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How AI is Changing Recruiting

Posted by
Nupura Ughade
on
April 13, 2023

67% of HR managers believe that AI has a positive impact on how they do their jobs. By now, many of us have played around with ChatGPT but the high-impact potential of AI recruiting is much more significant than typing a few questions into a prompt.

This piece will examine the core questions and opportunities around AI recruiting. We’re specifically exploring:

  • The impact of AI on talent acquisition and how it's changing recruitment practices
  • Ways to utilize AI recruiting tools to optimize recruiting efforts and overcome common challenges
  • A glimpse into the future of AI and the recruitment landscape

Benefits of AI in recruitment

Let’s get right into the ‘why’ of AI recruitment tools and how they can impact your bottom line.

Increased efficiency from AI driven recruiting

AI helps streamline and automate the recruitment process. AI recruiting tools eliminate hiring inefficiencies (such as long turnaround times, infrequent candidate communication) and enhance recruiter productivity by automating time-consuming tasks such as resume screening and candidate matching.

AI recruiting example

A leading home health and hospice provider achieved a 78% decrease in time to hire from 7 days to 1.5 by implementing AI-powered recruiting automation! Read their full story here.

AI for recruiting improves candidate selection

Depending on the size of your organization and recruiting team, you could be spending hundreds of hours each month on tasks like screening, job matching, and pre-employment testing. AI can handle all of these, saving countless hours while simultaneously delivering better customer experiences. 

Reduced bias from AI in the recruiting process

AI recruiting tools evaluate candidates objectively, using criteria that are based on job requirements and not influenced by personal biases or subjective opinions. By training AI algorithms on diverse data sets, including data from underrepresented groups, recruiters can reduce the risk of bias in the algorithm and ensure that the tool evaluates candidates from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences.

Enhanced candidate experience from AI

Today's candidates value transparency, personalization, and efficiency in the recruitment process. A survey from IBM found that a positive experience makes candidates 38% more likely to accept a job oer — indicating that companies that quickly schedule screenings/interviews, maintain communication during the process, and answer questions are keeping talent engaged throughout the lifecycle. AI recruitment platforms empower companies to deliver personalized, efficient, and timely communication to candidates at scale.

AI improves cost efficiency

The hiring landscape today is constantly evolving, with new challenges emerging every day. Simply throwing money at the problem is no longer a sustainable solution for companies seeking to attract top talent. To stay competitive, leading companies are turning to recruiting automation to more effectively source and engage candidates and reducing reliance on job boards. This improves core hiring metrics such as cost-per-hire, time-to-hire, and time-to-fill.

Speaking of improving hiring metrics, explore how America’s leading retailer brought down their average time to fill from 33 to 23 days using AI technology.

Enhanced recruitment data insights

AI recruiting solutions enable recruiters to identify trends, zero in on gaps, and make data-driven decisions to improve the recruitment process. Data insights help talent acquisition teams:

  • Watch performance over time and examine the effectiveness of sourcing channels.
  • AI for recruiting can look for patterns in candidate dropoff and identify hiring bottlenecks.
  • Examine past hiring data and assess hiring quality.

How AI driven recruiting is transforming the market

AI isn’t out to replace everyone’s jobs. In fact, AI helps recruiters do more of what they do best – build and nurture relationships with talent. Admin tasks, email + phone tag, and other tedious to-dos eat up a good portion of recruiter days (our research shows up to 50%!). AI and automation give that time back so that recruiters can focus on relationships. 

Let’s look at some specific ways it helps you amplify your skills and achieve ambitious hiring goals, all while delivering exceptional candidate experience.

TA teams are creating stronger candidate relationships with recruiting AI

AI recruitment platforms help recruiters build stronger relationships with potential candidates. AI chatbots provide 24/7 assistance to candidates and can easily handle prescreening and interview scheduling - all within a few minutes. Chatbots can also answer candidate questions, provide feedback on their application status, and schedule interviews. Effectively, recruiters can spend more time building relationships with candidates instead of wasting time on administrative tasks and candidates feel valued and engaged throughout the recruitment process.

