Four Ways to Transform the Hiring Processes with AI
Here’s how AI can be used to recruit employees for jobs, reduce bias and boost workplace diversity
Muddu Sudhakar, CEO of Aisera, explains how organizations can successfully leverage Artificial Intelligence and automation technologies during the recruiting process. AI works in the background alongside employers to identify ideal candidates and illuminate opportunities throughout the hiring process.
During this time of economic uncertainty and the aftermath of The Great Resignation, industry leaders are looking to new technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), to hire open roles and make the recruiting process as seamless and efficient as possible. It’s all about getting the right candidate, with the right skills, into the right role at exactly the right time.
When businesses hear of AI, they immediately think of automation, scale, error-free, fast, and many similar positive word associations. Leveraging AI technology to recruit employees for a business can be a massive time-saver for employers. However, AI also comes with its fair share of flaws. Recruiters need to understand AI’s benefits while also recognizing its limitations.
Hiring managers should rest assured that AI is designed to assist, despite the ominous and common fear that machines will eventually replace human workers. However, the future of AI for recruiting can be more accurately described as a human-centered approach that leverages AI to enhance the employee experience. AI is an invaluable concierge or digital assistant that never forgets a thing it’s “told” and works 24/7. In essence, AI and automation allow recruiters to evolve with the change that employers and employees desire.
Relationship Building and Predictive Outcomes
AI can help recruiters be more proactive and focus on relationship-building. Rather than simply backfilling open positions, AI will give recruiters data-backed insights and ample time to apply strategic hiring practices to enhance the employee experience. With more time back in their day, recruiters can dedicate more effort to best-fit candidates, conducting deeper analysis beyond just their resume to determine if the candidate is a good cultural fit and would have ample opportunity for growth within the company. This also improves the overall candidate experience during the interview process as recruiters can devote more time and effort toward them.
AI also assists hiring managers with finding the right candidate for the job. AI-powered recruitment software can leverage the wealth of data in an organization’s applicant tracking system (ATS) to generate insights into the talent pool when looking to fill an open position.
By using AI predictive technologies, recruiters can view KPIs to determine the quality of the applicant. This helps hiring managers find employees most aligned with the company’s values and who will be the best fit for the job. In addition, it can provide predictive graphs that estimate how soon a position will close and educate hiring managers on the expected outcome. According to multiple studies, experts in HR overwhelmingly agree that AI can improve talent attraction and retention by 96%.
See More: 3 Ways Predictive Analytics is Changing Recruitment Practices
Subjective vs. Objective Recruiting
Although AI significantly increases efficiency in the hiring process, it can’t replace humans altogether. Recruiters and hiring managers are necessary to complete specific tasks, and AI recruiting tools will only automate part of the recruiting process. Ultimately, a recruiter must interview a candidate or interact with the person responsible for the job requisition to determine if they are the right fit for the company.
AI can make it much more difficult for some candidates to get noticed by employers, and automation technology can make the same mistakes as humans. Suitable candidates that a hiring manager would typically spot could be missed with AI based on the predetermined criteria and algorithms for sourcing candidates and reviewing hundreds of documents. Human-to-human recruiting is a subjective task that the employer determines. Since recruiting is objective in the eyes of AI software, candidates with different skills, characteristics, and experiences above and beyond education, qualifications, and other criteria could go unnoticed. For example, a good candidate may need to improve in some areas but overcompensate in others, which AI may not distinguish as a human could.
AI and Unconscious Bias
Unconscious biases are the automatic, mental shortcuts used to process information and decide swiftly to which virtually everyone is susceptible. Unconscious bias can affect a recruiter’s decisions while interviewing a candidate and potentially cause discrimination. Luckily, AI can help recruiters with blind screening for reduced bias.
AI assesses large volumes of data points objectively, thus leading to reduced assumptions, biases, and mental fatigue that humans are susceptible to. Recruiting with AI can also be programmed to ignore demographic information about candidates, such as gender, race, and age, that have been common attributes of bias in human decision-making. However, AI will never solve diversity and inclusion issues — diversity and inclusion stem from shortcomings in awareness and transparency. AI provides awareness and transparency to support executive teams, recruiters, hiring managers, and employees by illuminating opportunities to improve where the human brain is biased in talent acquisition.
AI can also learn and apply human tendencies, which can be detrimental to the overall candidate experience and delay the hiring process rather than playing a role in supporting a seamless recruiting experience. All datasets have biases because they reflect people, but the key is trying to recognize them. For example, a dataset may not include gender but could have parameters that skew female or male. Overall, human oversight is still essential to ensure the AI isn’t replicating existing biases or introducing new ones based on the data we feed. The great thing is that if AI exposes a bias in your recruiting process, it allows you to act on it.
See More: How Employers Are Using AI to Stop Bias in Hiring
Implementing AI Within Your Hiring Process
According to Dataconomy, early adopters of AI-powered recruiting software reported a 75% reduction in cost per screen and a 35% reduction in turnover. However, to successfully implement AI within an organization, business leaders must first understand and set the right hiring goals for their open position. Next, they should leverage AI technology to understand which candidates will best help achieve the goal and, more importantly, what actions or activities will help them source, screen, and hire those candidates. AI works in the background alongside employers to identify insights, trends, and ideal candidates to identify opportunities across the entire talent journey.
By implementing the right AI technology, hiring professionals are empowered to focus on how to scale the business and hire the right talent efficiently. Powered by AI, these teams can use their human judgment and expertise to decide how to address any biases and improve the recruiting processes in an ongoing manner. Like how AI continuously learns and improves, so can an organization’s recruiting process.
Which recruiting processes do you think can greatly be improved with AI? Share with us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
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