AI continues to rise in popularity, thanks to the use of generative AI-based tools such as ChatGPT. Common folks have started using them in their daily lives to improve their day-to-day tasks and skill set. We can observe that this rising popularity of artificial intelligence is resulting in optimized processes and efficient solutions, even for human resources.
Businesses have also started using these AI-based tools to optimize their business solutions, making them an essential part of business processes. Artificial Intelligence (AI) or AI technology can think like a human being a come up with robust solutions to enterprise issues and streamline the common tasks associated with it.
The AI platform is slowly penetrating the recruiters’ domain with multiple HRMS software actively using it for undertaking their daily activities such as talent acquisition, the onboarding process, performance management, and more. In this blog, we will provide you with an overview of AI in talent acquisition and how AI technology and machine learning impact the overall hiring process.
Rising Role of AI in Talent Acquisition
Since AI is often tasked with streamlining processes, it can easily lend its services and skills to recruitment professionals. Since modern talent acquisition professionals use HRMS software to complete their daily tasks, they can easily streamline many of the clerical and administrative processes.
However, with the use and skills of AI, they can use their software to undertake intelligent tasks such as gathering insights from the employee database, providing custom training solutions, identifying the best candidates using their facial expressions data, and more.
AI’s role in talent acquisition can be summarized in 1 word – efficiency. AI can improve the efficiency of multiple processes related to talent acquisition, such as searching for the most qualified candidates, from multiple sources, scheduling their interviews, and analyzing their profiles to find the ideal fit according to the company culture, as well as providing predictive analytics regarding whether they will stay with the AI talent acquisition companies for longer.
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Benefits of AI Tools in Talent Acquisition
By leveraging AI in HR, talent acquisition and candidate experience can be fully automated with limited to no human involvement.
While it is true that candidates will require human interaction to feel connected with your company, the other processes apart from candidate interaction can be fully automated to overcome the multiple challenges we discussed above.
Following are some of the benefits of using AI tools in talent acquisition:
➔ Better Job Descriptions
We are living in the age of ChatGPT, a free Generative AI tool that can provide you with relevant and interesting job profiles within seconds.
The technology is only going to progress in the future with the inclusion of similar Generative AI tools into the HRMS. It will result in the generation of laser-focused job outlines that help you stand out from the crowd.
➔ Lowered Costs
AI-powered talent acquisition systems optimize the entire hiring process to make it more streamlined and ensure cost-effective hiring. Due to such efforts, the time and effort required to hire candidates are reduced, leading to lower overall costs.
The AI system can also provide valuable inputs to further optimize the manual processes involved in recruitment, making it highly effective automation.
➔ Automated Job Postings
You can leverage AI to generate automated job postings which helps you automate a major portion of the hiring process. Moreover, AI can find new job posting websites and forums to ensure maximum reach of the job opportunity.
AI can also customize the automated postings to ensure that the content is relevant to job requirements and the candidates found on the website, ensuring a maximum number of applicants, and enhancing the candidate sourcing process efficiency.
➔ Qualified Candidate Sourcing
With the help of targeted job descriptions and customized job postings, AI can enhance the quality of the applicants for a given position due to enhanced candidate experience.
It can also search the internet for passive candidates, and target them with customized plans which will make your job description and offer more interesting, and attract the best talent. Hence, AI can easily improve the overall quality of the candidates who apply for the vacant position.
➔ Enhanced Screening
Since AI works solely on logic, it can make effective decisions quickly regarding the best candidates’ fit and screening. It is devoid of human biases, which results in precise candidate screening, which will also lead to a diverse workforce.
AI can also match the candidate’s fit with the job profiles, making them highly effective at providing potential employees who are an ideal fit for the company culture and the work environment.
➔ Quicker Assessments
AI can also swiftly handle vast amounts of databases, making them highly efficient for undertaking interview assessments.
It can complete this task in a matter of minutes, whereas a team of human recruiters would have taken days to accomplish the same task. Quicker results also result in your candidate staying warm for further interview rounds.
➔ Bias Avoidance
Since AI is pure logic, it is devoid of human prejudice. Such bias-free interviews ensure that you employ talented staff, who were chosen solely based on human intelligence and merit.
You can also employ the same bias-free judgment even while promoting your staff or hiring managers, resulting in an engaged work culture, even if you have hybrid and remote work options.
➔ Improved Strategies
AI can also be used to further optimize your recruitment process by streamlining the entire application process as well as augmenting it with enhanced optimizations suggested by the AI system.
It provides you with a highly targeted approach ensuring that you gather a talent pool of quality candidates, which will also result in an enhanced employer brand.
➔ Interactive Onboarding
AI in employee onboarding can provide interactive sessions to the newly appointed staff, which will further enhance their interest in the company and keep them engaged.
AI can also automate several clerical tasks related to employment such as undertaking induction, helping new hires get acquainted with their teammates, etc.
➔ Better Retention
Another positive aspect of AI is that it can identify candidates’ patterns and provide predictive analytics with a relatively higher long-term success rate.
It can study the candidates’ resumes video interviews, and understand their past behaviour to predict whether they will stay longer with your company despite your best efforts.
Hence, AI can be used to predict whether a candidate is retained, effectively lowering your employee turnover rate.
Current Challenges in Talent Acquisition
Talent acquisition is a process consisting of multiple tasks such as sourcing the right candidates, assessing them with interviews and assignments, undertaking their documentation, onboarding them, and more.
