As technology evolves, artificial intelligence is quickly becoming mainstream in the recruiting world. Whether it’s sorting through high volumes of resumes, analyzing facial expressions in a video interview, or scanning social media profiles, AI is quickly becoming more of an industry standard. Artificial intelligence is simply cutting down time-consuming work, especially repetitive high-volume tasks that can take up hours of a recruiter’s time.
Because AI has the ability to grow to be more effective over time, some recruiters are viewing it as a threat to their jobs, but this technology can only make recruiters’ lives easier by taking out dreaded, tedious work.
Did you know manually screening resumes is still the most time-consuming part of recruiting especially when 75% to 88% of the resumes received for a role are unqualified?
Screening resumes efficiently and effectively is still one of the biggest challenges for recruiters. AI is designed to reduce and eventually remove low-level sourcing activities like manually screening resumes. 56% of talent acquisition leaders say their hiring volume will increase next year, but their recruiting teams will most likely remain the same size or shrink.
As AI expands in the recruiting world, talent acquisition pros will be expected to become more efficient by “doing more with less.” This means recruiters will be tasked with less sourcing and screening, but more interviewing candidates, closing job offers and improving the quality of hire. While traditional research might be replaced by some elements of AI, recruiters can still flex their sourcing and research muscles with hard to find positions and by figuring out a customized approach to that perfect candidate a bot helped find.
Artificial intelligence is also speeding up the recruiting process which reduces the time it takes to hire a candidate. This increases the chances of hiring the best talent before they get swept up by a competitor.
Companies using AI recruiting software have seen their employee performance and quality of hire increase by 20% and their turnover decrease by 35%.
Although a recruiter’s role will change in the future, industry leaders predict using AI to recruit is augmented intelligence. This merely means artificial intelligence will never fully replace a recruiter’s role, it will just enhance their part in the hiring process and increase the chances of a quality hire. A recent statistic foreshadows by 2020, 85% of customer interactions will be managed without a human.
Harnessing AI for hiring could lead to more dynamic and diverse workplaces. With AI there is more focus on the candidate’s qualifications and in many cases, AI can help bolster inclusion, by allowing a broader talent pool than more subjective humans. A common caveat, of course, is that AI is only as good as those programming it, so when creating these tools, human resources, recruiting and talent acquisition must be extra careful during implementation and use.
AI can also help improve the candidate experience during the application phase. Artificial Intelligence engages candidates throughout the recruitment process, matches candidates to alternative positions and provides support before, during and after the recruiting process. New tools are surfacing to take transactional tasks from recruiters, freeing them to focus on interviewing and closing job offers.
This kind of technology is continuously evolving but recruiter jobs will never fully be replaced by AI. It will only enhance the recruitment process to allow recruiters to focus on hiring the perfect candidate with a little help.
About the author: Noel Webb is co-founder and CEO of Karen.ai (Your Cognitive Recruiting Assistant), the latest project from his role as Director of Product Innovation at Innosphere. A veteran of business development and out-of-the-box thinking, Noel has been a leader in his roles over the years for several companies, including Bam Digital, SpeakFeel and Agnition.
