A Guide To Using AI For Recruitment (With Benefits)

Updated 20 October 2022

The Indeed Editorial Team comprises a diverse and talented team of writers, researchers and subject matter experts equipped with Indeed's data and insights to deliver useful tips to help guide your career journey.

Hiring suitable candidates for various job roles is essential to a business's success. The recruitment process of screening candidates, short-listing, scheduling and interviewing can be time-consuming and resource-intensive. If you work in human resources (HR), you can benefit from learning how you can incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) into the recruitment process to make it more efficient and effective. In this article, we discuss the meaning of AI for recruitment, outline how it works, list its benefits and limitations and review some examples.

What Is AI For Recruitment?

Using AI for recruitment is the process of introducing automated recruitment software and recruitment analysis into a company's hiring workflow to reduce time and resources while improving its efficiency. Using AI can help automate various repetitive tasks, such as screening large volumes of resumes, conducting a pre-assessment test, answering an interviewee's basic questions and scheduling interviews with candidates. The automated-recruitment process is not a replacement but a means of integrating innovation with human elements of the hiring process to make it more effective.

Using AI to streamline recruitment can save significant time and effort. This enables HR personnel to focus on building rapport with candidates and making the interview process more engaging, welcoming and comfortable. When candidates are at ease, their performance is more natural and they respond to the questions with more honesty. It also gives them a better impression of the hiring manager and the company. AI can help in key areas of recruitment, such as:

Sourcing candidates to find potential hires
Screening candidates with the help of resumes, job sites and portfolios
Nurturing candidates to build relationships with them during each step of the hiring process
Scheduling interviewers and analysing responses to identify candidates with suitable skills and personality traits
Engaging candidates by providing real-time notifications and answering job-related queries

How Does The Automated-Hiring Software Work?

Automated hiring software can scan a large volume of resumes to find candidates with relevant skills, educational backgrounds and work experience. The accuracy of the software depends on the quality of the applicant database. The software fetches the records from a centralised database that stores resume, social media profiles, emails and other relevant information and uses techniques such as named-entity recognition (NER) to extract details such as name, skills, location, education, and previous work experience.

After extracting the relevant details from each resume, it performs a similarity match to find candidates that fit the job description. It shortlists the candidates who may be suitable for the job role and sends personalised emails to each for the next round. Hiring managers can also automate additional steps, such as scheduling meetings, providing answers to basic queries and assessing a candidate's capability by analysing their soft skills and personality traits using natural language processing (NLP).

Benefits Of Using AI In Recruiting

Here are some benefits of using AI for recruitment in an organisation:

Saves time

An automated-hiring software can scan large volumes of resumes to shortlist candidates who may be a right fit for the job role. This reduces the time the recruiter might have spent manually going through each resume. The seamless integration of AI in the hiring process also helps in other administrative tasks, such as scheduling meetings, background checking potential employees, reference checking and answering a candidate's basic queries.

Removes bias

Unconscious and affinity bias may cause recruiters to prefer one candidate over another. Stereotyping can also result in selecting one candidate over the other unfairly. Using AI enables data-driven decisions and prevents possible misjudgement and bias. This is because the software uses factors such as education, skills and work experience to source and assess candidates.

Improves the quality of hiring

AI can help identify the right platform to post job ads and customise it using visuals and graphics to make it look more appealing. It can also identify active and passive candidates who are the right fit for the job and send personalised messages to them. Targeting specific users helps save time and resources that the HR team might have spent manually going through job profiles and sites in search of suitable matches. The tool also enables companies to track metrics, such as time to fill, time to hire and source of hire, to improve the hiring process.

Targets the right candidates

Finding the right candidate is essential because they have the desirable skills and experience for the job and can be valuable to a company. The software shortlists candidates based on specific skills, interests and work experience as specified in the job descriptions. It can find these matches using resumes, job profiles and other networking sites. This helps in filtering resumes that do not match the requirements.

Enhances a candidate's experience

Incorporating AI into recruitment through chatbots can enhance the hiring experience. Chatbots can perform various tasks, such as providing answers to basic queries, streamlining candidate interactions, analysing candidate responses to questionnaires and reducing human error. They can also provide real-time notifications to candidates to help them stay informed on their hiring status.

Limitations Of Using AI In The Recruitment Process

Here are some limitations to using AI in the recruitment process:

It requires a lot of data. AI requires large volumes of data to learn and mimic human behaviour and interactions. Small organisations with limited data may not benefit from using AI in their hiring process.
It may learn human bias. AI continuously learns from humans. If there is extensive bias when selecting candidates, it may learn a specific pattern and use it in the subsequent processes.
It lacks the human aspect of recruitment. There are elements such as personality traits, behaviour, enthusiasm and nervousness that only humans can perceive. A lack of human interaction during the hiring process results in surface-level assessments of skills and abilities without an in-depth analysis of a candidate's personal life, morals, character and other traits.
It may leave out potential candidates. Candidates may find ways to customise their resumes to pass the ATS, without possessing the relevant skills and experience for the job role. It results in short-listing candidates who may not be appropriate for the position over suitable candidates.

Examples Of Using AI In Recruitment

Here are some examples that effectively use AI to improve the hiring process:

Applicant tracking system

Applicant tracking systems (ATS) use NLP to screen and shortlist candidates based on resumes. They rank candidates based on the relevancy of keywords used on their resumes. Recruiters can also integrate ATS with job boards to streamline job postings and target suitable candidates.

In the first step, recruiters define the job description and provide details about the position, skills, work experience and interests. Next, the ATS creates a profile of an ideal candidate best suited for the role. After this, it parses, scans and ranks resumes based on their relevance to the ideal candidate's profile using various AI algorithms. In the last step, hiring managers manually review the shortlisted resumes and continue the hiring process.

Chatbots

Chatbots behave as conversational agents to interact with candidates and assist recruiters with administrative tasks. Some essential functions of chatbots include:

Collecting essential information such as resumes and contact information from candidates and storing them in a database
Asking candidates, a set of pre-defined questions related to their skills, interests and experience
Ranking candidates based on their responses, qualifications and recent activities
Answering frequently asked questions about the job role and the interview process
Scheduling interviews after the screening rounds

HR analytics

HR analytics involves collecting and analysing data to improve the hiring process and increase employee engagement in an organisation. Using AI in HR analytics helps make data-driven HR decisions by identifying, assessing and selecting suitable candidates for the role. The tool collects data from various sources, such as:

Company records: This includes data from HR, talent and learning management systems.
Surveys and feedback: This contains aggregated data from the recruitment satisfaction surveys and past employees' feedback.

Video sentiment analysis

Incorporating AI into video interviews can help evaluate candidates' word choices, speech patterns and facial expressions to determine their fit for the job and a company's culture. These can be helpful when conducting remote interviews. The initial stages of a recruitment process can be stressful for candidates, resulting in lower scores in a variety of areas. It is essential that recruiters base their selections on their experience and judgement rather than relying solely on this feature.