As you already know, hiring the right people is crucial to the success of your company. However, finding the right candidates continues to be a time-consuming and challenging process even as the market has loosened up somewhat in recent months.
Fortunately, you’ll also know that advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology have accelerated. You are now likely in a position where if you lean into these developments you can significantly streamline your recruitment efforts and improve your outcomes.
The Benefits of AI in Recruitment
AI will very likely revolutionise the recruitment industry in a way that hasn’t been seen for many years. Even now, quite early in the lifecycle of this new tech, it’s possible to use it to automate many of the time-consuming tasks that are currently quite manual for your business including the following elements:
- Faster Screening
CVs are still the default document in recruitment, and screening them properly still takes a disproportionate amount of time. AI-powered tools can be utilised to save hours by inserting the right prompts.
As with all data tools, the higher the quality of inputs the better the outputs. Your effort should be on identifying the right keywords for the most important skills, experience and qualifications for the role, plugging in the CV data and prompting the AI to do the matching for you. This will result in the most relevant candidates being found far more quickly.
- Improved Candidate Experience
The candidate experience can also be significantly improved by effectively using AI. High quality chatbots can provide candidates with instant answers to their questions, saving calls and emails to the recruiter.
This not only provides a positive reflection of your brand in the eyes of the candidate who has had their queries answered quickly, it also helps to deliver a more efficient recruitment process.
There are various third party businesses developing these chatbots right now, and early adoption is likely to lead to early rewards.
- More Efficient Background Checking
Rather than you or your recruitment team having to spend hours trawling through a candidate’s social media profiles as part of your due diligence on their background, AI-powered tools can do this for you.
This means you can undertake these checks much earlier in the process for numerous candidates and rather than waiting until the final stages (where it's much more impactful if a background check then rules them out).
This clearly helps you avoid hiring or spending time on candidates who may not be an appropriate fit for your organisation.
- Reduced Bias
AI-powered tools can also help increase the diversity of your candidate pool as it analyses candidate CVs and data objectively. This will significantly reduce any bias in the recruitment process and avoid hiring candidates based on subjective issues or protected characteristics.
How AI Can Help with Candidate Attraction
In addition to screening candidates, AI technology can also help you attract the right candidates to your organisation.
- Job Posting Optimisation
AI can identify and analyse job postings to determine which keywords and phrases are most likely to help your advert appear at the top of job board search rankings and therefore increase the quality and quantity of the right candidates attracted to your role.
This information can enable you to write more effective job postings and ultimately, attract a more diverse and better quality range of candidates. Content is king in all marketing efforts, and ultimately recruitment ads are a form of direct marketing to your candidate talent pool.
- Talent Pooling
Talking of talent pools, you can also build your list of potential candidates for future roles by using AI technology effectively. The AI can be programmed to identify any candidates with specific skills, experience and qualifications from a variety of sources, including LinkedIn and job boards.
This can help you identify candidates who may be a good fit for your organization and start building up a talent pool before you even have a job opening. This can save significant time and effort if and when you have a suitable vacancy for such candidates – especially if you’ve previously engaged with them.
The AI may even identify a candidate that is so talented and such a good fit, you create a specific role for them within your organisation.
- Predictive Analytics
Analysing data quickly is one of the key strengths of AI. Tools can be used to analyse data from your current employees to help identify and predict the likely profile of a candidate who will be successful.
Combined with tools like psychometric and behavioural profiling, you can identify candidates who may not have the exact qualifications you're looking for but who still have the potential to be a great fit for your team.
Furthermore, it can also help identify your most valuable current employees, which in turn can help inform an employee retention programme and career path development. Identifying internal employees for promotion or with the ability to change functions, may help avoid the need for any external recruitment if a relevant role becomes vacant.
The Importance of Culture Fit
While AI technology can help you screen and attract candidates more efficiently, it's important to remember that culture fit is more than just the ‘right’ psychometric profile, or test results.
Truly matching for culture fit still requires a significant human intervention as part of the recruitment process, as the nuanced elements of character and personality are best assessed on a face-to-face basis.
The Role of Executive Search
Whilst AI technology can undoubtedly deliver a much more efficient recruitment process for those candidates who are actively looking and have submitted their CVs, it’s not quite there yet for more proactive methods of recruitment, particularly executive search for senior or business critical roles.
It may ultimately get there, but as it stands there is no substitute for a consultative relationship with a search pro who can identify, attract, and screen the top talent in and adjacent to your industry. These people won’t be responding to job adverts no matter how high up the job board search rankings your advert appears, and they often won’t even have a current CV for your AI tools to screen.
At this end of the market, where culture fit is so vital for long-term success of the individual in the role, and where the top performers can make such a big difference to the bottom line of a business, executive search will likely remain the most efficient and cost-effective way of recruiting.
Conclusion
AI technology has the potential to revolutionise the recruitment process. Even with the rapid pace of change we have only scratched the surface of what is ultimately possible.
By using AI-powered tools, you will undoubtedly be giving yourself a competitive advantage right now, and the barrier to entry is lower than most people would expect.
Crucially, by combining AI technology with proactive recruitment methods for the most important and/or challenging positions, you can identify, attract, screen, and hire the best candidates that will enable the growth and future success of your organisation.
