How Talent Acquisition Benefits from Artificial Intelligence

We thought it would get better by now, but it hasn’t.  The global economy shed another 25.6 million workers within the last six months of 2021 and experts predict that this phenomenon, dubbed the Great Resignation, will continue to rage on. 

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No one would’ve anticipated that a pneumonia-like virus identified back in December 2019, would have been the catalyst for change so monumental that it would eventually flip the professional recruiting and talent acquisition industry on its head, along with every other industry in the world.  

The Great Resignation continues to siphon off talent from the global workforce and it’s causing today’s organizational leaders to wage one of the most competitive battles for talent the world has ever seen.  With these seismic shifts to the global workforce, and with professional recruiters now forced to accommodate an almost entirely new set of demands, organizational leaders are aggressively investing in new technologies to help arm their recruiters with the resources they need to effectively compete for the best talent.

In the Hollywood Blockbuster, Jurassic Park, one of the most memorable lines was uttered by the wildly intelligent and recalcitrant Dr. Malcolm, played by Jeff Goldblum: “Life finds a way.”  In the case of talent acquisition and recruitment, artificial intelligence is rapidly evolving as the new way for recruitment professionals to achieve more results with fewer resources.

Businesses across the world are continuing to adopt artificial intelligence technologies to help them compete, and not just for talent.  In fact, the usage of AI by businesses increased by 270 percent in the last four years but recruitment and talent acquisition have been the driving force behind many of the advancements in AI-based HR technologies.  

What is Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence, or simply AI, has evolved way beyond the realm of science fiction novels to become a core concept of modern society that is ushering us further into the digital age, but it can be confusing to come up with a clear definition.  For our purposes, AI is a form of technology capable of replicating the human thought process to enable machines to act on their own.  It is the same technology that allows your personal smart-assistant like Alexa or Siri to interpret your verbal commands, and then translate them into action.  In the world of talent acquisition, organizations are increasingly turning to innovations in AI technology to give their recruitment professionals the resources they need to optimize their time and achieve better results attracting highly qualified candidates.

If we dig deeper, we come across another equally important term: machine learning.  Machine learning and artificial intelligence are terms often used interchangeably, but machine learning is distinct in that it functions as a subset of AI that allows computers to learn from their own repetitive processes and experiences – it’s how a computer learns a new skill.

How Talent Acquisition and AI are connected

While every organization has a website to help them achieve their talent acquisition goals, many organizations rely on applicant tracking systems (ATS) to track and inventory all the resumes and applications they receive.  Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are now a core component of the best ATS systems, and they can dramatically enhance their performance.  AI technologies today are not only helping professional recruiters to more accurately identify the best candidate, but also helping recruiters identify the best candidates in a fraction of the amount of time it would ordinarily take using traditional processes.  

For example, one of the most time-consuming elements of talent acquisition is the time it takes for a recruiter to sift through a pile of resumes for a given position when they know that a large amount of the resumes will be from less-than-optimal candidates.  This is where the connection between AI and talent acquisition takes place - AI technologies can step in to provide, in seconds, what may have taken days for a recruiter to complete only a few years earlier.  

The rapid adoption of AI-powered HR technologies is expected to continue because of how effective these technologies are proving to be in enhancing levels of productivity and improving the results of your talent acquisition strategies.  

AI expedites the Talent Acquisition Process

One of the biggest challenges of the modern job market is how overwhelmed recruiters are with all their responsibilities, thereby becoming less efficient.  One of the marquee benefits of AI technology is its ability to churn through massive amounts of information at a high rate of speed.  When AI technology is applied to traditional hiring and selection processes, it not only significantly reduces the time it takes to perform certain HR functions, like reviewing resumes, it also gives recruiters back valuable amounts of time to dedicate towards more important responsibilities.

Even as far back as 2018, industry powerhouses like AT&T and Proctor & Gamble were already adopting AI-powered technologies as a component of their talent acquisition strategies.  Those companies went on to become case studies in demonstrating just how remarkably well AI can be used to help recruitment professionals efficiently sort through stacks of applications, and quickly identify the best candidates. 

Ultimately, AI technologies are providing recruitment professionals with the technical tools they need to reliably handle many of the traditional manual processes that formerly took up so much of a recruiter’s valuable time, thereby expediting the entire talent acquisition process via AI technology.

AI Can More Effectively Match Candidates to Open Positions

Hopefully, we’ve established how AI technologies can be useful towards your talent acquisition strategies by making traditional HR processes more efficient and less labor-intensive, but that is only one of the many benefits that come from integrating AI technologies into your HR processes.  Innovations in HR technologies that have AI at their core are also playing an increasingly important role in enhancing the probability that a recruiter’s efforts will yield a more positive outcome.  In other words, AI technologies can leverage the data that exists in an organization’s ATS to help recruiters identify candidates with skills that are uniquely matched to specific job descriptions.

Most professional recruiters will tell you that they get dozens upon dozens of applications and resumes for a single role, and it can be terribly overwhelming.  Using recommendations based on AI, recruiters can quickly and accurately find the best matches in a matter of seconds, and by doing something as simple as uploading a job description.  

Consider for a moment the extensive amount of raw candidate data that can accumulate in an organization’s applicant tracking system (ATS) over a few years.  It’s enormous.

