Today’s HR organizations and recruiters are under tremendous pressure to find and acquire top talent with few resources and limited bandwidth. Artificial Intelligence (AI) talent acquisition tools and technology are reshaping how HR hires. Because AI technology can streamline and automate many of the tedious tasks of talent acquisition, it’s no wonder AI recruiting adoption is expected to grow by a compound annual rate of 7.6% by 2027.
In this article, we explain why organizations need to adopt AI for talent acquisition to stay competitive in the marketplace, challenges inherent in AI adoption, and the best ways to leverage AI technology to improve your workflow and efficiently attract, screen, and assess the best talent.
Why AI is essential for talent acquisition
Reasons an organization should incorporate AI into their talent acquisition include:
- It saves time on tedious, administrative tasks, allowing the recruiter to focus on more important elements of the hiring process. AI can screen resumes based on keywords and descriptions, conduct assessments, and schedule interviews automatically, freeing up what typically occupies the majority of the recruiter’s time.
- It elevates the quality of hire by implementing standardized job matching. AI can efficiently and effectively assess a candidate’s likelihood of fit by analyzing their skills and experiences against a given job (or jobs) in a fair and consistent manner. This same AI can be applied to job descriptions, ensuring that they accurately represent the skills and experiences required for the job. When applied to both candidate evaluation and the job descriptions themselves, AI can significantly improve the quality of hire.
Benefits of AI-powered talent acquisition
Other key benefits of AI-powered talent acquisition include:
- It reduces the time/cost per resume screen since AI can perform this in near-real time.
- It accelerates time to hire by reducing sourcing, screening, assessing, and scheduling efforts.
- It decreases turnover by assessing trends and analyzing employee satisfaction.
- It improves organizational performance by filling positions faster with high-quality talent found from a larger candidate pool.
- It objectively assesses candidates and removes unconscious bias to improve diversity, inclusion, and equity (DE&I).
Challenges of using AI for recruiting
While AI-powered talent acquisition has incredible potential and can dramatically reduce the time a recruiter spends sourcing and screening candidates, AI is not without its challenges. AI faces several obstacles that can prevent it from reaching its full potential. The biggest challenges are:
AI is only as good as its data
AI relies on accessing and evaluating large quantities of quality data. If your AI isn’t learning from the best data sets, then its ability to accurately and effectively screen resumes as well as a human recruiter will be hampered. For this reason, it’s important for AI to be utilizing good data, including well-written resumes and job descriptions.
AI can learn biases
While AI strives to eliminate unconscious bias by purposefully disregarding or masking data about a candidate’s gender, race, age, or other factors that could trigger unconscious bias, it may inherit trends from previous hiring behaviors should it be included in the data set used to train the AI. While these hiring behaviors may have been unconscious, improperly trained AI isn’t smart enough to determine the difference.
An example of this is when internet users discovered racial discrimination in Twitter’s AI photo tools. This reinforces the importance of ensuring that the AI learns from the best data.
Related Link: Four Ways to Increase Workplace Diversity
People are reluctant to adopt new technology
While AI can save HR professionals a lot of time and be an effective tool, it can also induce fear that jobs may be replaced if the AI demonstrates enough improvement to replace humans. Others are skeptical that the AI will be able to effectively automate their tasks and perform them as well as humans.
Want a better AI-powered solution that takes a more holistic look at a candidate’s professional journey? Request a demo of our talent discovery solution.
Related Link: Discover Overlooked Candidates with MojoHire
How to implement AI-powered talent acquisition
To leverage the benefits of AI while still acknowledging the challenges of the technology, Consider utilizing AI for:
Candidate sourcing
AI is very effective for pulling data from a variety of platforms and channels. It can cast a much wider net and source from passive and active candidates that are a great fit for the company. And it can do it much faster than a person, allowing the HR professional to focus their time on vetting the best-matched candidates. This also accelerates the hiring process and saves the company money.
Candidate screening
Once the AI has identified the candidates, it can automate the process for the recruiter even further by performing the initial screening. This allows the HR organization to screen exponentially more candidates than a person would have time to do, creating a higher quality shortlist in a shorter period of time for recruiting teams.
Utilizing niche websites to find candidates
Because of the technical nature of some positions, it can be incredibly difficult to find candidates through referrals or internal hiring. By utilizing AI to search niche websites and communities, recruiters can identify potential talent to fill these technical positions more efficiently.
Job posting and targeting
HR professionals can also utilize AI to target specific candidates through targeted ads aimed at passive or active candidates who fit the job description. This enables the job listing to go to candidates that would be qualified for the position instead of a blanket pool of individuals who don’t necessarily have all the skills, education, or experience for the position.
How AI will change the future of recruiting
If used to its full potential, AI will become a powerful tool for recruiters. It will enable them to become more efficient and effective at hiring the right people, retaining top talent, accelerating time to hire, and increasing productivity by improving the quality of hire. And by analyzing the trends and patterns identified by AI, HR organizations will be able to address and improve employee satisfaction and experience more proactively.
MojoHire is revolutionizing how organizations find the best talent. As an AI-powered hiring platform, MojoHire focuses on looking beyond keyword searches to give HR professionals more holistic searching capabilities that paint a more in-depth picture of candidates’ professional journey, skills, and experience. Build a better, more inclusive team by leveraging MojoHire solutions.
Want a more proactive talent acquisition strategy? Learn more about MojoHire’s talent discovery system.
Related Link: How to Transform a Recruiter’s Work from “Database Admin” to “Strategic Hiring Partner”
