Artificial Intelligence is here, and it’s here to stay. The general outlook has been gloomy, especially when it comes to the safety of our jobs. The stats really are scary.
PwC (2017) estimates that 38% of U.S. jobs could be lost to automation in the next 15 years, and 30% of existing jobs in the UK are susceptible to automation from A.I.
H.R professionals and recruiters are not exempt to this, and artificial intelligence has already transformed the way we recruit by automating time-consuming tasks.
A.I. has problem solving and machine learning skills that most humans can’t comprehend, so we should just get used to the fact that A.I. is going nowhere.
Therefore as a recruiter it is very important that you learn to leverage A.I. to the best of your abilities, because soon enough you will reap the rewards.
Should we trust it?
Some of you are scared of the potential of A.I. and might be thinking we’ll all turn into terminators some day, alike to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s hit 1984 movie.
You might be overreacting just a tad and thinking A.I. will start World War III just like Alibaba’s founder Jack Ma:
JACK MA: Artificial intelligence and machine learning 'may cause the Third World War' https://t.co/9LmOVcQCTH pic.twitter.com/6DMIRID1ps
— Business Insider (@BusinessInsider) June 22, 2017
But let’s all take a chill-pill and focus on what A.I. will mean to us recruiters.
Fortunately for us, developments within artificial intelligence have created a huge potential to fix problems we face with our productivity.
Ideal say that “A.I. for recruiting is an emerging category of HR technology designed to reduce, or even remove, low-level sourcing activities like manually screening resumes.”
They go on to state that A.I. will, and already does, help you save time by automating high-volume tasks such as reading through tons of CV’s, that you never loved doing anyway, or scheduling interviews with possible candidates.
Furthermore, Bullhorn, an international cloud computing that helps staffing and recruiting organizations transform their businesses, based in Boston, Massachusetts, have recently reported in a research study that ‘67% of staffing professionals believe automation will help them promote and develop top talent, not eliminate them’.
How? By removing them of ‘non-value-adding’ tasks such as scheduling and screening, so that they can grow their relationships, and focus on the more humanistic side of things.
However, they also report that ‘33% of their respondents say they plan to replace talent with technology’, in order to lower costs. That’s a fact we have to come to grips with, and learn to work around.
Angela Hood, the Chief Executive of This Way Global, agrees and says “Our goal isn’t to try and replace recruiters – we’ll still need them,” she says. “What we want to do is remove the fatiguing part, the grunt work, so they can focus on recruiting, on-boarding and engaging people better. It’s about complementing rather than replacing.”
Intelligent candidate searching
Think about it this way – You have a job role with specific requirements, you put that online and allow prospective candidates to apply.
The A.I. system you have in place is able to quickly sift through hundreds of profiles, without the bias that a recruiter might have to specific things such as age or nationality, and allocates the best candidates to the best role based on their skills, aims and motivations, rather than their name, gender or age.
Candidates are matched against an employer’s requirements objectively rather than subjectively, making the application process as natural as it can be.
You as an employer then have the most suitable candidates at your disposal based on the exact skills you require for the vacant role.
No more sifting through heaps of CV’s, rather you’re focusing on the more important stuff, and the stuff that requires a ‘human’ to do, such as interviewing and selecting the best candidate.
Embrace A.I.
This is the reality of the situation – A.I. will take over some of our jobs.
But how do we react? We need to find a way to intertwine with artificial intelligence. Using A.I. to maximise our potential, and our businesses.
We already use A.I. based technology to reduce our workload, we use it schedule interviews or reduce administrative processes. So as recruiters we might as well continue to embrace it, even as it becomes bigger, faster and stronger. Right?
If you want to find out more on this subject, have a read through a previous segment we ran with recruiting experts within the industry right here: How Can Recruiters Avoid Being Replaced by A.I.?
