Imagine you had your own personal assistant who would screen resumes and categorize job applicants according to your criteria. They could schedule interviews, arrange screening assessments, and more. Here's a summary of the do's and don'ts when you use AI in recruitment.

How is AI Used in Recruitment?

Artificial intelligence, more commonly referred to as AI, is changing the face of HR and recruiting right now. Gradually, software is starting to take over tasks customarily performed by recruiting teams. These include translation, resume screening, scheduling interviews, and other time-consuming tasks.

Recruiters and hiring managers are loving having their time freed up to write fantastic job descriptions and the candidates’ experience has been streamlined and improved.

This is mostly done with recruiting software. Recruiting technology such as applicant tracking systems use machine learning to parse resumes, categorize candidates, and more. Applicant tracking systems are now commonplace in organizations today.

(1) The Good

Why are so many companies now using AI in recruitment? Starting using it and you can see for yourself the following benefits.

Save Time

The majority of recruiters have far too much work on their plates. It is useful to be able to rely on AI technology to perform the mundane but time-consuming tasks of the role. Think about how many hours you have spent reading through CVs and cover letters to find top talent. Imagine if you didn’t have to do that, how much quicker the time to hire could be!

Reduce Bias

We all know that bias is a massive issue in talent acquisition. Unfortunately, people have an unconscious bias against certain types of candidates. AI can learn from previous patterns and reliably repeat the process. It is however important that you feed the AI with reliable data. Resumes for example are notoriously unrealiable; if you are using AI to screen resumes you are not going to fare any better than screening resumes by hand.

Another interesting application area is writing bias-free job ads. That’s right, bias can even leak into job advertisements by using gendered language and other issues. But using AI in recruitment can help us to overcome this.

Better Candidate Experience

When you use AI in recruitment, it is doing its job 24 hours a day, seven days a week. When you get the AI to respond to candidates and schedule interviews, it will reply to them right away. This gives a much better candidate experience as they won’t always be waiting for you to get back to them.

Find Passive Candidates

Not enough quality applicants in your recruiting process? AI can help with that. It can go out and find suitable applicants for you. Whether they are job seekers or passive candidates, technology can make predictions about what jobs could interest people. This can save you a lot of time by making sure you focus on candidates who are engaged in the process.

Interact with Your Talent Pool

You have likely had many excellent candidates in the past who were a close second for an open position. These people could be wonderful choices for new jobs, but you have forgotten about them by the time it comes to recruiting. AI doesn’t forget. It can go through past candidates and put them forward for new job roles. This can help you to interact with your talent pool and re-engage previous qualified candidates.

Reduce Turnover

We all know that better hiring decisions mean lower turnover for the company. Reducing turnover can save us thousands in recruitment processes each year. Using AI in recruitment is one way to improve hiring and reduce turnover. As it can accurately screen candidates and tell us who the most suitable applicants are, it is helping us to hire smarter.

(2) The Bad

What are some of the disadvantages of using AI in recruitment? It can be a handy tool, but there are some pitfalls you need to be aware of.

Lack of Insight

While AI is fantastic at parsing resumes for keywords and experience, it can also miss a lot. It is those small contextual things such as a large career gap or five jobs in one year that only a person will notice. AI may completely overlook this and put the candidate onto your shortlist.

Interpreting Body Language

Did you know that we can now use AI in video interviews to interpret body language? This sounds like magic and sometimes is. There is not enough evidence today that body language can be reliably interpreted. 

(3) The Ugly

There is one deeply concerning issue facing AI in recruitment. As mentioned earlier, it has the potential to reduce unconscious bias. It does ignore details such as race, age, and gender in job applications. But there is one issue. AI looks to find patterns.

This includes bias that already exists in your recruitment processes. Your AI system can accidentally learn this. For example, if you usually hire people who have graduated from one college in particular. This can become an issue if the AI realizes and therefore implements this as a criterion for your roles.

The Future of AI in Recruitment

While there may be some downsides of implementing AI into your recruitment process, Bryq has found a way to only use the good parts. With Bryq, recruiters and hiring managers are able to create the most ideal and aligned Job Profile, using our AI Profile Predictor. This feature uses AI to take your job description and match it with the most relevant cognitive skills and personality traits for that specific job role. Creating the most accurate job profile results in attracting the right candidate pool, making it easier to find your perfect hire. With the help of AI, Bryq is able to reduce bias and eliminate subjective views, creating a more Diverse and Inclusive workforce. 

The use of AI in recruitment will replace up to 16% of HR roles within ten years. Don’t panic; it doesn’t mean that we will all be made redundant. Instead, we will be able to focus more on the critical thinking and creative aspects of our roles rather than the mundane tasks that consume our time.

Recruiters will have more free time to spend interviewing candidates face to face and building relationships with them. This will help to determine the culture and team fit of applicants.

AI can also give us an increased amount of data on hiring success and failures. Using AI, you will have more information to show hiring managers how effective your recruitment processes have been. This will be useful for gaining buy-in from hiring managers on using AI in recruitment.

There is no reason to be wary of utilizing the technology that is now available to us. It can be beneficial for making better hires.