Recruiting and hiring of new employees have always been demanding and resource-intensive processes. As the monetary cost of a bad hire can reach up to 30% of the employee’s first-year salary, it’s only natural that HR professionals are trying to standardise the matching of candidates and job requirements, leading to happier employees that are less likely to leave.

Even though the Coronavirus lockdown has put a hold on most new hires, now is an excellent time to start thinking about finding efficient ways to locate and attract potential top-quality candidates for future positions.

Leveraging AI has a huge potential to transform HR and make your recruiting process more cost-efficient and faster, empowering you to make smarter hiring decisions and providing your candidates with a much better recruitment experience.

What is AI for Recruitment?

Finding the right candidate for the position you’re trying to fill is one of the most significant hurdles in HR today. However, to tackle this challenge, many new technology companies focused on the HR sector are creating solutions that rely on AI, machine learning, predictive analytics, and big data.

To put it in a nutshell, AI-powered tools can now analyse enormous amounts of data from various sources, identify patterns and make accurate predictions, thus automating and improving certain processes, and helping you come up with the best solutions.

These AI-powered tools can help you improve and automate your hiring process, from creating a perfect job advertisement to screening resumes, candidate outreach and scheduling, and engaging with the applicants.

By using AI to help with the recruitment procedure, the most important metrics such as time for hiring and cost for hiring will also be significantly reduced

Here are the most critical ways AI can help your recruiting.

Candidate Sourcing

One of the main problems in recruiting is attracting skilled candidates for the positions they’re trying to fill.

However, AI-powered tools and platforms such as Fetcher or Textio can help you out in the candidate sourcing process, so that the initial candidates you attract are a better match for the requirements you list in your job advertisement.

Using AI, you can now create a perfect job description depending on your industry and tailor it to resonate with your potential job candidates. As AI can help you eliminate any implicit bias or clichés from your ad, it will sound better to your target audience and attract quality talent.

AI can also help you find relevant candidates and automate your outreach by creating highly personalised emails that can significantly improve their engagement and their interest in the job.

Candidate Nurturing

However, it’s not enough to reach out to your candidates. You need to nurture them well so that they can understand the timeline and the recruitment process, and start to see the position you’re offering as a desirable one as well as seeing themselves as a perfect fit for your company culture.

Keeping the candidates engaged through the recruiting process is a big challenge for any HR team, and might eat up all of its time and resources.

That’s where AI-powered conversational chatbots come in to keep the communication lines with your candidates open while saving you time for the tasks in which your professional engagement matters more.

Chatbots can provide real-time interaction with the applicants, asking questions related to the job requirements, and providing the latest updates, feedback, and suggestions.

Conversational chatbots can be used later on as well to provide your new hires with a great employee onboarding experience, giving them all the support they might need to adapt to a new work environment.

Candidate Screening

You can now save a significant amount of time by using AI-powered tools to analyse candidates’ resumes and other documentation, and determine whether they match the set of skills and experience the position requires.

Unlike previous automation tools that would exclude all the candidates that didn’t use the right “keywords” in the job applications and CVs, AI now relies on comprehensive job taxonomies and natural language processing, thus making a more accurate candidate selection.

Such an improved screening process will significantly reduce the time to hire, keeping more top-qualified applicants in the funnel.

Interviewing

AI and facial recognition software have become increasingly common in recruiting. This technology can analyse the tone and language of candidates’ voices, as well as record their facial expressions while they are answering questions.

The truth is that job interviewers are always biased. Whether we like it or not, we subconsciously make decisions on arbitrary or sometimes even illegal criteria, such as physical attributes or the way candidates dress.

AI can make the hiring process impartial, as it can help you choose objective criteria, and then use that alone when selecting the right candidates.

AI can also capture more than meets the human eye. It can use facial expression analysis to assess candidates’ personalities, as well as their honesty, making it much easier for the HR department to make a final selection.

By trying out some of these AI-powered tools, you can significantly improve your recruitment practices as well as the quality of your new hires, leading to better employee engagement and overall job productivity.

Blues Point’s position

All the above techniques will help, but we are still some way off recruitment nirvana with AI.

In fact, will we ever get there at all? The personal touch is still vital to successful hiring, and AI hasn’t successfully replicated that – yet. Here are some things that AI can’t do:

• Find passive candidates (necessary for senior roles and positions where there is a skill shortage);
• Create rapport (vital for engaging potential employees and encouraging enthusiasm);
• Sell the benefits of your company / the role to the candidate, or vice versa;
• Know instinctively when to ask more probing questions, if an interviewee doesn’t give a full answer (there’s usually a good reason for this); and
• Improvise, if things don’t go according to plan.

The recruitment industry has been under supposed threat for decades from technology, but it still exists – and thrives. Why? Because the human element is indispensable.

Artificial intelligence combined with human intelligence and personality (yours as the discerning person in charge of hiring and ours as recruiters who know what we are doing) – now THAT is a winning combination!