AI in recruitment: friend or foe?
Whether we like it or not, Artificial Intelligence is becoming more and more integrated with the recruitment process, so we need to learn to work with it or risk getting lost in the dust. If used in the right way, it can be a powerful tool that can push our recruitment game upto the next level. At the same time, some recruitment professionals are reluctant to give AI too much power, and would prefer to keep it old-school.
So let’s take a look at how AI is benefitting the recruitment industry in 2021.
4 benefits of AI in recruitment
Time-saving
AI has been somewhat of a recruitment god-send when it comes to automating mundane and repetitive tasks such as CV parsing and responding to basic queries. Thanks to chatbots and machine-learning software, AI has allowed recruiters to knuckle down on more important activities like relationship-building, winning business and negotiating.
AI has also enabled recruiters to scan large numbers of CVs in mass. With the events of 2020 putting hundreds of thousands of people out of jobs, recruiters reported record-high numbers of job applications and CVs online, making it near-on impossible to look through each individual application manually. Recruiters have long been embracing the benefit of keyword scanning software, but the pandemic was a period where keyword scanners truly saved the day.
Improves candidate experience
Candidates are an integral part of the recruitment cycle, but that hasn’t stopped many of them from feeling jilted when they don’t hear back from recruiters. Thanks to email automation, there’s no excuse for recruiters not to let their candidates know if they’ve not been successful.
Again, with the large number of applications during the height of the pandemic, there’s no way recruiters could personally inform each candidate of their application progress. But email automations have proven themselves to be a useful tool for eliminating this time-consuming task.
Better outreach messaging success
You know that moment your boolean search pulls through the ideal candidate on LinkedIn and you then spend the next half hour fretting about how to craft the perfect message? Well, thanks to some AI machine-learning software, you don’t have to do that anymore. New types of software have the ability to profile candidates based on their social media activity, and advise you on their personality type and messaging preferences before you’ve even spoken to them. This means recruiters can send more impactful messages tailored to each candidate’s personality type and get a better response rate!
Assists with candidate screening
Psychometric testing has become a standard part of the interview process for many recruitment companies. It uses an unbiased approach to assess a candidate’s suitability to a role, and provides valuable insights into their learning styles too. Psychometric tests can be really useful particularly when you’re faced with two amazing candidates and need help making the final decision.
What are the disadvantages of AI in recruitment?
One of the most important things to be aware of is that AI isn’t 100% reliable and can never replace your own human judgement. Sometimes, businesses give AI too much power to make decisions when really it should be used to support decisions. For example, if an employer loved a candidate during the interview but the psychometric test raised some red flags, the results of the test shouldn’t automatically override the employer’s own judgement.
The other argument against AI is the fear that it will put recruiters out of their jobs. But as we just mentioned, AI isn’t 100% reliable and, ultimately, it can’t replace the much needed human interaction, such as establishing relationships and handling negotiations.
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