6 Ways AI and Automation are Changing Recruitment

The robots are coming! But there’s no need to fear. Automation is going to streamline menial tasks and allow humans to focus their energy on more creative endeavors that computers are simply too dumb to do. With regard to recruitment, AI is going to enhance the process for both recruiters and candidates. Improved communication and selection will preempt many headaches encountered on both sides of the process.

Check out our top 6 trends in AI that we think will be the most impactful in the coming years:

1. Candidate Shortlisting

You post a job opening on any of the major job boards and within 24 hours your inbox is full of hundreds of CVs. You want to find the best people for the job, but you simply don’t have the time to handle that volume.  Enter AI autosorting and automation. Once an AI system has had enough time to study a large pool of data, it will be able to pick out the most relevant keywords in resumes and associate them with your job posting. Of course, it’s never going to be 100%, but neither will a human skimming at 6 seconds per candidate.

The AI will pick out and rank the applicants from most to least relevant. Then you can go through the top 10%-20% and make your own shortlist.

Further, recruiting agencies have huge pools of past applicants on file. Their inventory is simply so huge there is no way to manually sort through these. With AI, these candidates will become easily searchable. Services, like those provided by InstaHire, enable Smart Lists to be generated with top candidates selected as soon as you post the job. If you need to fill a position immediately, this technology will enable a quick turnaround.

2. Personality Assessments

Soft skills are becoming more important in the workplace, so personality assessments are good way to gauge if a candidate will be a good fit for your company culture. You don’t have time to do phone screens with hundreds of applicants, so AI is a good way to automate this process.  You select the personality features that matter the most for the role. The candidates complete a pre-programmed assessment and the AI scores them on various criteria. Once you have the candidates sorted, you can easily pick out who matched highest for both hard and soft skills, then review these CVs manually.

3. Email Automation

With such high volumes of applications, you and your team are not able to respond to all the unsuccessful candidates.  A major source of stress for applicants is receiving no responses when applying for positions. In order to ensure a more pleasant recruitment experience, send an email letting candidates know they were unsuccessful at this time, but encouraging them to apply again. You will simply select the candidates that have moved on to the next step and the automation system will then automatically send out the drafted email, even personalising it with their first name.

4. Hiring Bias Elimination

Recent studies have shown that there is still, unfortunately, some discrimination in the hiring process.  Non-Western European sounding names on resumes are less likely to be called in for interviews, causing many applicants to change up or “whiten” their CVs. Even subconscious biases can hinder the recruitment process and prevent companies from finding the absolute best talent available. AI is programmed to pay attention to keywords and qualifications, not names or addresses of former employers.  As a result, the automation process will help eliminate a lot of the hiring bias that can come about as a result of human review and preconceived notions a reviewer may have.

5. Advertising Automation

Given that employment is currently very high, passive candidates, those who are in jobs and not actively seeking new ones, are where recruiters are focusing their efforts. In order to convince these candidates to switch to working for your company, brand marketing is needed to highlight the most attractive qualities this new role would have. In order to reach these candidates, your jobs need to show up across social media.

Online advertising has been a rapidly changing landscape.  Google and Facebook have been increasingly encouraging marketers to cede control over bids, targeting, and placements. Their AI systems have been learning user habits with massive amounts of data over years and years. With this information, their AI systems can place ads in front of the most relevant audience with higher accuracy than humans can with manual adjustments.

Further, AI is even able to suggest better wording by leveraging huge amounts of data over time. Tools like Textio are able to gauge whether certain phrases attract more male or female candidates and allow you to write a more neutral job ad.

6. Chat Bots

Lastly, but certainly not least, chat bots are up and coming in the world of recruitment.  Nowadays, with the ubiquity of mobile phones, everyone is expecting really quick, if not instant responses.  Small teams, or even large ones with high email volumes, simply are not able to answer everyone in their hiring pipeline.  Especially during the initial phases of interest and inquiry, a chat bot can free up a lot of time for your staff.  Bots can be programmed to answer FAQs and direct candidates to job listings or company policies on your site.

Further, a chat bot can even conduct an initial interview, collecting basic information from candidates and exporting it to you in the form of an easily sortable spreadsheet.

 

Are you looking to grow your team? Why not join InstaHire and let us help you hire staff FAST?