AI recruiting tools provide better recommendations for talent

AI-powered recruitment platforms use data-driven insights to provide personalized recommendations to candidates, based on their experience, skills, and location. If a candidate has experience in sales, AI recruiting tools can recommend a sales position with relevant experience in the candidate’s preferred location. AI-driven job matching is significantly faster and more accurate than traditional job matching methods, which rely on keyword matching or simple rule-based algorithms.

AI recruiting solutions enable TA teams to operate more efficiently

According to a 2021 survey conducted by Jobvite, 86% of recruiters surveyed reported that they would like to spend more time on strategic initiatives, such as employer branding, diversity and inclusion, and candidate experience. However, the reality is that recruiters spend 75% of their time in redundant manual tasks instead of revenue-driving activities! 

We’ve already covered how AI sourcing, screening, interview scheduling, and job-matching tools help save recruiters’ time. AI recruitment platforms can also track all candidate interactions, including emails, messages, and chatbot conversations in the ATS. No more manual data entry and keeping track of multiple tools!

AI enhances your recruitment marketing efforts

Today’s candidates are aware that they're in demand. Simply posting a list of job requirements on a company's website or job board won't be enough to capture their attention, nor will generic tactics like cold calls, email blasts, or job fairs. So what can cut through the noise?

Recruiters need to implement sustained and strategic marketing campaigns that touch every phase of the talent acquisition life cycle. Forward-looking companies are combining AI with recruitment marketing to identify candidates, connect with them, and deliver targeted, personalized messages.

AI helps recruiters source smarter with a self-enriching database

50% of candidate profiles sourced from job boards are already in your candidate database!

AI recruiting platforms help you get more mileage out of your existing database by automatically updating thousands of candidates in your database, no matter how often they change jobs, skills, phone numbers, and email addresses. How? AI recruiting tools can reach out to candidates at scale and auto-update the data in your ATS — also known as database automation.

Database automation turns your ATS into a self-cleaning, self-generating sourcing machine, reducing cost-per-hire dramatically.

Role of AI in recruiting events and candidate nurturing

Recruiting events are all about fostering candidate connections. You don’t want to waste much time on administrative tasks and that’s where AI comes into the picture. Recruiting AI tools help with:

  • Pre-event targeting (using personalized and targeted invites)
  • Real-time engagement during the events (think AI sourcing chatbots for smoothly accepting applications during job fairs)
  • Personalized post-event follow-ups to ensure the candidates move further down the hiring funnel.

With sophisticated AI recruiting platforms, you can create personalized automated workflows to nurture candidates using a mix of email and SMS, triggering communications at key milestones in the talent lifecycle. This improves your response rates and candidates appreciate your timely communication. You can also use these workflows with existing employees or even alumni to foster a sense of community.

Future of AI in recruitment

Recent developments in AI (we’ve all heard of OpenAI and chatGPT) signal that AI for recruitment is here to stay and will continue to evolve rapidly. As recruiting AI becomes more sophisticated, it will be able to analyze larger and more complex data sets to provide more accurate predictions about candidate fit and potential job performance using predictive analytics. With continued improvements, AI will continue to enable recruiters to engage with candidates in new and innovative ways, such as virtual simulations and gamification. Exciting times ahead, for recruiters and candidates alike!

Conclusion

There’s no denying that AI in recruitment has proved beneficial to employers as well as candidates. Here at Sense, our AI-powered talent engagement platform is enabling 900+ talent-centric brands to provide outstanding talent experiences throughout the talent lifecycle and we’ve compiled all key strategies for AI-driven talent engagement into a single easy-to-digest ebook.

To optimize your talent engagement strategy for powerful results, explore our Definitive Guide to Talent Engagement for Contemporary Talent Leaders.

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