AI in talent acquisition

Advancements in AI have created several powerful use cases for human resources departments to use the technology to improve their workflows. Organizations can use machine learning, generative AI, natural language processing (NLP) and other advanced automation and AI tools to improve the overall hiring experience. AI-powered tools can help organizations save money and find the best possible candidates.

Organizations that use AI will find more prospects also using AI to enhance their jobs. McKinsey found that 88% of respondents to a survey were using generative AI to enhance their jobs.¹ As such, they might be more comfortable encountering it during their job search process.

AI-driven talent acquisition can improve an organization’s overall recruitment process by reducing the time it takes to find, assess and hire top prospects.

The HR department is incredibly important within organizations of all sizes. Hiring managers have many responsibilities that ultimately lead to the overall health of the organization. Some of these responsibilities are more labor intensive but don't require extensive strategic thinking.

As such, hiring managers can use AI in talent acquisition to meet several key goals:

1. Improve the candidate experience
2. Enhance recruitment strategies
3. Foster happier employees

AI can also help candidates find the information they need to decide whether they want to apply for a job. They can use AI tools like chatbots to ask specific questions about the roles and requirements, if anything in the job description is unclear. In addition, top talent, especially those working in information technology fields, will want to see their prospective employer using AI technology to improve workflows.

When manual work is removed from HR professionals’ responsibilities, they can focus on more strategic initiatives. AI algorithms can lessen the load for HR professionals so they can spend more time with top candidates to answer their questions and make the case for why they should join the organization.

It is likely that HR employees have several manual tasks they must complete during business. If AI can take on some of those responsibilities, HR employees can focus on the more rewarding activity of interacting with prospective employees.

1. Idea and script generation
2. Candidate screening
3. Rapid employee onboarding
4. Customized job postings
5. One-way video interviews

Generative AI can help HR professionals make quicker decisions and respond to difficult employee questions. While employees can use free tools like ChatGPT to generate potential scripts when talking to candidates, organizations are better off building or licensing a more industry-specific generative AI tool to help discuss opportunities with candidates.

Organizations can use AI to analyze public information of a candidate, such as their social media posts, to identify potential red flags. Using AI to vet potential candidates in real time saves time and resources.

A new hire does not truly become an employee until an organization onboards them and they start their job. AI helps expedite that process so that they can quickly set up the new employees to start doing the work they were hired to do.

Recruiting teams can find themselves overwhelmed during the hiring process by the number of job posts they must create. And sometimes they default to broad descriptions to appeal to the largest audience. AI can help those recruiters automate those time-consuming tasks and create many customized versions of job posts for different types of candidates.

Organizations can use AI to ask candidates a series of screening questions before a human-to-human interview takes place. However, organizations that use this option should take great care to explain this process and why they’re doing it, so as not to potentially turn off candidates.

There are several important facets to any strategic talent acquisition and management approach.

1. Audit roles and tasks
2. Identify the right tools
3. Build for responsible AI
4. Test and learn

An organization should identify their current talent acquisition workflows and resources, so they can begin to build an AI-driven recruitment strategy that works for all parties: the organization, candidates and employees.

There is a mix of free and paid, general and industry-specific AI tools and technologies that HR teams can adopt. The executive team should coordinate with their IT teams and HR staff to identify the best investments that supercharge their talent acquisition strategies.

Before adopting AI into their processes, organizations should explore what responsible AI means for them. There are reputational, ethical and legal ramifications for not using AI correctly.

It is incredibly important to trial AI technologies before rolling them out to all candidates. This way, the organization can identify if there are any biases in the system or if the process worries candidates. Organizations should test a new AI enhancement and analyze the results before deciding to incorporate it into all active searches.

Incorporating AI into talent acquisition activities requires constant assessment of how the process is working. The organization should set up a natural cadence of reviews to see which facets have improved and which are not working.

Helping HR teams streamline manual HR processes so they can focus on more meaningful work benefits employees, candidates and organizations alike.

1. Reduced recruiting and hiring costs
2. Quicker hiring decisions
3. Improved candidate engagement
4. Improved quality of hires

It can be costly to recruit and hire new candidates. AI can streamline many manual processes in the talent acquisition process. By automatically scheduling appointments based on candidates availability and scanning resumes for key expertise, fewer HR representatives need to work on heavily manual tasks. Instead, they can focus on higher value tasks.

For example, AI can schedule interviews based on available time, saving HR professionals from having to check their calendars and find the appropriate time to interview candidates.

AI improves the decision-making process and reduces time-to-hire in several ways. HR teams can use AI-powered recruiting tools to get in front of candidates quicker and make offers before the competition. AI can automate résumé screening and match candidates to open roles.

Using AI to create better messaging leads to better outcomes with candidates. Organizations can use historical data to better understand what has appealed in the past and what recruiters should use to get the attention of candidates. AI-powered interactions can offer personalized job recommendations and respond to specific questions. Predictive analytics can also help organizations better future-proof their recruiting strategy so they know how prospect preferences are shifting.

AI can help organizations discover the right hires with less work than historical manual processes. It can also help with employee retention, which aids the talent acquisition process by minimizing loss of valued employees, and talent searches to replace them. AI can also help identify metrics to find out how the organization attracted top employees, and repeat its successes.

There are several challenges to using AI in talent acquisition.

1. Inherited bias
2. Increased startup costs
3. Decreased human connection
4. Prospect and employee concerns

Since humans built the systems that power AI, the biases of those humans can carry over to these AI systems. Organizations can use AI to pore through thousands of résumés and applications to find prospective employees that fit whatever criteria the organization has for open positions.

Investing in AI technology can be expensive at the beginning of the process. However, improvements in efficiency, such as time-to-hire, can ultimately drive down an organization’s costs and make the entire process more valuable.

Organizations that focus all their efforts on AI talent acquisitions might lose out on candidates who feel the process lacks a human touch. The best way to avoid this scenario is to treat AI as an enhancement, not a replacement for human outreach.

Some prospective and current employees might have concerns about how an organization is using AI to perform certain tasks. Organizations should transparently discuss how they are using the technology and how it benefits all parties. Over 61% of Americans are unaware that organizations use AI in their hiring process.²

AI will only become a more powerful force in talent acquisition as language models improve and more organizations embed the technology into their hiring practices. HR teams use AI in their daily activities, and AI will increasingly handle some functions like job postings and resume screening. As organization trust more actions to AI, they must work hard to ensure that those systems are free from bias and set up in a way to identify diverse candidates across all industries.