The promise of AI in hiring

The hiring process is becoming more data-driven all the time. Pools of available candidates have grown drastically due to the expansion of talent networking platforms and the persistence of remote work. Gartner forecasts that 39 percent of global knowledge workers will do hybrid work by the end of 2023 – up from 37 percent in 2022. This means companies no longer face rigid geographical constraints upon who, where, and how they hire.?

Despite these shifts, a stubbornly tight labor market has made the process of finding and recruiting talent extremely competitive. There are still roughly two job openings for every American who is actively seeking work. At a time when companies are desperate for qualified employees and capable of recruiting from larger talent pools, AI is the ideal tool to help them find and hire people efficiently. For example, AI can be used to automate the candidate search process by filtering out job-seekers who don’t meet a company’s specific needs, reviewing resumes and other sources of information (such as LinkedIn profiles) at scale, and resurfacing previous applicants (a process known as talent rediscovery).??

According to a 2022 survey conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management, a quarter of organizations say they plan to increase their use of AI and automation in hiring over the next five years. Of the organizations that currently use AI in HR, 79 percent do so for recruitment and hiring – much more than for any other purpose. The top AI-supported recruiting function cited by HR professionals is communication with candidates – a reminder that increasingly sophisticated chatbots will likely play a larger role in hiring. A 2022 Criteria survey found that the second-most-cited reason candidates drop out of the hiring process is poor communication from the recruiter, and chatbots can quickly address this problem.?

HR professionals cite many other use cases for AI in recruiting: screening resumes, automating candidate searches, customizing job ads, pre-selecting candidates for interviews, and generating job descriptions. AI has already demonstrated its value across many domains of the hiring process, and it will only become more versatile. These are all reasons recruiters need to know how to use AI as productively and responsibly as possible – a goal we’ll focus on in the next two blog posts.?