June 8, 2019

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The benefits of AI Recruiting – Part 1

When it comes to hiring, the resource needed most for HR teams is time.

Screening for the best candidates to fill any position can take countless man-hours – and comprises a large part of any hiring process – almost 23 hours’ worth per job posting!

Keyword-spotting, skill sets, and whether or not the candidate comes across as the right fit are important parts of hiring, especially when it comes to high profile or lucrative positions. But if you’re a small business, or you’ve got a number of positions to fill, putting an HR advisor strictly on screening resumes isn’t a good use of your time – and it’s not a good use of company money, either.

So what if there’s a way to do it faster and more time-effectively? As we move into the 21st century of hiring practices, artificial intelligence technology, or AI, has replaced many of the hours spent screening resumes and spotting the right candidates for an interview pool. With this technology, HR advisors and teams can quickly scan each resume they receive for a job posting in less than half the time, freeing up more time for in-depth interviews and discussions with preferred candidates, and leading to better fits for the open jobs within their organizations.

As we see more and more menial, time-consuming tasks become automated, the fear becomes whether or not this type of technology is appropriate for certain organizations. We’ll cover that more in part two of this series, where we discuss how AI can be used to support hiring and the pros and cons of using technology to screen sensitive personal data.

How does AI recruiting improve the quality of candidates?

First of all, it’s best to consider how AI recruiting can save an HR recruiter’s time and money. We’ve discussed already how AI can cut CV screening time in half; how it does this is using complex algorithms to spot specific keywords and phrases. It matches the candidate to the job using a standardized method, which improves the quality of hire.

Quality of hire, or the value a new hire adds to your organization, is one of the top key performance indicators every HR team has when it comes to hiring for a business. The longer you retain a talented candidate, the more they contribute to the organization’s long-term success. According to Ideal.com, the minimum baseline for a quality of hire is that the value a person creates while employed at your business is greater than the cost of recruiting them. After all, if you’re losing money by hiring the wrong talent, then your business not only suffers, but so does your team’s morale – which can lead to more talent-bleeding in the long run.

AI recruiting helps with this by carefully taking indicators that you have chosen and measuring each candidate against them using a rating scale, for example. The more highly rated the candidate, the better the fit. Because AI doesn’t have the biases of human beings, the diversity in your talent pool may actually be greater, allowing you to choose from candidates you may or may not have seen with the old method of human-based screening. Tools such as Textmetrics are able to assist in eliminating gender bias job descriptions by detecting male and female-centric wordings and giving its users “neutral” suggestions, making the text friendlier to all potential candidates. While candidates must be a good fit for the organization, it’s important to remember that diverse hiring actually makes your organization better, and can bring new creativity and skills to the role.

Top performers contribute disproportionately to an organization’s success – it’s said that they provide almost 80% of the rise in profits and KPIs just by their work alone. To that end, it’s important that HR recruiters are able to attract top performers who will also be lured to stay long-term.

How AI recruiting works

AI recruiting is based on algorithms that are trained to spot patterns, especially when it comes to large chunks of information. It uses intelligent screening software on your existing resume database, which then gives it insight into which candidates moved on to greater success, and which employees were unsuccessful based on their performance, tenure, and turnover rates. By doing this, it gathers a sense of the skills, experience, and qualities to apply to new applicants that will fit in best with your organization.

It can also enrich candidate profiles by using public data sources, finding their previous employers, public social media profiles, or other information that would generally be gathered by a human recruiter – and take much more time in the hiring process.

At the end, it gives you a complete profile of your most successful candidates, automatically ranked, graded, and shortlisted. That allows you to move onto the interview stage, in which you’ll use this information to delve more deeply into the candidate as a person.

Innovations in AI recruiting

Along with the basic sorting and ranking, AI recruiting can do more than simply pre-screen candidates. Recently, technology has created all sorts of time-saving innovations for HR teams.

Recruiter chatbots are currently being tested to provide real-time information and interaction to candidates, eliminating pre-screening calls. They can be programmed to ask questions based on the must-have job requirements, and eliminate hours of phone calls to unsuitable people. They will provide feedback, updates, and next-step suggestions to the candidates – allowing them to become more successful in their careers, as well.

How does this benefit you? Well, many candidates say they leave with a negative impression of the company when they don’t hear back from an HR team after leaving an application. In order to keep your brand profile high, these time-saving bots deliver that interaction for you.

Other innovations include digitized interviews, which can eliminate one or more screening interviews in the hiring process. The software assesses word choices, speech patterns, and facial expressions to judge whether or not the candidate is a fit for the role, which leaves the hiring decisions and deeper questions to the human HR recruiters.

Whether or not you believe in the ability of technology to judge the best candidate for the job, it is undeniable that AI recruiting saves time. Stay tuned for our next blog in the series, where we examine some of the challenges of AI recruiting, and how you can get around it in order to hire the best fit for the role – and save time for your team.

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