AI for Recruiting

How can AI be used for recruiting?

AI-enabled technology tools empower businesses by automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks and enhancing recruiting processes so that HR employees can focus on finding, recruiting, and hiring top talent.

In HR TechCube's “How Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Professionals Are Leveraging AI for Enhanced Recruiting Processes,” Jose F. Laurel, G&A Partners' Vice President of Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO), discusses how AI for recruiting is streamlining and transforming the process in areas such as:

• Candidate sourcing and evaluation: AI tools scan online data from job boards, for example, to assess resumes and seek out candidates whose skills and experience match with job requirements. They analyze data and generate a shortlist of the most qualified candidates.
  
  
• Enhanced candidate experience: AI-powered chatbots are designed to elevate the candidate experience by answering questions, providing feedback, scheduling interviews, recommending job opportunities, and providing updates throughout the hiring process.
  
  
• Optimized interviews: AI tools can help assess candidates' communication skills, develop targeted interview questions, and ensure “…consistency across interviews, leading to more reliable and fair assessments.”
  
  
• Data-driven insights: AI tech tools can scan your SMB's hiring data patterns and trends and analyze sourcing channel effectiveness, forecast hiring needs, and evaluate recruitment strategies that align hiring with business goals. They can also identify patterns and help predict which candidates are most likely to succeed in each role.

AI can also reduce unintentional bias in recruiting by providing tools for objective evaluation of candidates' skills and qualifications.

The result is an intentional collaboration between SMBs and AI. HR team members can focus on the human-centric aspects of the recruiting process while using AI-generated insights to help make strategic decisions and build stronger relationships with candidates.

What are the benefits of using AI for recruitment?

It can be challenging to strategically position your SMB in today’s competitive and crowded job market. You are competing for skilled candidates (who have options) while evaluating hundreds—if not thousands—of applicants for each job opening.

AI-enabled HR tech tools, including AI candidate sourcing, offer benefits that help your team navigate and manage time-consuming tasks associated with today’s multi-tiered recruiting process. These include:

• Increased efficiencies. According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM)’s “The Future of Hiring: The Role of AI in Modern Recruitment Strategies,” “Using AI saves recruiters time by scanning resumes to find keywords. While sifting through thousands of applications and resumes, an AI resume parser scrapes information needed to evaluate a client.” AI screening and candidate sourcing tools also analyze applicant profiles based on skills, experience, and cultural fit, which helps HR teams identify the most qualified candidates more efficiently.
  
  
• Improved communications. Chatbots can answer candidates’ questions with pre-defined answers, update their application status, and communicate information about your company and job openings. This helps forge relationships with applicants and boosts your company’s recruiting reputation. According to Forbes’ “How Artificial Intelligence Benefits Recruiting” by Neha Naik, “Unhappy candidates can leave negative online reviews. You can lose customers. This is easily remedied by using an applicant tracking system to help with timely responses and scheduling candidates.”
  
  
• Accelerated hiring. The recruiting process takes time, from posting a job opening to hiring and onboarding the right person. By automating some tasks with AI-enabled tools, such as resume screening, candidate matching, chatbot communications, interview scheduling, and data analysis, your team can focus on identifying and shortlisting top candidates and conducting a robust yet efficient interview process.
  
  
• Strategically marketed job openings. AI tools can help generate content for job descriptions and targeted ads and recommend posting strategies to attract qualified candidates. According to Indeed for Employers’ “Exploring the Benefits of AI in Recruitment,” “You can also use AI technology in the form of recruiting chatbots to help interested job seekers find a position that’s a good fit for them. Helping candidates connect with the right job opportunities results in better quality applicants that fit your needs well.”
  
  
• Enhanced objectivity. AI assessment and testing tools can increase objectivity in recruiting by focusing on a candidate’s skills and qualifications while adhering to legal standards and transparency, according to G&A Partners’ Jose F. Laurel in HR TechCube’s “Transformational AI in Talent Acquisition.” Some of the ways this happens are through AI algorithms that evaluate candidates based on pre-defined criteria, assessments, or tests that score objectively based on candidates’ performance, analysis of job descriptions to identify and flag potentially biased language, and anonymizing resumes by hiding identifying information like name, gender, and address.

