How is AI already affecting the recruitment process, and what can we expect to see in the future? AI-oriented tech company, IPsoft, provides an overview
What types of automation solutions are at the disposal of today’s recruitment teams? AI systems are already providing numerous options.
Traditionally, recruiters have often had to log into a system and manually identify the characteristics of ideal job candidates. With conversational AI, a recruiter can use natural language to ‘tell’ the system what type of candidate they are looking for, such as, ‘I’m looking for a compliance officer with at least five years of experience.’
Advanced AI systems can even generate relevant qualifying questions to further refine the search, such as those based on location or language proficiencies. Once the recruiter’s search has been created, the AI system will independently check through numerous candidate databases and job sites. As the system already knows the role requirements, only the most appropriate candidates are shared with the recruiter to take forward.
Augmenting effective recruitment from sift to interview
Talent acquisition is one of the key tasks for recruiters and one in which AI can play a transformative role. But there is no great need to change the way that candidates apply for jobs – ultimately, it’s augmenting the ability for recruiters to work effectively and build better relationships with prospective hires. Traditional recommendations for optimising CV and LinkedIn profiles to best highlight your skills and experience remain important – whether it’s an AI or human searching.
When it comes to the interview, AI software can also design interview questions that are personalised to the person’s professional competencies and experience. This approach helps both the candidate and recruiter: the candidate has the best opportunity to present and discuss their relevant experience and skills, in turn helping the recruiter make better and more informed decisions. It can also help to reduce unconscious bias in questions, as the AI can be trained to disregard certain information and guide the recruiter away from questions that could have previously exposed a candidate to bias.
Between the search for great candidates, the time needed to conduct interviews and the challenge in hiring top-tier employees, recruiting is very resource-intensive. Many organisations – including Hilton and Unilever – therefore already rely on AI to assist HR in the lengthy hiring process. From résumé screening to interviews, AI can help limit the amount of time it takes to narrow down the pool of job seekers.
Stepping towards the hybrid workforce
Recruitment, and indeed HR as a whole, involves many routine tasks, making this an area of potential improvement through the use of AI-powered automation. From the business perspective, freeing up recruiters and HR professionals from high-volume – but not necessarily high-value – tasks, can allow them to address more complex individual needs across the business and apply their skills to other projects, such as setting up a graduate training programme, building relationships with prospects, or researching and refreshing employee benefits schemes. Automation can help make these teams more productive, and ultimately make their jobs more interesting and rewarding.
In the long term, AI is going to fully automate tasks that human employees would rather not do, or simply do not have enough time to complete along with other, more important objectives. This is an important step towards the hybrid workforce, in which human and digital associates work alongside each other to help businesses scale faster with improved productivity and efficiency.
Covid-19 is becoming the accelerator for one of the greatest workplace transformations of our lifetime, with unprecedented changes in people’s day-to-day lives. What we are experiencing today could very well hasten this transition to a hybrid workforce and bring cognitive AI into the workforce even sooner than has been anticipated.
Johan Toll is Executive Director of Transformations at IPsoft, a technology company focused on AI, cognitive and autonomic solutions.
