2023 Recruitment Trends: Embracing AI advancements

2023 continues on shaky ground. If fears of recession, economic slowdown, and macroeconomic conflicts weren’t enough, businesses continue to find themselves in the most competitive talent market, perhaps, in history. Let’s be clear: Good teams make for successful businesses. Business leaders know this and therefore talent related themes – acquisition, retention, and productivity – rank consistently amongst the top 3 priority areas for many. And yet, most businesses adopt a very conventional approach to building their teams. As we enter an age where the use of AI is being truly democratised, the recruitment industry is starting to feel the tailwinds of disruption. More than $12 billion was invested in HR tech in 2021 alone, with a larger chunk favouring Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered solutions. While the talent industry has embraced technology, the challenge is that many still don’t fully understand how AI can help. AI can help make better decisions. Recruiters can identify the right candidates faster by leveraging machine learning algorithms to analyse thousands of data points about each candidate — including their skills, experience, education, and interests — to find those who align best with your organisation’s needs. Utilising ChatGPT or similar “Large Language Models” (LLM’s) for recruitment is a game-changer in the industry. The AI-powered language model provides an efficient solution to evaluate candidates and make informed hiring decisions in a fraction of the time. Today, you can feed in an entire resume into a LLM model and get a 3-point summary of a person’s experience and their fit for the role in seconds. In addition, predictive analytics allows companies to use data from past hiring experiences to predict future results, including who will accept an offer, who will stay in their job and how long they’ll stay there. Recruiters can use complex data sets to forecast which candidates are most likely to succeed on the job based on factors like performance history or education level. These insights allow recruiters to focus their efforts on the best candidates instead of spending time reviewing every application. AI can make hiring better, more consistent, and more efficient by reducing the risk of a bad hire and increasing retention rates through real-time feedback loops. Recruiting teams spend 45%-55% of their time today screening profiles and trying to shortlist the best-fit applications. By using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, AI can scan thousands of resumes in seconds and deliver those that match the job description. AI makes screening more effective. For example, a conversational assistant or “chatbot” can collect data points for first-level screening. Cognitive interviewing is an automated tool that uses a chatbot interface to ask interview questions based on what hiring managers want to know about a candidate’s experience and skills. This allows recruiters to get more information from their interviews faster by eliminating repetitive questions that have already been answered elsewhere in their application materials. Unconscious biases are often responsible for companies struggling to attract and hire diverse candidates. These biases can be both conscious and unconscious patterns embedded into how your business thinks and acts. For example, if your company hires mostly men within a very specific demographic, then your process might subconsciously prioritise those profiles. AI has the potential to transform the recruitment process and make it more inclusive and transparent. By focusing on data-driven fitment and ensuring that these data points get more accurate at predicting “fitment” over time, your recruitment engine can hire objectively without unconscious bias against women, minorities, and older workers; and hire the best person for the position without stereotypes interfering. With AI, job recommendations can be precise and data-driven. Rather than looking purely at skills match, there is potential to evaluate deeper fitment criteria and help candidates apply for jobs that give them the highest likelihood of success. In addition, businesses now have the opportunity to personalise their messaging and communication based on a candidate’s background, history, and intent. 85% of professionals believe that the most significant challenge they face in current hiring processes is the lack of prompt and relevant communication regarding the next steps. There is evidently a huge opportunity for improvement. And finally, AI tools can now analyse transcriptions of interviews and calls to provide sentiment analysis and help businesses course-correct engagement discussions as needed. AI is already augmenting recruiting at leading companies across a range of industries. But a final word of caution – while AI can be a powerful tool for streamlining and improving the recruitment process, it’s not a replacement for human judgement. The tricky bit then is striking a balance between leveraging AI to improve efficiency and maintaining a human touch in the recruitment process.   This article is authored by Vikram Ahuja, managing director, ANSR, and chief executive officer and co-founder, Talent500. Source