Hiring with AI: Everything You Need to Know

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the way businesses operate across various industries. From marketing to manufacturing, AI is helping organizations improve their efficiency, productivity, and innovation. Hiring is one of the areas where AI is widely applied, as it can automate and optimize many aspects of the recruitment process. However, hiring with AI also comes with some challenges and implications that need to be addressed.

How can you leverage AI to find the best talent for your company? What are the benefits and drawbacks of using AI in hiring? How will AI change the role of recruiters in the future? And what are some real-life examples of how leading companies are using AI in their hiring?

In this article, we will answer these questions, and provide you with everything you need to know about hiring with AI.

Why Hiring with AI Is Important Today?

Hiring is one of the most critical and challenging functions of any business. Finding the right people for the right roles can make or break your company’s success. However, hiring is also time-consuming, costly, and prone to human errors and biases.

This is where AI can help. AI can automate and streamline many tasks in the hiring process, such as sourcing, screening, interviewing, and assessing candidates.

By using AI, you can:

• Save time and money: AI can come in to reduce the manual work involved in hiring, such as reviewing resumes, scheduling interviews, and sending feedback. This can free up your recruiters’ time to focus on more strategic and value-added activities, such as building relationships with candidates and hiring managers. AI can also lower your hiring costs by reducing the need for external agencies or platforms.
• Improve quality and diversity: AI can help you find the best candidates for your roles based on data-driven criteria, such as skills, experience, personality, and cultural fit. AI can also help you eliminate human biases and prejudices that may affect your hiring decisions, such as gender, race, age, or appearance. This will improve the quality and diversity of your talent pool and ensure a fair and inclusive hiring process.
• Enhance candidate experience: AI has the ability to provide you with a faster and smoother hiring process for your candidates, as they can apply easily, get instant feedback, and communicate with chatbots or virtual assistants. You can also use AI to personalize the hiring process for each candidate based on their preferences and behavior. As a result, you’ll be able to improve your candidate experience and satisfaction, which can boost your employer's brand and reputation.

Challenges in Hiring with AI

Hiring with AI is not without its challenges. Some of the common issues that you may face when using AI in hiring are:

• Data quality and security: AI relies on large amounts of data to learn and perform its tasks. However, if the data is inaccurate, incomplete, outdated, or biased, it can affect the performance and outcomes of AI. For example, if your data reflects historical or societal biases against certain groups of people, your AI may end up discriminating against them in your hiring process. Moreover, you need to ensure that your data is secure and compliant with relevant laws and regulations, such as GDPR or CCPA.
• Solution: To ensure that your data is accurate, complete, up-to-date, and unbiased, it’s important to collect data from diverse and reliable sources, clean data by removing errors and inconsistencies, update data regularly by adding new information or deleting obsolete ones, and audit data by checking for any potential biases or gaps.
• You also need to protect your data from unauthorized access or misuse by using encryption, authentication, authorization, and backup systems. You should also comply with the relevant laws and regulations regarding data privacy and security, such as GDPR or CCPA, by obtaining consent from data subjects, informing them of their rights, and reporting any breaches.
• Transparency and accountability: AI is often seen as a black box that makes decisions without explaining how or why. This can create a lack of trust and understanding among your stakeholders, such as candidates, employees, managers, or regulators. Take example in a situation where a candidate is rejected by an AI system without knowing the reason why, they may feel frustrated or discriminated against.
• Solution: You need to explain how and why your AI system makes decisions, what data it uses, what criteria it follows, and what outcomes it produces, in order to increase the trust and understanding of your stakeholders. You can use techniques such as explainable AI (XAI), which aims to make AI more interpretable and understandable by humans, or human-in-the-loop (HITL), which involves human feedback or intervention in the AI process.
• Moreover, you need to monitor the performance and impact of your AI system regularly and be ready to correct any errors or biases that may arise as well. You should also document the design, development, deployment, and evaluation of your AI system and be able to justify its decisions if challenged or audited.
• Human-AI collaboration: AI is not meant to replace human recruiters but to augment them. However, finding the right balance between human and AI involvement in the hiring process can be tricky. You need to determine which tasks are best suited for AI and which ones require human input or oversight. You also need to train your recruiters on how to use AI effectively and ethically, and how to communicate with candidates about it.
• Solution: To find the right balance between human and AI involvement in the hiring process, you need to identify which tasks are best suited for AI and which ones require human input or oversight. AI can be used for tasks such as sourcing candidates, screening resumes, scheduling interviews, or assessing skills, while human recruiters can be used for tasks such as building rapport, providing feedback, negotiating offers, or making final decisions.
• You need to train your recruiters on how to use AI effectively and ethically, and how to communicate with candidates about it. For example, you can provide them with guidelines on when and how to use AI tools, what information to disclose or request from candidates, and how to handle any questions or concerns that candidates may have about AI.

