Someone had to say it and Joanna Maciejewska said, “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.” (Source). Here’s the best part! AI has been metaphorically taking care of the dishes for a while and it’s interesting to note how AI integration has bestowed superpowers on HR (with a few hiccups, like bias from trained data causing small speed bumps).
Here’s a breakdown of this line of thought: If you are familiar with the whole process of recruiting, you would more or less realize that there are a few pillars that support the recruitment process as a whole. And that’s:
- Sourcing: The entire process of gathering candidates for the relevant position, be it from different job boards, social media, or even those not actively looking for a job.
- Screening: Procedures involving everything from background checks to resume parsing to the assessments that verify the candidate’s legitimacy.
- Outreach and building a relationship: The messaging and the medium involved while communicating with a candidate from the get-go to maintaining the relationship with necessary updates.
The best part is that you have an AI tool that caters to all these aspects (here’s a brilliant option, especially for candidate sourcing) and it is a huge deal! Within 12 to 18 months, 76 percent of companies will adopt it as a part of their workflow.
Imagine you put out your requirement on LinkedIn or any job board, and over the course of a couple of days there is a barrage of CVs and resumes that come in as a response. Most of them would have placed considerable thought into crafting it perfectly to suit your job, but manually looking through all of them to see which of them suits your role is arduous in itself. Thanks to AI, which has resume parsers that look at the resume as a whole rather than just the keywords. A task that needs a team of trained professionals is automated by one person with a click. Let’s assume you have an ATS to help you out but if your applicant is familiar with the technology (which most applicants are), they may resort to manipulating the resumes to suit the software. But, with AI, there is more hope for a better system of filtration that compensates for human errors. However, a more comprehensive vetting procedure is ensured in the next step.
When it comes to assessments, if there was no automation available at all, the role of a subject matter expert would be necessary for the different roles across designations. With automation involved, the number of SMEs can be reduced substantially, and with AI, this number could dwindle to single digits as well. The best part of having an AI-based assessment is that you get niche points of proficiency for candidates. AI has reached a level of proficiency where you don’t need a dedicated SME to deep dive into the answers, which was the case previously, where although automation did help support the process, AI can customize the questions in real-time and, using the results, analyze the perfect candidates for niche roles.
From here, candidates can be pushed ahead to one-way video interviews or a face-to-face interview with a company representative, and AI can easily help with the mass scheduling of these interviews. One-way video interviews have changed from text-based screen recording models to realistic AI avatars that can analyze and respond to questions spontaneously. AI can analyze body language and eye movements and provide insights that could even surpass most interviewers. Not to mention, you can even customize the language based on the comfort levels of the candidates.
The next part would be to correspond with the candidates and ensure that their skills are tested. When corresponding with each candidate, writing a generic message makes the interaction cold right from the start. For the most part, even if you are typing in a LinkedIn email, which is personalized, the chances are high to get a person to respond (as compared to a generic email) but there still exists the chance that there may not be a response. Hence for the amount of time spent, sending emails to larger volumes of candidates is a better investment of time. Written correspondence with one candidate in itself is tedious and takes considerable bandwidth. At this point, a larger team would be required for a better possibility of fruitful interactions.
While there is a sizable contribution AI can provide with assessments, let’s magnify the seams that keep the whole recruiting process together. The main goal is to ensure that the correspondence is as human and personalized as possible for every single applicant. Why is this important? Apart from maintaining good employer branding, personalization to a level where each message involves the qualifications and projects as a part of the narrative gives an emotional commitment that keeps candidates engaged. Thanks to AI that actively learns and mimics human behavior. These tasks can easily replace large teams that would usually cater to each interaction and HR tasks.
And there you have it! a 360-degree comprehensive view of how recruitment has taken a complete revamp. And indeed, as mentioned before, AI can take care of the “dishes” while you work on those bits that truly matter. Like ensuring that your new recruit’s mentality and mindset suit your existing team. Connect people and create human-oriented synergies that could potentially affect the future of your organization.
