that companies cannot simply replace their entire recruitment process with AI. Not only is the technology not advanced enough for this, many recruiters would not want to leave key hiring decisions in the hands of an algorithm. AI may never be advanced enough to fully understand how a candidate will fit into a firm’s culture, for example, or to compare extremely different employment experiences.

When talking about integrating AI into recruitment, generally this refers to the delegation of specific tasks to AI-driven algorithms. Often these are menial tasks that don’t require complex decision-making, but take up a lot of recruiters’ time.

For example, many jobs have strict education or experience requirements, and any candidate that doesn’t meet them can be safely rejected. For a human, this requires reading and checking potentially hundreds of CVs just to eliminate the candidates that don’t meet these criteria, which can be hours of work. An AI tool can filter out ineligible candidates in seconds.

In this example, the decision made by the AI is simple: does the candidate meet these specific requirements? The recruiter still has oversight over the process, and can overrule the algorithm. For example, in very small talent pools it might be necessary to consider candidates who do not meet the experience requirements. However, by using AI the entire process can be made quicker and more efficient.

How To Use AI In Recruiment

Looking at each stage of recruitment, there are several areas in which we can bring AI into play. Starting at the beginning, AI can be used to create job adverts. At Allen Recruitment, we use AI to ensure we are choosing the most effective job title for the advertised role, as well as using it to scan our adverts to ensure the language used is as appealing and appropriate to candidates as possible.

We then use AI to establish a talent pool. Once we have talked to our clients and fully understood their requirements, we can plug them into our AI-powered search engine and quickly access a longlist of all the candidates in a given area that meet our criteria, whether those candidates are actively searching for a role or not.

The AI screens each candidate based on any number of criteria. For example, we can analyse past hires and how long they stayed at the company to pick up on factors that might indicate a better hire. The AI might be able to spot that candidates from a particular university are a small percentage more likely to stay in a role, so we can use that factor to screen candidates and improve hiring retention for our clients.

We can even leave the process of contacting candidates to an AI, using an automated system that contacts each candidate a set number of times. This has much higher success rates while also saving a significant amount of time over having recruiters contact each candidate manually.

Benefits Of AI Recruiting

It should hopefully be easy to see how AI can save you time and resources, and this has held true for the recruitment professionals who have implemented the new technology. Of all recruiters using AI tools, 41 percent report increased productivity and 57 percent find it faster and/or easier to write job descriptions.

The same study found that 45 percent of recruiters using AI were able to focus on more fulfilling work by using the tech to automate tasks. This is a major benefit of artificial intelligence: taking menial jobs out of the hands of recruiters so they can focus their skills and expertise where they are most able to help.

However, AI is more than a time-saving device. It can also help crack down on recruitment bias. This is something that affects recruiters all across the industry, with 96 percent of recruitment leaders agreeing unconscious bias is an issue. It frequently leads to candidates being dismissed for reasons completely unconnected with their skills and abilities.

AI allows us to bypass bias by removing demographic information from the equation. Rather than looking at each applicant as a whole, AI-powered search can focus purely on the criteria that matter for the job. That means looking at skills, experience and education rather than gender, ethnicity or age.

This doesn’t mean we can sit back and assume we have solved recruitment bias, of course. We’re aware of the possibility of bias in algorithms, and work to ensure we are revisiting ours and not relying too heavily on it without oversight. However, AI can be an exceptional tool for preventing unconscious bias from affecting recruitment decisions.

Real-Life Examples Of Using AI In Recruitment

Using AI to recruit more effectively is not just a theory; plenty of companies are already putting it into practice, and seeing incredible results. An early adopter of the technology is Unilever, which announced it was launching an AI-powered talent marketplace back in 2019. Part of this involved utilising artificial intelligence tools to analyse video interviews.

The software looked at subtle aspects of candidates’ body language, as well as the language they used in the interview. It then checked these against a database of the traits that were typically seen in candidates with high levels of success in their careers. By doing this, the company could get some quick, easy indicators of which candidates were most likely to do well if they were to get the job.

Unilever was able to save hundreds of thousands of hours of time by utilising this tactic, telling the Guardian that it had also saved a significant amount of money thanks to its AI recruitment tools.

Another company that has seen success by using AI throughout the recruitment process is IBM. The company is an AI pioneer, and has developed its own software that used machine learning to assist in hiring.

Because IBM is such a large company, its recruitment process can take a long time. It was able to streamline this by using AI to prioritise candidates. Its algorithm uses a combination of information about the job market and data about the performance of past hires to determine which candidates are most likely to be successful at the company.

This is used to free up recruiter time. Like a lot of firms, IBM’s recruiters are talented professionals with a lot of experience that is best suited for building and nurturing relationships with its candidates. Using AI allows the company to use its recruiters in the most effective way, rather than wasting their talents with menial CV sorting.

Conclusion

Artificial intelligence is just one tool in a recruiter’s toolbelt, but it is important not to underestimate how crucial that tool is. Time is one of the most valuable resources in recruitment, and the ability of AI to save a huge number of hours means recruitment processes can become much more streamlined, efficient and effective.

We have seen how AI has been used to search for candidates, screen CVs and even analyse performance at interviews. As time goes on, we will likely see a number of other developments that make the tool even more effective; however, it’s also likely that some of the ways AI is currently being used will fall out of fashion.

AI-based video analysis, for example, is a technology that is still in early stages. It might be discovered that it isn’t as effective as human analysis. It would be foolish to avoid using AI, but it would be equally foolish not to see it as an evolving tool.

Whatever the case, recruitment is in an exciting place. With AI-powered tools, the industry is becoming more efficient and opening up opportunities to be even more effective, while giving recruiters the ability to really use their talents. We’re excited to see where the technology will take us next.