The Role of AI in Recruiting

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• 99% of talent acquisition teams leverage AI and automation (Global News Wire)

👀 ICYMI

• Improve onboarding with these tips (Scale Smarter Newsletter)

🏆 Leveling up your recruitment practices

Recruiting at the best of times can still be challenging.

According to a 2024 global report by ManpowerGroup, 75% of companies worldwide are struggling with recruiting.

It doesn’t help when you’re dealing with a global talent shortage coupled with the archaic nature of the traditional recruitment process.

It’s one thing to have a small talent pool but it’s another to actually find candidates within that small pool and still not be able to find the right person.

From resume screening to candidate sourcing, assessments and beyond, AI has started to play a key role in solving recruitment challenges.

It’s no wonder a study by Gartner has shown that 81% of HR leaders have explored or implemented AI to improve their hiring processes and organizational efficiencies.

If you’re curious, here are several ways you could incorporate AI into your recruiting process:

Increasing speed and new efficiencies

Gone are the days of browsing through each resume one by one.

Leveraging AI when it knows what you’re looking for will reduce your search through resumes from days down to minutes.  Beyond just resume screening, very often you’ll be able to get analysis around social media activity and previous work experience which will speed up your matching process between the candidates and the job posting.

Leveraging data to decide

Traditional HR practices often rely on intuition and experience of the HR team to make decisions around candidates.  And although nothing beats a seasoned 20 year HR veteran, there’s this subjective grey area created around how decisions are made when it’s left to intuition and personal bias.

However, in leveraging AI to assist in making data-driven decisions not only speeds up your recruitment process, but it also allows you to accurately assess candidates at scale using algorithms assessing skills, qualifications, and behavioral patterns.

Candidate sourcing and matching

Remember when it was thought that HR was just looking for key words in your resume and as long as they matched keywords with what they were looking for you, you were more likely to get the job?  Candidate to job matching has become so much more refined with the use of AI.

Not only will AI look at the typical things like experience and qualifications, but depending on the kind of data you have access to, it will go beyond to see who are the passive candidates out there that may be open to work but not in the immediate candidate pool.  Ever wonder why Linkedin has that “open for work” feature?  This is why.

Reducing bias

Again, having a veteran rockstar running your recruitment is always a good idea.  But we’re only human and because of that, we all have our own innate bias.  In a 2023 Zippia report, 48% of HR managers admitted they use bias when making hiring decisions.  An AI enabled recruitment process eliminates bias, solely focusing on skills and qualifications and not demographic data that often leads to recruitment bias.

Enhanced candidate experience

No one likes waiting for feedback as they go through the hiring process.  From summarizing screening questions and interview commentary, to tailoring constructive feedback for the applicants, AI enables you to provide responses back to applicants in a timely manner with meaningful insights personalized to the applicant.

🧩 Tools that can be employed to scale recruiting

Whether you’re trying to improve efficiencies with matching candidates to the right role or struggling get through the gauntlet that is your applicant tracking system, you’re bound to find an AI enabled solution that will save you time, money, and improve the recruitment process for you.

That said, AI is everywhere, so where do you even begin to look?  I for one am a big proponent of defining tasks and processes with crystal clarity.  I think once you’ve defined your key recruitment tasks it becomes easier to decide on what the right tool is for you and your organization.

Endorsed.AI to screen resumes

When you’re sorting through hundreds of applicants, you really want a dashboard that you can navigate swiftly and intuitively.  I love what the team at Endorsed.AI have done to make resume screening a breeze. 

Leveraging AI, you can search for candidates based on basically any criteria you want - “Lives in New York”, “first 10 employee at a startup”, or whatever else you can think of, it will search based on the criteria you give it.

BrainTrust to match candidates

Making a match to your job post within your candidate pool can be difficult at the best of times.  BrainTrust makes this a lot easier as they use AI to scan through their robust talent pool to give you the five best talent matches.  Simply provide your job description and then receive a matching score for the top applicants. 

The beauty of this platform is their AI model adjusts as you give it feedback - simple thumbs up and down sharpens its search for you, honing in on what the kind of talent you’re really looking for.

Knockri to interview without bias

As much as AI can be a timesaver, there still is this notion of unconscious bias that AI models create based on the people who train them.  At Knockri, they rely solely on foundational skills and behaviors from a candidate’s video interview response. 

Their I/O psychology approach to assessing candidates through video allows for the reduction in bias as their AI models don’t take into consideration who the candidate actually is but rather what their responses are along with the skills and qualifications they give the platform.

🙋‍♂️ Cautionary advice

You’ve just scrolled through a summary statement of how AI can help your recruitment processes.  And it’s true, AI can be very helpful.

But like any AI tool, it’s always good have a good background on what it is you’re using and how it does what it does, especially when you’re trying to hire for your company.

As I’ve mentioned, I don’t think AI can replace a 20 year veteran recruiter - they’ll always have something special about them that an AI just will never have.  You just can’t train an AI to have gut reactions.

At the end of the day AI is just a snippet of code helping you automate tasks intelligently as possible.  But if you can figure out how to integrate it into your recruiting processes, it could become the HR partner you always wanted.

🎬 TL;DR—Your Actions For The Week:

• Scaling Your Startup: Pick one recruiting process that can be automated

• Scaling Yourself: Look at how you can enable your recruitment process with more automations, especially with resume screening

Whenever you're ready, there are more ways I can help you:

💼 Hiring? I built an expert bench of recruiters from companies like Uber, Amazon & Spotify to run the full recruiting process for you. We’re on-demand, can flex up & down, and there are zero commissions or hidden fees—Learn more here.