Today, artificial intelligence (AI) is accelerating almost every business process — whether marketing, sales, or finance. The situation isn’t different for the human resources (HR) department, with AI recruiting becoming more popular than ever.
About 25% of employers use AI to perform HR-related activities, such as candidate outreach, resume filtering, and keyword tracking for recruitment.
The reason behind it is clear: AI expedites the traditional recruitment process by automating time-intensive tasks. This allows human recruiters to focus on making data-driven decisions and hiring the top talent in less time and with fewer resources. However, there are some concerns about AI that HR managers or recruiters need to understand.
What Is AI Recruiting?
AI recruiting refers to using artificial intelligence to hire talent in less time and with fewer resources. AI automates time-consuming, repetitive tasks during recruitment, such as candidate screening, resume filtering, and interviews. This frees up recruiting teams for data analysis and making the right tech hiring decision.
AI in hiring doesn’t mean replacing human recruiters. Instead, it works with HR professionals and helps them acquire talent more efficiently than the traditional method. AI doesn’t make any decisions in the hiring process but informs and automates different functions.
It’s often challenging for recruiters to deal with thousands of resumes. AI recruiting eliminates much of this effort by instantly finding the best candidates for a position while providing data insights throughout the hiring process.
Traditional vs. AI Recruitment in Tech Hiring
Traditional and artificial intelligence recruitment aims to achieve the same thing: hiring the best talent for the open position. However, their working mechanisms are quite different.
While most processes in traditional recruitment are manual, AI recruiting leverages several tactics and tools for recruitment automation. This makes AI hiring more efficient with respect to costs, resources, and time utilization.
Traditional Recruitment
- Traditional recruitment strategies are time-consuming, often taking four to six weeks to complete. This extensive time-to-hire may cost some companies more than their allocated hiring budget.
- Traditional screening procedures are often tiring, lengthy, and prone to human error or bias.
- Manually sourcing candidates requires significant time and budget. It also adds to HR professionals’ workload, distracting them from more important tasks.
- Manually responding to thousands of applications and communicating with every applicant isn’t easy. It often leads to ineffective and untimely response times and misunderstandings with potential candidates.
AI Recruitment
- AI recruiting speeds up the hiring process by running different functions in real time. This allows hiring teams to complete the recruitment process while saving time and costs quickly.
- AI in recruiting offers intelligent candidate shortlisting. It evaluates candidate profiles based on turnover rates, performance, skills, working tenures, social media data, and more. This helps hiring managers quickly shortlist the best candidates and cover any existing skill gaps on the team.
- AI for recruiting also facilitates searching for passive candidates more quickly than traditional recruitment. The technology evaluates talent based on the candidate’s job tenure, experience, relevance to the position, etc.
- AI recruiting also supports seamless communication with job applicants. It leverages conversational AI, such as chatbots, that interact with candidates and address their concerns in real time.
The Growing Importance of AI in Recruiting Tech Talent
With the global AI market expected to grow to over $1.8 trillion by 2030, AI is undoubtedly here to stay and will help humans do their jobs more efficiently. Similarly, the technology assists HR managers and recruiters search for, connect with, and hire talent worldwide. Significantly, AI recruitment is one of the emerging recruitment trends in 2024.
AI in recruiting supports every step of the hiring process, beginning with engaging employer brand messaging in the early phases. Moreover, AI-powered chatbots communicate with candidates and answer their questions.
HR professionals use AI tools such as ChatGPT, Bing, or Gemini (Bard) to craft drafts for job postings. However, people are still needed for proofreading, adding relevant keywords, and incorporating a human feel.
Later in the process, when applications pour in, AI recruiting solutions may be used to screen for selected keywords and skills. They also assist in interview content analysis and candidate profile summarization. All these insights help in making informed hiring decisions.
Benefits of Using AI for Recruiting
Using AI in talent acquisition elevates workflows from the department level to the organization. It speeds up the process, takes less time and resources, and frees employees from more intricate HR processes. This puts less strain on the budget allocation and increases the total output and revenue of the company.
Recruiters and HR professionals find several benefits when harnessing AI in recruitment processes.
Automates the Process
Hiring and firing people isn’t the only task for HR managers. They also have to make decisions, build relationships, and foster employee satisfaction. Using recruiting AI will automate all the hiring and firing-related repetitive tasks, allowing HR departments to focus on more critical things.
AI-powered software is used for scheduling, analytics collection, and responding to candidates. This speeds up recruitment and informs talent sourcing strategies for attracting top candidates.
Narrows Down the Qualified Candidates
Artificial intelligent recruitment analyzes job applications based on how well a candidate’s qualifications match the requirements. This reduces the need to review each application manually.
For example, by using “Microsoft Word” or “Python, Java, and C+” in the skills section of a job description, AI software will narrow down the candidates proficient in those skills by scanning the keywords in a candidate’s resume. Knowing which skills are present informs how you may assess software developers further in the hiring process.
Some AI recruiting tools also assist job seekers in finding the job positions that best match their qualifications.
Offers Accuracy in Recruitment
Recruitment is a resource-intensive process. Making the wrong choice adversely affects the budget, productivity, reputation, and profits. Unfortunately, this is a common mistake in manual hiring, but AI recruitment tools help to solve this issue.
Since the technology screens thousands of applications in a few minutes, companies are more likely to connect with the most relevant tech candidates. AI tools also shortlist qualified candidates, allowing hiring managers to perform early screening interviews and hire the most accurate one.
