The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) by businesses has increased by 270 percent in the last four years and is expected to reach $266.92 billion by 2027. And a major factor driving this growth and adoption is the human resources field.
In particular, it is the talent acquisition division that is seeing a greater trend towards AI. The sheer number of applications and CVs that talent hunters get has forced them to turn to AI to narrow down the numbers.
Onboarding process made easy with AI
According to a survey, 52 % of talent managers say the most challenging part of the recruitment process is identifying the right candidates from a large applicant pool, and 56% say their hiring volume will increase this year.
Manually screening resumes is time-consuming, especially when 75% to 88% of the resumes received for a role are unqualified. Screening resumes and shortlisting candidates to interview is estimated to take 23 hours of a recruiter’s time for a single hire.
Recruiting sounds easy with AI powered software.
Early adopter companies using AI-powered recruiting software have seen their cost per screen reduced by 75%, their revenue per employee improve by 4%, and their turnover decrease by 35%.
Advantages of AI
AI allows recruiters to better leverage their Application Tracking System (ATS), allowing them to sift through the 1000s of applications, allowing them to hire more efficiently and fairly.
Many AI hiring software applications assist with the different processes and integrate with the HR workflow to help recruiters arrive at the best candidate. AI can be used in finding the better-suited candidates for the job (outreach program), assist in the interview process with personality insights, and even in the onboarding process.
Speeding up recruiting through automation reduces time-to-hire, which means you’ll be less likely to lose the best talent to faster-moving competitors.
Data mapping for talent
AI recruitment software also leverages the wealth of data in your ATS to generate insights into your talent pool.
Also, the system can be used to build a talent list of desired abilities and skills sets from past successful candidates.
As HR data has become easier to collect, access, and analyze over the years, quality of hire has become recruiting’s top KPI.
AI can also help you improve your communication with candidates. For example, AI chatbots act as a representative that candidates can contact with questions day or night. It can also reach out to qualified candidates to gather more information and set up an interview.
There are some cons too in setting up AI-based recruiting:
Overlooking Candidates
AI has the potential to overlook or even reject great people. Because it is a machine-based system, the fed algorithm only look at preset values and data points. Many qualified candidates are rejected because they do not match one criterion. A person might have all the relevant skills, education, additional certificates but not the required experience, and he or she will be rejected based on that.
Bias
AI evolves itself on past patterns and repeated behavior; hence, it can easily pick up on past partiality like age, gender, experience and even the candidate’s alma mater. These biases are no insurmountable. Once awareness builds, this can easily be fixed by software developers.
Disconnect
As AI is a machine, it cannot replace the human factor. The whole process though highly efficient and time saving, can also be very impersonal. This can potentially lead to miscommunication and a disconnection with the whole recruitment journey. One can even lose good talent due to this disconnect.
An effort can be made to connect with the candidate once the initial process of filtering and outreach is done.