Why organizations should invest in AI for talent acquisition

The importance of the recruitment function has grown significantly in the past couple of decades. With a growing talent gap across the globe, companies have today know and understand the relevance of finding the right fit. Reports have shown that irrespective of a high anticipation among business leaders on the prospect of business transformations and technology reshaping business processes to make them more efficient are also skeptical of their company’s talent to oversee and handle such transformation. For example, a recent ManpowerGroup report noted that 40 percent of global companies are experiencing critical talent shortages, the highest figure in a decade - technology can help bridge the gap between supply and demand and make the job market less inefficient. Such a gap requires urgency on the part of HR leaders to begin addressing the talent needs of their company in an age where forces influencing such needs are far more in number. For HR leaders this translates into empowering their recruiters to make faster, and more precise hiring decisions to find talent that is the right fit for the company. This is where the recent advent of the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in businesses comes into the picture.

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Artificial Intelligence has slowly but steadily sought to penetrate into almost all facets of modern day living. But away from the limelight of consumer-oriented AI applications, companies have had their own disruptive journey with AI. Today many companies have begun tweaking parts of their talent acquisition system by bringing in various AI programs that help them make better talent decisions. This today has significantly changed the way recruiters operate. 

Before we delve into some the major ways in which a recruiter today can wield the power of using AI, it is important to understand why AI becomes relevant in the sphere of HR. The ability of machines and programs to learn and improve human operations, while significantly reducing costs has been a great force of change within modern-day corporations, according to a report by McKinsey & Company. Hence it comes as a little surprise that more and more companies are increasing their investments into AI to ensure recruitment becomes data-driven, objective, and organized process where a recruiters time sifting through troves of resumes and other transactional activities is freed up to take care of assessing larger level alignment of to candidate in terms of company requirement.  

Today recruiters are tasked with finding the right talent in face of macro trends in the labor markets like skill mismatch and evolving talent preferences that often become challenging for many to deal with. Especially because the cost of hiring the wrong person is quite high in the current competitive scenario. In addition to such market conditions company’s recruitment process is also fraught with systemic inefficiencies and biases (both conscious and unconscious) that hamper the recruitment process and could lead to suitable candidates falling out of the talent pipeline. 

Automating transactional workload

Recruitment like many other HR tasks comprises of both transactional work and components that are generally areas where recruiters can add value to their company’s talent acquisition processes. But for recruiters to genuinely make time for tasks that add such value, reducing operational burden becomes necessary. This one the foremost areas where AI can prove beneficial to the recruitment function. By automating low-level tasks and providing key insights faster, AI successfully frees up valuable time that recruiters can use to address more vital issues. Instead of wasting precious hours chasing operational tasks, AI enables the productivity of recruiters to meet the talent needs of their companies to go up significantly. 

Creating organization-wide learning 

Although the talent needs of a company evolve, the process of hiring the right candidate is usually the result of the right mix of identifying business needs, finding the right talent pool, sourcing the right candidates and having the correct screening and review mechanism that ensures only the best fit is hired to fill the empty position. Although recruiters might crack the formula for it once, with the help of AI, this learning becomes a part of how the organization does future hirings. Without having intelligent AI based recruitment systems assisting TA teams, valuable past history might be lost with the change recruiters or expansion of companies to new territories. With the help of AI, recruitment data can effectively be used to hire instead of starting from scratch every time a position within the company needs to be filled. 

Making smarter decisions

The other benefit that a company accrues by using AI within its recruitment function is the removal of the human component in certain areas; areas where such removal provides a great advantage. Besides just assisting recruitment teams to automate transactional data, AI will also change the way critical talent decisions are taking within the function. As AI has the computational power that enables it to make objective, data-driven, and often bias-free decisions, its use within the recruitment function would not just improve decision making of recruiters but also help them contribute to business growth by hiring the right candidates. 

AI holds great potential in reshaping the recruitment of tomorrow. It’s provided the ability to source, automate, hire, and provide the right fit for prospective candidates are great advantages for companies who face a tough competition to acquire the right talent. It truly seeks to build recruiters who are ready to face the changing labor market of tomorrow.

To learn more on how organizations are gearing up to leverage AI in recruitment, join us for People Matters TechHR Conference on 28th February 2019 at Marina Bay Sands, Singapore. Register Now!