How Artificial Intelligence is Changing Recruitment?

If you can fit in two words as the game changers of the 21st century, those are data and artificial intelligence. The power of data is huge and how it is transforming industries from insurance to IT to healthcare. The question is how we harness the data is what the role of artificial intelligence technology is.

What is Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial intelligence makes it possible for machines to perform human-like tasks by learning from experience. Using technologies like machine learning, computers can be trained to execute tasks by processing huge data. The technology continuously recognizes a pattern in the data and act on the findings which helps in making important decisions.

Why was the AI required in Recruitment? Wasn't the existing process sufficient?

The ultimate goal of recruitment across any industry is to hire candidates who match their job requirements. Since starting, companies have been following manual tasks of sourcing, filtering, scanning through profiles.

If you have 10 requirements to close in 1 month, that can be done without much hassle.

If the number goes to 50, things become complex especially if you have a small HR team. Now, suppose you have 500 positions to fill in 1 month, either your manual task of screening candidates will be so much that you have to let go of all other activities or you will end up doing bad hires.

The technology behind artificial intelligence is majorly focusing on solving the problem for recruiters in a way to let go of the burden of filtering, screening profiles manually, because a machine is there to it.

Recruiters can go through thousands of candidate profiles with a click which was earlier taking 2 to 3 weeks doing manually.

What are the benefits of AI in Recruitment?

1. Saves recruiters’ time: Screening software takes control by going through candidate applications and choose the relevant ones. Screening software help save the recruiter's time which they can utilize in other important places.

2. The Quality of Hire Improves: On average, 500-1000 applicants are rushing for a single position. How does one find out which is the best for you?

AI improves the quality of hiring by matching the requirements with very relevant candidate profiles. Technology continuously uses past data and matches experience level, skillsets, certifications, cultural fit, keywords. New-age recruiters make use of automation technology to analyze the speech patterns, facial expressions of jobseekers to check on the fitment.

3. Automates High-Volume Tasks: It’s an opportunity to automate low-level and high volume tasks. Providing decision-makers with more detailed information, immediately reduce operational costs. A single hire takes more than 24 hours of recruiters' time. Day to day tasks like shortlisting relevant candidates, running background checks can be automated.

4. Remove Biases: Recruitment has been a tough job for many, that it is evident that many companies don’t even look beyond references, but they don’t know what are they missing, a high skilled candidate.

Suppose you received 1000 applications for a position. Through the use of AI, you would remove the biases in hiring, and you would reach out to more people who don’t come through reference, don’t belong to the branded institute, a particular color, age, national origin. AI minimizes the bias and hires actually skilled candidates and the right fit for the job.

5. Great Candidate Experience: Though slowly, the trend is shifting from providing candidates a complex long job application to a two-way conversation.

Rather than candidates emailing or calling the Hr team, candidates, the software reaches out to confirm details and screen them for further process making it quick and engaging.

AI technology automation combine with relevant job applications picks up data from multiple candidates' resumes and does the best match with the Job description which results in a great candidate experience. This can bring a good number of jobseeker data to your website in the future.

Candidate experience does matter as it decides if a candidate will accept the offer or not, it will determine the overall company image. A good experience can push further the word of mouth branding.

6. Reduced Risk of losing talent to competition: Right from the time of sourcing till the offer letter is released, automation technology does all the work so fast that there is less probability that the candidate will go to the competition, until and unless there are some other major challenges like higher salary demands. 

Most of the recruiters admitted that their most time is spent to find and screen candidates' resumes, finding the right fit, it’s all manual. Thanks to AI, it saves a lot of time.

Automation powered portals like Vasitum help you with interview scheduling and automated screening of the candidates. Vasitum takes the pain out of screening by leading all your applicants through a predefined series of questions that pre-screen them for the role.

The challenges of Applying AI in Recruiting

1. Pre-existing Biases in The System: Artificial Intelligence in recruitment aims at reducing unconscious bias by ignoring information such as a candidate’s age, race, gender. Biases can get baked into the algorithm whether removing qualified candidates because HR assumes everyone needs a college degree.

Make sure to take steps to remove potential pre-existing bias from the system e.g., only hiring people with an MBA marketing degree.

2. Huge Amount of data: For the AI technology to produce the best output and to be time-efficient, it will require lots of data to learn how to accurately mimic human intelligence.

As an example, AI that uses machine learning needs a lot of data to learn how to filter candidates as accurately as a human recruiter. Otherwise, it questions the fact about the accuracy of AI technology.

3. Data Privacy: When there is so much data generated every second, there is a risk that the data might be used for unethical and bad purposes, which is not what the AI technology is built for.

Recruiters will have more time to spend with candidates in-person to build relationships and help determine culture fit.

Role of Chatbot

Although chatbots have started becoming a part of recruitment for some companies, most recruiters are still not leveraging the benefit. 

Chatbots screen candidates by interacting with them by asking qualifying questions, analyze the right fits for present requirements, providing them a status update, and present them in form of the Talent Acquisition team.

Candidates have started using chatbots to reveal their queries which they couldn’t ask on another platform in open. That's why 70% of candidates and employees who engage with AI say it’s a great experience. 

Chatbots are instrumental as there are 50% reductions in calls made to the HR team making the whole system more productive.

Some Companies Which leverage AI in Recruitment

1. Unilever: The multinational company reports that it saved 100,000 hours of human recruitment time in the last year by using automation software to analyze video interviews. The software scans the language that candidates use – active or passive phrases, tone of voice, facial expressions.
2. Vodafone: Vodafone claims to be banking upon the Automation tools. They have introduced "psychometric assessments into the video interview platform for a finer candidate experience". Also claim that "drop out" rates have reduced by 30% and candidates love the engaging tool than earlier processes.
3. IKEA: Global Furniture and lifestyle company has to deal with thousands of CVs every other day. They have adopted Artificial intelligence technology for selecting the best of candidates. The AI system takes care of the initial recruitment steps for candidates while leaving the recruiters free for other meaningful responsibilities. They had been conducting interviews for more than 1000 candidates in a single day using the automation technology.

The Way Ahead

If speeding up the hiring process is your priority then making use of an AI platform can make a lot of sense.

Modern companies are increasingly looking at advanced technologies to boost hiring productivity. The best thing AI does is turning quantity into quality.

The aim to ease the recruitment process the recruitment is not going to end. It's just the start. What's important is we take action now. Adding automation to your recruitment is the need of the hour.

Get on to the new age of recruiting with Vasitum. Vasitum saves 40% of recruiters time spent on screening applicants and screening interviews. Leverage AI to find, screen, and hire the best candidates.