Reduces Bias and Discrimination
Unconscious bias and unintentional discrimination are common during recruitment, even in well-established tech companies. While the root cause may originate in several different processes, this practice leads to poor hiring decisions and a lack of compliance and diversity.
AI recruiting reduces all sorts of bias but doesn’t eliminate it completely. Ideally, it assesses every candidate equally and helps recruiters conduct standardized interviews. AI-powered solutions also communicate with candidates across the globe to recruit diverse talent.
Sources Passive Candidates
AI recruiting provides a complete solution for hiring-related issues. Traditional recruitment, while effective, doesn’t focus on sourcing passive candidates. These candidates are not actively searching for a job but may be the best match for a company.
By sourcing passive candidates, tech firms will always have a list of people to target if tech talent becomes scarce. AI in recruitment makes searching for these candidates a breeze.
AI solutions scan hiring platforms, social media sites, and job boards to find passive candidates. They assess different factors, such as a person's job duration, experience, and whether the company they currently work for is downsizing or re-organizing. Recruiters then nurture these leads and invite candidates to apply for open positions at their company.
Streamlines Candidate Engagement
Recruitment isn’t just about screening candidates and hiring those who match the job description. When done properly, it’s a great way to boost a company's positive reputation in the market.
By connecting with candidates through meaningful conversations, HR departments gain more insights into each person’s professional background and typically a stronger quality of hire. AI recruitment tools easily interpret interviews to inform recruiters about every candidate.
This enhances candidate experience within a given company, establishing real connections between both parties. Even if not hired, these candidates may still spread good things about a firm in their networks. Reputation and a strong presence in passive candidate circles may not mean an immediate hire, but they help establish a talent pipeline for future hiring needs.
Challenges and Ethical Considerations for Recruiters
AI recruiting increases hiring efficiency but poses a few potential challenges for recruiters and HR managers. Some relate to the candidate’s privacy, while others revolve around ethical implications such as discrimination, biases, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) standards.
HR managers or recruiters must consider these nuances of AI and recruiting to better adapt to this technology. Here are the major ones:
- Privacy concerns: With most AI, how collected data is stored or shared is unknown. Many tech companies, especially startups, aren’t familiar with data protection regulations (like GDPR), so they unknowingly are at risk of data breaches. The best way to address this is to obtain every candidate’s consent and have a transparent data usage policy.
- DEI compliance: Artificial intelligence provides access to a diverse talent pool but struggles with algorithmic AI bias, which arises when it analyzes a candidate’s biased data. Companies should regularly audit and update their AI recruiting algorithms to reduce this bias and ensure every candidate gets an equal chance.
- Lack of human interaction: Although modern AI solutions imitate humans through deep learning, they are still bots, and relying on them entirely isn’t ideal. AI only operates on what it learns from data, meaning it may fail when someone asks an unconventional question. It's essential to continue including humans in the AI recruiting process to retain that human touch.
- Over-reliance on AI: AI technology is rarely better than experienced humans in decision-making. However, relying on AI recruitment solutions may make some HR managers believe that AI-driven recommendations are better than employee suggestions. It’s best to maintain a balance between AI and humans and let AI only assist humans, not replace them.
- Technical training for employees: AI recruitment tools are continuously evolving, making it challenging for HR managers and recruiters to develop new technical skills. Tech companies should invest in training to quickly adapt to changing AI recruiting rules.
Top AI Recruitment Tools
There are many AI recruitment tools, including several options designed to perform different components of the recruiting process. While some are great for resume skimming, others build candidate summaries more efficiently. In either scenario, AI recruiting software may help HR professionals perform different components of the tech recruiting or hiring process.
Some emerging AI hiring tools include:
- ClickUp: The ClickUp AI prompts are specifically useful for recruiters to write engaging job descriptions using the right keywords. Additionally, its document storage feature saves all the candidate conversations, from the initial interaction to their retirement, in one place.
- VireUp: This skill assessment tool is powered by natural language processing (NLP) and helps recruiters with interview screening. It analyzes every sentence in video interviews, preventing them from watching thousands of applicant videos. VireUp also makes suggestions to assist in decision-making.
- Findem: This AI recruiter tool is ideal for candidate sourcing and skills assessments. Findem leverages advanced AI/ML (machine learning) solutions to identify relevant candidates for a job position. It also explores recruiting platforms and job boards on auto-pilot to support a quick recruitment process.
- Talenture RS: Talenture focuses on engaging job seekers and scheduling interviews. It integrates into applicant tracking systems (ATS) for candidate screening and resume filtering. Talenture’s AI capabilities also eliminate duplicate candidate entries.
These tools make AI recruiting simpler and more manageable. However, startups often don’t have the resources to invest in these solutions. The best alternative is to connect with a talent platform to recruit tech talent.
Harness AI Capabilities and Hire With Revelo
AI recruiting makes searching for, connecting with, and hiring employees easier than traditional methods, ultimately reducing the time to hire. Everything works on auto-pilot, whether resume screening, candidate sourcing, interview scheduling, or keyword tracking. However, AI needs human oversight to work effectively.
The best option is to partner with a talent platform. Revelo has access to a global talent pool of tech candidates. Using AI processes, we match tech companies with developers who are time-zone-aligned and rigorously vetted for technical skills, soft skills, and English proficiency.
After your hire, Revelo performs ongoing administrative tasks, including onboarding, payroll, benefits administration, taxes, and local compliance management. This results in better candidate engagement and retention.
Hire tech talent with Revelo and integrate AI recruiting into your company today.