Hence, there are multiple challenges in undertaking it smoothly, such as increased cost of hiring, unconscious bias in interviewers, etc.
Such challenges hinder the efficiency of the talent acquisition process, increasing its cost in terms of time and effort. Hence, let us try to understand the current major challenges in talent acquisition.
1. Higher Costs
Recruitment is a balance between resource usage. While the management requires talented staff, they want them to be recruited within the minimum wage possible. On the other hand, cut-throat competition in the job market has resulted in talented candidates searching for better opportunities constantly.
Similarly, the lack of a dedicated hiring cost optimization mechanism results in vague metrics related to the cost per hire, making it even more difficult to make the recruitment process more efficient.
2. Biased Hiring Process
Human beings are inherently biased in nature and this nature manifests itself in the recruitment process. Our judgments are often clouded by various emotional factors, which can affect a panel of interviewers too.
However, such biased interviews result in far less diversity in the employees within the AI talent acquisition companies leading to lowered productivity, when compared to a similar workforce consisting of diverse individuals.
3. Unorganized Hiring
Even in the digital age, talent acquisition professionals are still hiring candidates the old-fashioned way. However, a major flaw of this technique is the lack of organized hiring techniques that ensure optimized recruitment.
With unorganized hiring processes, it becomes difficult to track the received applications, schedule interviews, as well as handle the candidates efficiently.
4. Candidate Engagement
Additionally, candidate engagement is usually unheard of, in traditional recruitment methods. With the increasing number of informed candidates, it becomes essential to keep them warm and help them stay interested in open positions in your organization.
Lack of candidate engagement would also result in the loss of talented candidates to the competition as they understand their value for the other company over yours due to the efforts taken in keeping them engaged with informed decisions.
5. Slow Hiring Rate
The lack of required recruitment tools on online platforms will result in drawn-out labor-intensive processes, which take longer as well as require more manpower.
It has an adverse impact leading to a slower hiring rate, which can also make talented candidates search elsewhere for better opportunities.
Hence, a slow hiring rate would result in the hiring of fewer candidates within a period, while also resulting in the loss of top talent with the right skills.
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AI in Talent Acquisition Challenges
While deploying AI and talent acquisition software, is a lucrative prospect, it needs to be undertaken with utmost precaution and with judicious judgment. Since AI is a complex system, its usage with human capabilities should be undertaken with utmost care.
You would also need to consider the ethical requirements while implementing an AI-based recruitment management system, making it a highly sensitive process. Let us check out some of the significant AI in talent acquisition challenges:
➔ Ethical Concerns
Let us address the most basic challenging factor while deploying AI-powered talent acquisition, the numerous ethical considerations, and the questions that arise due to its usage in judging the skills of potential candidates.
Additionally, as recruitment AI is trained on previous hiring data, it will be biased if the data itself is biased. You will have to consider these possibilities and continuously hone the AI to have a fair recruitment process.
➔ Disconnected Candidates
If you use AI for every step of the recruitment process with transformative technology, potential and current employees may feel disconnected from your company.
Hence, it is essential to have the human touch with the candidates wherever possible, as it helps them better connect with the company and its culture. Without such interactions, they may feel the company is too robotic, dissuading them from onboarding.
➔ Data Security Concerns
AI is trained using vast amounts of data; it constantly feeds on data to keep running efficiently. Such usage of databases raises multiple concerns related to data security and integrity.
It raises both ethical and regulatory concerns and as such, you would need to take extra precautions while deploying AI – talent acquisition effectively.
➔ Lower Adoption Rate
Since AI undertakes the recruiter’s tasks more efficiently, many recruiters are wary of implementing it in their organization, as they believe it will take away their jobs eventually.
While it may reduce the number of individuals required to undertake specific tasks as recruiters, AI can only be used to augment the duties of the recruiter. It cannot replace them as candidates will require human interactions to remain engaged with a company.
➔ Human Bias
Since AI is exceptionally good at identifying patterns within large data sets, it can learn human bias if the data fed to the system is inherently biased in nature.
As a result, human bias can still become an issue if adequate precautions are not taken while training the AI. Additionally, continued monitoring of the AI algorithm is required to ensure that it keeps working as intended.
➔ Limited Chatbots
While AI-powered chatbots are increasingly becoming good at human interactions, they may not be able to provide all the answers, especially to candidates who would be enquiring about company policies, HR processes, and other details that require deeper understanding and in-depth knowledge of the system.
Such queries can only be resolved with human interaction, making the candidate jump into an additional loop for their queries.
Future of AI in the Talent Acquisition Process
Artificial intelligence is here to stay as is evident by the rising popularity of the ChatGPT and other similar platforms that use AI to resolve user queries. Hence, the future of AI, machine learning, and talent acquisition seems very bright together.
However, this future need not be a grim one for the human recruiter as the software can augment the recruiter’s time and enhance their recruitment efforts multiple times.
On the other hand, human recruiters will always be required to build good relationships with the candidates and keep them engaged with the company.
Final Thoughts
The future of AI and the talent acquisition process will be a mixture of human-based interactions enabling recruiters to enhance AI-based automation.
Such harmonious co-existence will require a rework of the existing recruitment strategies from the ground up. While it may be a time-consuming and costly endeavour now, the results of the process far outweigh the effort put into developing and deploying such strategies.
