With the rapid growth of AI (artificial intelligence) technologies like NLP, Machine Learning there is a big shift happening in various industries including the recruitment industry. As per Dice’s AI recruitment automation report in 2018, more and more companies are looking to use AI in recruitment. Companies are either using AI recruiting software or integrating AI into their recruitment software. So, let’s look at the benefits of ai in recruitment.
Benefits Of AI In Recruitment
Here is a quick list of the benefits of AI in recruitment. We will also go through each benefit in detail.
- Intelligent Recruitment Automation
- Reduces Time To Hire
- Improves Quality of Hiring
- Stay Ahead of Your Competition
- Can Help In Eliminating The Bias In Hiring Process
- Improves Candidate Experience
- Mine Your Existing Candidate Database
Let’s look at these benefits of AI in hiring in detail.
1. Intelligent Recruitment Automation
Recruitment software like an applicant tracking system (ATS) provides a certain degree of automation. It could help you store resumes systematically over the cloud where you would be able to maintain your candidate database. It also helps you search through that candidate database. You also get some insights into your hiring process with reports that an ATS would provide. Although a traditional ATS would help you manage your recruitment flow, intelligent recruitment automation can actually optimize your recruitment process.
For example, if you receive 100 applications for a job, you still need to go through each resume to decide which resumes fit the best. Using AI for resume screening you can screen those 100 resumes a few seconds. Otherwise, a resume is screened many times in the recruitment process. A resume is screened by recruiters and later by hiring managers to decide if the candidate is suitable for the position.
Another example where AI can play an important role is scheduling interviews. A Recruiter has to continuously go back and forth in determining the time and availability of a candidate and an interviewer. Smart automation would help in automatically finding a suitable interview slot between the two.
Similarly, by integrating AI in an applicant tracking system for various other activities like candidate sourcing, video interviewing, recruitment marketing, companies can boost the performance of their hiring teams. Or companies can simply use AI-powered recruitment automation software to leverage most AI-enabled functionalities.
2. Reduces Time To Hire
If you ask me what is the overall theme of the benefits of AI in recruitment, I would say it reduces the time to hire significantly. If you ask companies, one thing they want to improve in their hiring process, there is a high chance the answer would be “reducing the time to hire.”
The reason companies spend a lot of money on recruitment is that it wants to hire the best people, faster. Companies spend money on recruitment marketing, it spends money on candidate sourcing by subscribing to various job boards, recruitment agencies with a purpose to attract and to hire the right talent.
We have already discussed how using AI for resume screening can screen 1000 resumes in a few seconds. A recruiter would need days before he or she can find the relevant candidates from the heap of job applications.
Similarly, using recruiting chatbot can help save productive time of recruiters. Even if we consider only routine questions related to hiring that a recruiter needs to answer on day to day basis, an NLP powered chatbot can save hours of time every day. This leaves recruiters with more time to focus on what they love most – engaging candidates.
3. Improves Quality of Hiring
AI improves the quality of hire. However, it won’t automatically pick a candidate and tell you this is your next hire! No. There are many reasons why a candidate may get selected or rejected through the interview process. However, AI brings you to close in choosing the best candidate.
Typically, candidate applications are processed in the order it is received. It is also true that many resumes or candidate applications are not even screened when the volume is higher than usual. A recruiter or a hiring manager when screens through a heap of resumes, they call the initial matched candidates. They may not go through other applications. It could happen they never open the resume of the best-matched candidate. If we use AI for candidate screening then we almost eliminate the chance of leaving out the best candidates.
Machine learning learns about the hiring pattern in your organization and helps you identify the most relevant candidates who could actually join your organization much early in the process.
4. Stay Ahead Of Your Competition
Probably one of the most interesting benefits of AI in recruitment – it helps you stay ahead of your competition. If you think about it, as per LinkedIn hiring stats, 30% of the job seekers are active job seekers and everybody is looking out for them. Every company, recruitment agency is after this 30% of candidates. This is evident because 80% of the recruiters use the same leading job board in their geography. Meaning, all recruiters when they search on job boards they find the same set of candidates. How do you beat that?
It is like the fastest finger first! But how would a recruiter know the candidate they are pursuing is the right candidate and would match the job requirement. Job board searches are keyword driven. Also, a job board wouldn’t know the kind of candidates that matches your organization. It just throws results based on your query. Hence, many resumes of active candidates that you find on job boards may not be relevant.
In addition to that, in most cases 70% of the job applications that a job receives are irrelevant. It adds to the noise. In order to reach the right candidates, you need to eliminate such noise. Using AI you could eliminate such noise and focus on most suitable candidates.
5. Remove Unconscious Bias In The Hiring Process
We human beings are biased. We pick up various biases as we are growing up. It is not possible to remove it completely. However, we can recognize it and accept it. AI can help you identify and to some extent remove unconscious bias from the hiring process. AI itself cannot remove the unconscious bias. However, it will help you in the first step which is recognizing the unconscious bias.
For example, many of us decide the fate of a candidate by just merely reading the name of the candidate. Or by knowing the race, gender or any other demographics about the candidate. This is because we are biased about certain things. So, how AI can help?
AI can identify the hiring pattern in your organization. Thus, it can tell if your hiring practices are biased towards particular hiring. For example, if you are recruiting male candidates over female candidates or if you are avoiding candidates with certain ethnicities?
How AI can remove unconscious bias? As described earlier, AI won’t remove unconscious bias by itself, but it can remove things like name, gender from the resume if you are using an automated resume screening process or otherwise.
6. Better Candidate Experience
One of the distinct benefits of AI in recruitment is you can improve candidate experience at different stages of recruitment. For example, if the candidate visits the career page of your company and has any questions related to a job opening; an NLP based recruiter chatbot can answer those questions immediately.
Even during, onboarding process, candidates generally have questions around joining date, work timings, etc. A conversational chatbot can address that quickly saving the productive time of recruiters.
Another example, when you use emails for recruitment marketing, more than often candidate’s inbox is flooded with irrelevant job opportunities. It is because such campaigns are keywords driven. Using AI resume screening will match the right candidates with the right job positions. This will make sure you do not engage wrong candidates and annoy them by presenting irrelevant job opportunities.
7. Mine Existing Candidate Database
Applicant tracking system (ATS) helps you organize your recruitment database however it really doesn’t help you with historical data. You can search through your database but it is no different than searching on job boards. An ATS wouldn’t find the most relevant candidates for you from your own database.
For example, let’s say you are looking for Marketing Communications professionals in your database. When you search in your database with keywords like marketing, sales, ATL, BTL, etc. You may find 100 candidates if not thousand. Would you have the motivation to screen or to contact these 100 candidates? But you can certainly contact the top 10 candidates. That’s the simple difference between searching and screening candidates. Candidate rediscovery is one of the most value-added benefits of AI in recruitment. You may want to consider using AI Applicant Tracking System if you are planning to use historical data for finding passive candidates and save recruitment cost.
As per HR.com, the current state of AI in recruitment shows AI is changing the traditional methods of recruiting and it will continue to do. For some use cases, it is still evolving. The benefits of AI in recruitment will push companies to introduce intelligent recruitment automation at least for mundane tasks that are time-consuming and laborious.