Organizations that choose to invest in a modern ATS system such as Manatal that comes packaged with an AI-powered recommendation engine are giving their recruiters access to a literal goldmine of information that they can use for matching existing candidates to current and future open positions.  These ATS databases can have over tens of thousands of candidate profiles stored within them so this is an extraordinary way of saving time so recruiters can focus on what they do best – recruiting.

AI Enhances Applicant Assessment

Finding the perfect match for a position or candidate has historically required a significant investment of a recruiter’s time, often equating to days if not weeks of careful analysis, and with no guarantee of a successful outcome.  Fortunately, modern ATS systems now come equipped with powerful AI-based recommendation engines that can provide recruiters with a reliable way of intelligently sifting through volumes and volumes of candidate data while at the same time they can have the confidence that they are selecting the very best candidates.  Recruiters can customize their AI recommendation engine to filter their recommended candidates based on skills, work experience, academic background, or other conditions.  This feature recommends the most suitable jobs for your candidates and vice versa within seconds.

AI Reduces Hiring Bias

A term that every HR professional and recruiter should be familiar with is unconscious bias (a.k.a. implicit bias). The definitions vary but, for our purposes, we’ll just say that these biases are social stereotypes about certain groups of people that individuals form outside their own conscious awareness.  In the HR world, it looks like this:

…Resumes with English-sounding names can receive requests for interviews more often than identical resumes with Chinese, Indian, or Pakistani names – that’s unconscious bias.

Fortunately, AI is playing a significant role in eliminating this kind of bias from the hiring scene.  Unlike humans, AI can be programmed to make candidate selection decisions based on strict data points and it can be applied to enormous quantities of candidate data.  

Our 3 lbs. human brains just aren’t made to process that much information while remembering to keep objectivity front and center.  AI technologies don’t make assumptions, nor does it have any biases, and it certainly isn’t susceptible to the mental fatigue of staring at hundreds of resumes for hours on end.  

AI Promotes Diversity by Eliminating Bias

AI has enjoyed considerable amounts of success in the recruitment industry, but the concept of relying so heavily on AI for candidate selection has drawn some attention from those who believe that too much AI can contribute to biases in an increasingly hyper-competitive labor market.  There are lawmakers and regulators who’ve expressed concern that some AI-powered ATS systems function like “black boxes” that lack any real transparency of their inner workings, and this can open opportunities to create an adverse impact in hiring and subsequently harm efforts to properly diversify and promote inclusion in the global workforce.  

One counterpoint to such an assertion is that AI, unlike humans, simply isn’t capable of letting personal beliefs or opinions influence or interfere with the decisions that it makes on a given set of data.  In other words, AI technologies are programmed to perform their objective analysis equally and without bias.

There is evidence to show that organizations with above-average achievements in diversity enjoy greater success than their less diversified competitors.  For our part, it would be good to see artificial intelligence celebrated for how it can contribute to a more inclusive and diversified workforce rather than be disparaged for not being so easily understood and, therefore, a bad element.

AI-Based HR Technologies Simply Yield Better Candidates

Only within the past few years have AI-based HR technologies truly emerged to become such a marvelous innovation for our recruitment and talent acquisition strategies.  Now, AI is being widely embraced in the marketplace as organizations continue to discover just how resourceful they can be to recruiters who are responsible for finding the best talent amidst a very challenging job market.

Artificial intelligence has clearly reached a state of mainstream adoption in the recruitment and talent acquisition industry. It is positive proof that there is a way to accurately evaluate countless resumes while being able to reliably omit the majority of resumes we would otherwise be wasting our time with, leaving us with only the most precisely matched and relevant candidates. In other words, the best candidates can be found more easily via the utilization of artificial intelligence.

Manatal – The Industry Leader in AI-Powered Recruitment Technology

In the world of talent acquisition and recruitment, Manatal is world-class in terms of offering the latest innovations in AI-powered recruitment technologies to organizations of all sizes.  With the most robust AI-powered recruitment SaaS platform on the market today, Manatal has made the business of modern recruitment easy once again. Manatal has successfully integrated the latest advancements in AI and machine learning technologies to design an assisting Applicant Tracking System (ATS).  It’s an ATS that can use AI recommendations in much the same ways that we’ve described above to simplify talent acquisition and recruitment into a mere handful of clicks.

Customization is one of the chief benefits of Manatal’s AI-powered recruitment platform.  Manatal’s SaaS platform was specifically designed with customization in mind and it’s largely adaptable to the unique dynamics of almost any organization, no matter how large or small.

Manatal’s intuitive AI-based technology is where the company truly stands head and shoulders above the competition.  With the impressive AI and machine learning capabilities of Manatal’s platform recruiters can significantly accelerate their screening processes and rapidly identify their best candidates.  Remember, the best candidates are off the market in as few as 10 days, so being able to rely on a powerful platform that produces results sooner can be a strategic asset for your company. 

To see for yourself just how remarkably well Manatal’s AI-powered platform can amplify your talent acquisition strategies, start your 14-day free trial today (no credit card required). 

Conclusion

If there are any processes that merit a human touch in modern society, it is the talent acquisition process – something that should and needs to remain deeply human with recruiters remaining at the center of the processes.  We believe the best innovations in AI and machine learning technologies aren’t centered around the desire to replace or omit recruiters from the hiring and selection process but, rather, are there to help professional recruiters perform as the ringmaster at the center of the talent acquisition process - Someone that can use the latest advancements in AI technologies to accelerate the hiring process and produce the best candidates at the lowest cost.