Examples of AI In the Recruitment Process

There are several types of AI recruiting tools to help your business strategically streamline the recruiting process and identify qualified candidates.

Eleesha Martin, G&A Partners' Director of RPO, identified several ways companies can use AI in the recruitment process in HR TechCube's “The Transformative Impact of AI on Recruiting/Talent Acquisition.” These include:

• Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS): An applicant tracking system can automate several tasks associated with finding qualified candidates, including searching through and evaluating resumes, screening skills and focusing on qualifications over subjective factors, and communicating and scheduling interviews with selected applications.
  
  
• Recruitment Marketing Platforms: AI recruitment marketing platforms leverage insights from candidate behavior, engagement patterns, and ad performance to optimize job postings and strengthen employer branding, according to Martin. "These data-driven platforms not only improve the relevance and appeal of job postings but also strengthen employer branding by aligning job ads with the evolving preferences of top talent, ultimately leading to more effective recruitment campaigns and a stronger organizational presence in the job market," Martin stated.
  
  
• AI Chatbots: AI chatbots help streamline processes and improve the user experience for both recruiters and candidates by asking pre-screening questions that select candidates who meet basic qualifications, responding to common candidate questions, automating the interview scheduling process, and personalizing interactions with candidates by addressing them by name and providing relevant information based on their profile and interests.
  
  
• Video Interviewing Platforms: Video interviewing platforms that feature AI tools such as real-time transcription, sentiment analysis, and facial expression assessment help recruiters record interviews, gauge candidates' interest in a position and provide insights into their confidence and engagement levels. Video platforms also eliminate geographic barriers to interviewing remote candidates, which allows recruiters to cast a wider net when searching for top talent.
  
  
• Prescriptive Analytics Tools: Prescriptive analytics tools allow SMBs to probe data and gather insights on hiring patterns and trends in general, or specifically for your business. From that point, the information can be analyzed by skilled HR professionals to determine action items that can be implemented to enhance recruiting efforts.
  
  
• Skills Assessment Platforms: AI-powered skills assessment platforms have seen rapid advancements in accuracy, adaptive testing, real-time feedback, and bias reduction. According to Martin, these improvements equate to a more precise evaluation of candidates' technical and soft skills and can adjust the difficulty of assessment questions based on a candidate’s performance, providing a more tailored and relevant assessment experience.

How To Use AI to Conduct Interviews

A groundbreaking use of AI in the recruitment process is for conducting candidate interviews, which is considered one of the most time-consuming and complicated hiring activities.

“The interview process plays an integral part in the talent acquisition process,” according to the Academy to Innovate HR (AIHR)’s “30 AI-driven Tools to Optimize Your Talent Acquisition Process” by Vishwanadh Raju. “We all understand that we have to provide a great candidate experience, even to those who may not reach the finish line, as we all know that candidates can be future employees, future customers, future shareholders, or ambassadors for the experience.”

Using AI-enabled tools helps save time, gather valuable applicant insights, and reduce bias. Here are tools to consider using to conduct an AI interview:

Pre-Interview Phase

• An AI-enabled job description generator can create a job description that is keyword-optimized and analyzed for readability and potential bias.
• An AI-powered interview tool generates interview questions based on the job description and the candidate’s skills and experience.
• Chatbots communicate to candidates that they will be interviewed by an AI system and provide preparation instructions.

Interview Phase

• A video interviewing tool allows the interview process to be conducted in one of two ways:
  • Candidates can record video responses to pre-set questions
  • Candidates can participate in a live interview with the AI system
• The video interviewing tool automatically transcribes candidate responses, analyzes candidate answers for key skills and soft skills, and provides automated feedback on their performance.

Post-Interview Phase

• Feedback from the video interviewing tool helps your HR team identify and shortlist the most qualified candidates for further evaluation and additional interviews with recruiters, which can also be conducted on an AI-enabled video interview platform.
• AI chatbots can be used throughout the interview process to communicate with candidates about application status and interviews scheduling, and to help guide them through various tasks.