Matt Jones, Chief Product Officer, Cielo
For many years, we’ve known that AI and tech would have a big impact on recruitment, and now we’re starting to see that accelerate significantly with the rise of Generative AI. While it might seem a daunting prospect, the reality is that there will be many benefits if we proceed responsibly and ensure human involvement remains integral. The focus will be on how AI can enhance our performance and experience across various roles and improve recruitment and employment procedures. However, for this vision to become reality, many factors need to be considered around the integration of AI.
Here are some essential areas where AI can assist recruiters, employers, and candidates alike, including useful tips on incorporating the technology.
The human side of AI
AI can benefit recruiters by fielding many administrative, transactional tasks with low administrative value-adds and reinvesting that time into human interactions. A quick example: traditional recruitment workflows rely on humans reviewing CVs/application forms before progressing prospective candidates to the next step of the process. This often leads to limiting actions in recruiters’ working days and more modern automation-driven processes that leverage tech and AI to allow prospective candidates to complete multiple stages in the process with real-time feedback. This has been called ‘always on’ recruiting and gives better experiences for job seekers.
The matching capability of natural language processors, machine learning, and Generative AI – when managed alongside human input – can accelerate sourcing the right shortlist of qualified candidates. Simultaneously, it removes some of the potential human or organizational bias that returns value to both the job seeker and employer.
As we can reinvest this time into other areas of the role, such as building more of a connection on a human level with candidates, we could see enormous benefits. By engaging more with candidates upfront, we’ll likely make better matches for candidates and companies overall. That’s a win-win. There are many other ways AI can help make changes in pace and scale, too.
Beyond examining existing data, AI-powered Conversational AI can also engage directly with candidates. Conversational AI systems are already being used for pre-screening, making job recommendations, providing additional information about a job, and scheduling interviews. By using Generative AI, recruiters also have the potential to write more effective job descriptions, job adverts, and hyper-personalized communications in far less time than they would usually take.
Proceeding responsibly
The potential benefits of AI, then, are clear – and material. But as with any new technology, there are, of course, many careful considerations. Current AI models are “trained” on vast amounts of publicly available existing data. This means they can reproduce biases in the training data, which could upset diversity and inclusion efforts. We’ve seen recent news discussions about how AI filters have wrongly excluded candidates with gaps in their employment history.
Data privacy is another consideration. Some AI models learn continuously from the data they access, so they may not be suitable for use with sensitive candidate and client data. Regardless of the model they use, companies must be transparent about the data they collect and how they use it. In the future, companies and recruiters will likely find value in conducting training using their own data. This approach will let organizations grasp the significance of employee, job, and organizational data and allow them to organize this information in a way that can frame larger language models.
But, while AI is likely to free up recruiters’ time for more human interaction, candidates could feel like they have less human interaction. At least early on in the process if they’re communicating primarily with an AI interface. This can be off-putting for a candidate who wants to feel the company is willing to invest in them as much as they’re willing to invest in that company.
People want to feel like they have a human point of contact at all stages, from first to last. Using AI as a support, we can get better at that by building connections from the outset.
What’s next?
The coming months and quarters will see AI play an increasingly valuable role in many areas of recruitment, from speeding up the recruitment process and creating a better candidate and client experience to processing data more efficiently and accurately. By using AI like this, we’ll be able to spend more time building genuine connections with candidates and employers whilst providing significant benefits. The benefits from AI are indeed generous, as long as we’re mindful of how we use these systems and pay careful attention to integration.
Job seeking is a deeply personal experience, and human recruiters play a tremendously important role for candidates. Finding the right balance might take a little time, but success will likely fall to those who combine the right amount of technology with a human touch.
