7 top benefits of using AI in recruitment

Artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere. And it isn’t going anywhere. For better or worse, there’s an application for it in almost every area of our lives. That’s especially true when it comes to AI in recruitment.
AI isn’t here to replace human recruiters, but it’s here to make their lives infinitely easier.
However you feel about it, it’s worth HR teams exploring ways to use AI tools in their systems because it could save them time, improve their processes, and potentially make their employer more money (or at least save them some).
So, here are some of the top benefits of AI in recruitment, and ways adopting AI technology could enhance your recruitment strategy:
Sourcing candidates
Almost four in five employers find it hard to find talent in 2023, according to data from ManpowerGroup.
AI recruitment software can make a massive difference to your talent acquisition efforts. It can significantly reduce the time spent finding and recruiting great potential candidates.
Rather than a recruiter spending hours scanning LinkedIn, posting on job boards or attending career fairs, AI can do much of this automatically.
It can locate top talent while hiring managers work on other things, like recruitment marketing to improve the business’s employer brand. All these things ensure organizations bring candidates in quickly and efficiently.
Automating time-consuming tasks
One of the most significant advantages of using AI technology is how it improves workflows to make them more efficient. Administrative tasks that might have taken too much of a recruiter’s time can now be delegated to AI technology and automation.
For instance, scheduling interviews – mainly group interviews or complex interview schedules – can be notoriously time-consuming to organize.
Using AI software, you can make this process easier and faster for recruiters, interviewers and candidates.
This creates a more positive candidate experience, improving your employer brand and streamlining the hiring process for everyone.
It also gives you more time to do innovative work that helps move the organization forward.
Screening candidates
Sixty-three percent of HR professionals believe AI will replace manually screening candidates in the future.
One of the major benefits of AI for hiring is its ability to filter job seekers’ resumes in seconds. Its resume screening skills are infinitely faster than that of any human, meaning hiring managers can reclaim their days for higher-level tasks that help them more quickly find the right fit for a role.
It uses predictive analytics to compare applicants’ resumes to the skill sets of current employees. This means it can more accurately predict if that applicant will be successful in a role from their resume without the interference of human biases.
The more recruiters use it, the more machine learning algorithms of AI recruiting software will learn what makes some succeed. It can then use this knowledge to further streamline future hiring processes.
Because it can analyze information so quickly, AI can screen hundreds of resumes in a matter of minutes, searching for relevant experience, or other useful candidate qualities the candidate has. This ensures recruiters identify the best candidates faster, giving them an edge over the competition.
It can also conduct pre-screening interviews, meaning hiring managers only need to come into the picture during the decision-making process.
AI can even assist with the decision-making process using the data it collected during the screening process.
Improving time to hire
The recruiting process can take up a lot of time. The more AI recruitment tools hiring managers use (or that their applicant tracking system includes), the faster they can find quality hires and the better-quality hiring decisions they can make.
It’s perfect for the automation of time-consuming tasks, like screening candidates. Its ability to filter through job applications in seconds and provide a shortlist while you sleep can dramatically streamline your time to hire.
Time to hire is also a great key performance indicator to track, especially if the organization has historically struggled to fill roles.
Since AI can process more data in less time, it can offer more detailed information on candidates, improving the decision-making process as well as reducing the amount of time it takes to fill a role. You, therefore, get to improve your time to hire while feeling confident you’ve attracted quality candidates.
Reducing human bias
Eliminating human bias from the hiring process is something every HR department should work toward.
Unconscious bias affects everyone. It’s only through actively working to improve this within an organization that it can change.
AI technology could help hiring managers improve human biases that crop up during the hiring process to ensure they hire the right talent every time without biases getting in the way.
AI technology’s focus in recruitment will always be to look for the best matches based on skills. With human bias out of the way, hiring managers can focus on identifying the best candidates they may have otherwise passed wrongly on.
This creates a more diverse workforce, which means the business gets to experience all the benefits of a diverse company like improved employee engagement, greater productivity and higher profits.
Scaling communication
The use of chatbots has grown over recent years, especially in customer service. Now, it’s being used by HR professionals in candidate outreach.
AI tools can reach out to qualified candidates to gather more information and set up an interview.
