AI in TA

Disclaimer: I am not an AI expert, these are just my thoughts, I’m always open to being wrong and always interested in other people’s thoughts and input.

Recruiter friends:? you are not going to be replaced by robots any time soon.? BUT……AI is going to be (if it isn’t already) baked into tools and processes you use.? So, embrace it and learn more sooner rather than later.?

AI tools definitely provide efficiency in the form of time saves for everyday recruiting tasks.? Soon you won’t need x-ray or Boolean searches (thank the recruiting Gods), it can improve outreach and sequencing and potentially personalization of messaging.? But you still need Recruiters to feed the prompts and those recruiters need to understand their company, the role, the competition, the talent market they operate in and the factors that are going to engage that talent and get a response (at least in markets where you target passive talent).? LinkedIn In has already built this into their Recruiter product.

Sourcing tools can potentially provide better quality candidate “long lists” in the sourcing stage.? Rather than relying on keyword searches they can analyze the body of the text to enable more context around a potential candidates skillset and experience.? Again, potentially a time save from having to chop a lot of wood and plough through 100’s of profiles that just have the two or three keywords you initially searched on.

In fact, from what I’ve seen, most of the AI tools focus on incremental efficiencies on consistent tasks in the process.? What’s interesting is that most of the tools I’ve seen seem to be targeting professional level niche or hard to find talent (most demos I’ve seen use the Software Engineer profile).? I would have thought targeting these tools to the volume hiring market is where TA functions will get the best ROI and efficiency.? So far, I’ve only seen Talk'n'Job Job really target the volume hiring market with a sourcing tool.? Maybe I’ve missed these products, and I haven’t yet looked at what Workday unveiled this week, which I’m sure will be skewed to the Enterprise/Volume markets.

As the market is fragmented with small vendors, for the immediate future Tech Stack and integration is going to be everything.? Until the big vendors buy up these tools or create their own and integrate them into the HRIS/ATS/CRM, you’ll need a series of tools or add-ons which, from my experience, can take away some of the efficiencies the tools provide in the first place unless they are implemented thoughtfully.

What did I see that was cool?

Talk'n'Job Job – awesome tool for enabling applications by voice via a smartphone.

Ashby – they are building in a lot of the tools around searching, messaging and sequencing into a combined ATS/CRM and clearly have a roadmap to roll out more.? If I was in the market for an ATS, I’d call them first.

Searchlight.ai – incredible tool to automate quality of hire based around skills and competencies for roles in the org.? The only things that struck me are whether the organization has to have this data already, otherwise you’re risking GIGO and that it asks candidates to sit through another assessment.? In the passive talent markets, particularly engineering, candidates might be reluctant.? But it is a great tool.

Metaview – if your company rigorously uses scorecards and/or interview notes, Metaview transcribes the interview and can generate these for you.

Several tools for writing better job specs and adverts, these should be baked into the HRIS/ATS as standard, but then I thought that of Textio years ago and it hasn’t been universally adopted.

There’s a lot of debate about ethics and bias.? I’m not going to dive into that here, but I heard an argument that recruiters should soon be taken out of the selection process altogether and allow AI tools to perform this.? I get that argument but we’ve seen that some of these LLM’s have problems with inherent bias, so are we potentially replacing one form of bias with another??

Finally, the robot ATS still doesn’t exist.? But we are potentially getting closer to it.? It’s going to be fun seeing how the TA industry responds to these tools and how rapidly they are developed and adopted.? We’re not renowned as being cutting edge (hell, some firms are still using Taleo!) or tech savvy but we clearly have to embrace AI as it isn’t going anywhere and will provide benefits in terms of quality and efficiency of hiring.

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