How AI can be time and budget-saving in recruitment

Quoting an extract of Bill Gates, "The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency." It is a known fact that automation has practically taken its rightful place in every business currently.

From an efficiency aspect, automation when used with advanced tech like AI has shown enhanced sales productivity of 14.5 % and reduced marketing expenses by 12.2% according to Nucleus Research Report. These statistics in a way prove how adopting AI and automating day-to-day company operations could be the answer to improved business growth. The recruitment domain is the next destination for AI automation. Let's understand how this technology will aid effective recruitment.

AI in recruitment refers to the use of automation in talent acquisition processes, in which AI's machine learning is trained to model and select your ideal applicant and automate every possible manual job in the recruitment process. As the market for recruitment software has seen demand over the decade, the usage of AI in recruitment, though nascent, is showing a promising penetration. While just 10% of firms presently use AI in recruiting candidates, 36% anticipate using AI ML for their recruitment automation process in the next two years, according to a Carmichael Fisher study.

To clarify, typically, the selection of candidates for available positions is a time-consuming, manual procedure. The recruiting process took days, if not weeks, from publishing job opportunities in newspapers and digital platforms to manually comparing candidates for the role as per the job requirements to looking for profiles using keywords on job site databases or selecting a suitable candidate for the job.

As the accumulated resource data floods corporate HR systems, it is challenging for organizations to comprehend and apply resources to this data to cull, identify and make the right recruitment decisions. AI technology is dubbed as the messiah in the recruitment process as it has made life easier and more productive for those engaged in this department, while also expediting the recruitment process, particularly in the high-volume hiring, and repetitive job openings scenarios.

With the advent of AI in the recruitment domain, the first step toward intelligent automation was to bring efficiency to the manual screening process of job aspirant applications to match profile to the job description, which is immensely time-consuming and brought in the element of fatigue due to the task being repetitive. Using AI (Artificial Intelligence) ML (Machine Learning) algorithms, this smart automation service allows for high-speed screening of profiles from resource data pools to identify a near-to-perfect profile match for the job opening, and this was the start of AI use in the recruitment domain. With machine learning (ML) used for automating the screening process of potential candidates at unfathomable speeds, to custom AI tools that conduct sentiment analysis to determine the individual potential and capabilities, to automating for better aligning of requirement and fitment; we have AI software that not only screen resumes or conduct instant analysis of online interviews but we now can have access to a gamut of custom AI solutions for the HR recruitment process.

Benefits of AI

AI is a high-value, low-running cost investment driven by algorithm-based programming customized to assist recruiters to meet the high recruitment demands of their organizations. AI recruiting software are custom automated to make use of existing voluminous data in the applicant tracking system (ATS) to generate insights into the potential pool that exists in a system or conduct the same process in an external database if accessible. Besides AI assisting recruiters with screening and blind screening to avoid any prejudice, the system can derive insights into available recruitment opportunities in the talent pool database by comparing profile types with the history of successful applicants who have been benchmarks and have successfully stayed with the firm.

Human resources departments can use AI to take full advantage of the talent pool available to the HR department from any recruiting database. With potential human resources actively looking for a job, AI-powered tools can detail, dig deeper by quickly exploring, and analyze candidate alignment to job fitment from a humongous list of potential candidates and all this is done within seconds. Such tools assist to identify active and passive candidates such that the productivity of the recruitment process is more efficient. And this is just the tip of the iceberg!

Challenges with AI in recruiting

To simulate a human resource recruitment software, AI requires a large amount of data to get trained; for a single position, AI could require a thousand or more resumes. This accumulation of data to feed and train the AI system is a task and organizations must resort to collating databases into a system, ideally an ATS (applicant tracking system) before engaging any AI-based solution for the recruitment process.

Similarly, AI can learn human prejudices such as gender, race, and age, and it can emulate such prejudices in its way primarily due to its training to detect patterns in data. Since machines learn mostly from people, human bias may be applied to them as well and this results in an irrational rejection of the candidate based on human characteristics.

AI is a fantastic new endeavor that may help any company's hiring processes and expand its firepower, though such systems initially do not garner the trust of human resources in a hiring department. Executives or hiring managers in recruitment and talent acquisition may be suspicious of any technology that claims to make their work simpler or to improve the capabilities of their HR ecosystem. Aside from the uncertainty that might hinder growth, it is known that such human capital desires to ensure that any software that automates one of its tasks is capable of doing the work as effectively as it would.

AI is a creative and specialized tool that may be adapted differently for each organization's distinct recruitment demands. As with every new invention, there are challenges associated with AI deployment, but with time and intellectual minds on board, no hurdle is impossible for us humans to bridge. If recruiters and firms task themselves with an AI tool and welcome change with an open mind, they can surely educate the AI ML process to grasp, conduct, and meet specific recruitment goals and one must see such AI initiatives as extensions of their teams rather than a substitute to human involvement.

With 36% of firms wanting to implement AI in the 2 years for the recruitment process, the opportunity and scalability of AI is an opportunity to be competitive by recruiting the best possible talent, most effectively from the large talent pools that exist in our country.

(The author is President of Judge India & Global Delivery at The Judge Group)