How Will Hiring with AI Change Recruiters’ Role

Hiring with AI will change the role of recruiters in several ways. Some of the key changes are:

• From administrative to strategic: Recruiters will spend less time on administrative tasks such as resume screening or interview scheduling, which will be automated by AI. Instead, they will have an opportunity to focus more on strategic tasks such as defining job requirements, sourcing passive candidates, building employer brands, and developing talent pipelines.
• From subjective to objective: Recruiters will rely less on their intuition or gut feeling when evaluating candidates, which may be influenced by biases or emotions. Instead, they will use data and evidence from AI to make more objective and informed hiring decisions.
• From reactive to proactive: Recruiters will not wait for candidates to apply for their roles, which may result in a limited or mismatched talent pool. Instead, they will proactively seek out and engage with potential candidates using AI tools such as chatbots, social media, or talent analytics.

Keep in mind that hiring with AI will not completely replace human recruiters. AI is still a tool that needs human guidance and supervision. Recruiters will still play a vital role in the hiring process, such as:

• Defining the criteria and parameters for AI to follow.
• Interpreting and validating the results and recommendations from AI.
• Building rapport and trust with candidates and hiring managers.
• Providing feedback and coaching to candidates and employees.
• Ensuring ethical and legal compliance with AI.

Real-life Examples of Hiring with AI

Many leading companies are already using AI in their hiring process. Here are some examples:

1. Unilever

The consumer goods giant uses AI to screen and assess candidates for its graduate program. Candidates apply online and complete a series of games that measure their cognitive, emotional, and social skills. Then, they record a video interview that is analyzed by an AI system for their speech, body language, and facial expressions. The top candidates are invited for a final assessment at Unilever’s offices. [1]

2. Hilton

The hospitality giant uses AI to interview and evaluate candidates for its customer service roles. Candidates complete an online assessment that measures their personality, problem-solving skills, and situational judgment. Then, they participate in a video interview that is scored by an AI system based on their verbal and non-verbal cues, such as tone, pitch, facial expressions, and eye contact. The top candidates are invited for a live interview with a human recruiter. [2]

Conclusion

Hiring with AI is a powerful way to improve your recruitment process and outcomes. By using AI, you can save time and money, improve quality and diversity, and enhance the candidate experience.

However, hiring with AI also comes with some challenges and implications that need to be addressed. You need to ensure that your data is quality and secure, that your AI is transparent and accountable, and that your human-AI collaboration is balanced and effective.

If you are looking for an AI-driven recruitment tool that can help you manage your recruitment with ease from end to end, you should check out Manatal. It is an AI-driven hiring solution that comes with the ability to help you source, screen, interview, and hire the best talent quickly and efficiently.

Some of Manatal’s AI-based features include:

• Resume Parsing: Manatal automatically extracts candidate data from resumes and creates rich profiles for each candidate.
• Candidate Enrichment: Your candidate profiles will be enriched with additional information from social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and more.
• Candidate Scoring: Manatal assigns a score to each candidate based on their fit for the role and the company.
• AI Recommendations: Manatal’s AI engine suggests candidates from your database that match your job requirements the most.

Start a 14-day Free Trial to learn more about Manatal’s innovative features and see how it can help you elevate your recruitment game within a few clicks.

Citations:

1. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-unilever-uses-artificial-intelligence-recruit-train-bernard-marr/

2. https://www.forbes.com/sites/heidilynnekurter/2019/09/19/how-hilton-reduced-their-time-to-hire-from-43-days-down-to-5/?sh=5e11dee36759