The presence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has massively changed a plethora of things in our lives, from the most simple ones to the ones that have quite a huge impact on our lives. The way recruiting is done has a lot of impact on the lives of the candidates, and this too has been massively affected by AI.
AI is used in every step of the recruitment process, and here’s how.
- Sourcing: AI is used to find and connect with talent more quickly, with the overall results of the sourcing being of better quality than before.
- Screening: with the help of AI screening tools, deriving important information is more efficient than ever – instead of going through and opening each and every resume, the tools will give you needed results in minutes.
- Interviewing: AI can be used for analyzing facial expressions of candidates during video interviews, giving the employer a better look into their personality traits, as well as using chatbots or pre-recorded videos to be more precise with checking the skillsets of candidates,
AI has changed the way the recruitment process works, as well as what roles the recruiters have. However, most of them say that the changes have been beneficial to their work.
To be exact, a study has shown that 96% of HR managers believe that AI has great chances of helping when it comes to the right talent acquisition, and even 55% believe that using AI-based tools will become the standard when it comes to recruitment.
Those are quite big numbers, and that indicates just how widely spread the use of AI in recruitment is. Especially nowadays, it is important that regions all over the world get on with the incorporation of AI in their workforce.
And while it might take some more than the others to keep up with this fact, there’s no denying that this part of IT is getting more needed worldwide. Having AIi be so prominent in the recruitment process implies that there must be a lot of benefits to using it, and that implication would be quite right.
There are many ways in which the use of AI and big data has changed the recruiting landscape. Below you will find some of the main ways how AI changed recruitment for the better.
Automatization is a benefit that’s present in all steps of the recruitment process. Starting from the search for candidates, AI lessens the time spent on this part a lot, basically reducing a process that used to take several months to just a few weeks. By collecting and analyzing a huge amount of data, AI helps you source, find, and even shortlist candidates that are all a perfect match for the job.
When AI does the CV reading for you, you will have more time and energy to dedicate to meeting the candidates and learning more only about the ones that truly are good. This way, you are significantly less likely to make a bad judgment and hire someone who actually wasn’t as fit for the job as it once seemed.
Of course, it will still be important to have human input when it comes to employing people, but having AI automatize through the tiring parts will likely result in the overall quality of the recruitment being much higher.
Having less discrimination in the recruitment process has been something that’s always been in the center of social media talk for the last decade especially.
Having biases is normal for humans, and while there’s no way to completely get rid of them, there are ways to control them.
Firstly, people need to be aware of all the different biases that we as a population are prone to. By being aware of what kind of bias you might have every step of the way, you are more likely to catch it when it occurs and stop it from highly impacting your decision.
Having any kind of bias in the recruitment process has gotten companies and institutions into scandals, leaving them with a lot of damage.
If you as a company discriminate a candidate because of a certain bias you hold, these candidates can fight back and file a lawsuit against you, and this could cost your company a lot. The losses that companies suffer during such lawsuits are in millions of dollars.
No matter how big the company is, the losses are going to be a huge hit to them. Besides the financial side of things, your company could also get a bad reputation and therefore lose customers.
When a company makes that kind of mistake in recruitment, it won’t stay unknown for a long time, as situations like this are heavily followed nowadays, and having so many eyes on your mistakes will certainly have its drawbacks.
That’s why AI is highly needed in the recruitment process. Having a well-designed AI tool will look through the candidates only based on their skills, leaving things like age, gender, race, sexual orientation, looks, ethnicity, etc. behind.
This will ensure that the companies are getting truly the most highly skilled professionals, with way less danger of making a biased mistake.
AI-based tools and platforms that are used in the recruitment process go through millions and millions of pieces of data, and throughout all of that search, they are guaranteed to find people who are as perfect of a match as possible.
When you want to hire an employee, you expect a certain set of skills that the candidate needs to have mastered in order to become an employee. And more often than not, recruiters are met with a problem when a huge number of candidates seem to really match the job description.
You, as a human, are not able to fully precisely see which one is better than the other and who has the closest matching percentage to the job description. This is exactly where AI comes in. When using an AI-based tool, you can make the profile of a perfect candidate, and by going through the data, the AI will match you with the person who seems to match that profile the most. Or, if you have a huge number of candidates, it is able to make a shortlist for you, from which you can then choose who fits the job description best.
What role will human contact play?
It might seem like the recruitment process could potentially be taken over completely by AI. And while that might be true, it probably wouldn’t be a smart decision. No matter how much we modernize tiring procedures like hiring, we probably won’t live in a science fiction fantasy where robots do every bit of the work.
Recruiters have had an important role when it came to finding candidates. There are even some great examples of chaos ensuing when companies have relied way too much on AI recruitment tools – like when this Australian girl Rick Rolled a wide variety of big companies, just by changing up her CV to be more adjusted to what she thought AI tools would pick up as positive.
AI tools have also had a bad reputation among some people because of the dehumanization of the recruitment process. In a study done by Oracle, 69% of HR professionals that participated in the study said that dehumanization is the main drawback of using AI in recruitment.
In the same study, 41% of people said that the main drawback of using AI is the fact that biased decisions can be made even when using AI because the way AI works depends on who wrote the code for it.
This exact thing happened with Amazon when it was revealed that their AI recruiting tool prefers men over women, and therefore the problem of women being discriminated against has still remained.
There is no doubt that AI has made some crucial changes that are making the lives of recruiters easier every single day. The boring and repetitive parts of this process have been significantly cut down when it comes to the time needed to do that, and they also require much less mental energy from the recruiters themselves.
With access to so much data, it is ensured that there are little to no chances of recruitment ending in a wrong decision. However, this should by no means be a sign that human impact should be completely scrapped from the recruitment process. AI tools are extremely helpful and make the job easier and more efficient, but they cannot replace a human recruiter. They should be used for what they are – tools – and human recruiters should always remain the ones who make the final decisions.