A new form of AI, known as Personality AI, can even offer advice for communicating with each candidate effectively based on their unique personality, which helps you build important connections and hire the best candidates you can find.
An AI chatbot can act as a representative that candidates can contact with questions, day or night. They don’t have to wait for anyone to answer their morning emails before they get a response; they can get one instantly.
And hiring managers don’t lose time answering questions (particularly repetitive ones).
Actually, candidates get a better candidate experience with the only extra work required from hiring managers being to set up the chatbot. Once that’s done, the AI can do the heavy lifting for them.
Promoting open positions
Half the battle of the recruitment process is getting people to apply for open positions. AI can take some of the pressure off when it comes to ideas, such as how to promote a role on social media channels like LinkedIn.
This can also include the content in the post itself.
This saves HR teams the time it takes to come up with content ideas on their own. Generating content in this way can also help maintain a consistent brand message, particularly if multiple people manage the same social media page.
Potential cons to consider
AI has some great benefits to offer, but it’s still in its early stages, which means it does come with some cons. Here are some of them:
Overlooking candidates
As beneficial as AI’s ability to find suitable candidates can be, it also has the potential to overlook, deprioritize or even reject great people.
Because it focuses on past experiences or other similar data points, AI may not follow up with someone who could be well suited to a role, despite not having as much relevant experience on the surface.
For instance, if they have evidence of the right soft skills, but not as many hard skills.
In an episode of HRMorning’s “Voices of HR” podcast, titled “Secrets of a Top Executive Recruiter: Finding the Right Leadership for That Critical Role,” Vivian Kessler said: “It’s getting to know how they drive a project forward, what problems they encountered in driving that project forward, whether they abandoned ship or kept moving.”
It’s unlikely AI can give you that insight, but how they answer questions when you speak to them will.
Likewise, if a candidate is neurodivergent, their knowledge may manifest differently than someone who isn’t neurodivergent. If AI overlooks them, it can mean businesses miss out on the increased creativity and enhanced problem-solving skills that can come from experiencing the world differently.
Potential learned bias
Despite popular perception, AI does have the potential to be biased.
Though properly developed AI can help prevent human biases, the technology’s need to learn through patterns can easily pick up on past partialities like age, gender and even the candidate’s alma mater.
While there are companies that may neglect to account for these biases, software developers can take steps to remove these patterns of human error.
It’s therefore important to consider this when looking into any HR tech. Find out how the software prevents learned biases from its developers, hiring managers and anyone else who built or uses it, from seeping in.
Possible liability issues
Keith Sonderling, commissioner of the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), said this in a recent interview, “All the liability rests with the employer in the same way it rested with HR using a pencil and paper back in the 1960s. You cannot lose sight that these are just employment decisions being made faster, more efficiently, with more data and potentially with more transparency.”
So, even though there’s a lot of uncertainty around AI right now, businesses are still liable for hiring decisions made by AI tools. It’s worth keeping that in mind when adopting or updating any AI software.
Being impersonal
AI doesn’t always connect as well to job seekers as a person on the other end might.
While AI-powered tools like a chatbot can save HR leaders a lot of time, it can make the hiring process feel less personal for the hiring manager and candidates. Sure, it can make work simpler and more efficient, but it may also lead to a lack of effective communication.
Hiring managers could feel more detached from the process, while AI’s generic messaging may be less convincing to candidates, or may not fully answer their queries or concerns.
Businesses can avoid this if hiring managers use the time AI saves them getting to know more about the candidates AI locates.
While it’s possible to let AI do all the work, there are still plenty of areas – like interviewing or making the final decision – where human connection still works best.
Finding the right fit using HR tech
AI recruiting software can make the recruitment process more efficient. It can help to eliminate biases, improving workplace diversity, and speed up the hiring process so that companies don’t spend months trying to find the right candidate for an open position.
But it’s still in its infancy, so it isn’t perfect when it comes to things like reflecting human biases.
Recruitment will always require a personal touch to help candidates feel valued and appreciated, and to ensure the right fit is hired for the role.
However, if you want to hire at scale, without sacrificing the quality of your hiring process, AI could be just what you need.
Free Training & Resources
White Papers
Provided by Paycom
Resources
The Cost of Noncompliance
Case Studies
The Cost of Noncompliance