Everything You Need to Know About How to Use AI in Recruiting

Kathleen O’Donnell

As an HR professional, you’ve likely heard a lot of buzz and speculation lately about the role AI will play in the future of talent acquisition. Leaders across the HR field are cautiously exploring the role AI will play in their organizations: while only 5% said their function is already using generative AI, more than half are exploring how to do so, according to Gartner research.

Forward-thinking recruiting teams like yours are likely already considering how to best use these new tools and tech. With all of the hype about this new technology though, it can be hard to determine what’s really happening and how you should actually make use of AI in recruiting in your organization.

That’s exactly why we created this guide for HR teams to incorporate AI in recruitment for their own companies, while still maintaining the human touch that’s so critical in the HR field. This guide will take you through everything you need to know to effectively use AI in recruiting to improve your hiring process as well as your candidate experience. Let’s get started!

The Benefits of Using AI in Recruitment

Using AI in your recruiting process offers many significant benefits, no matter how large or small your organization is.

Saves Recruiters Time

Smart use of AI can save your recruiters hours of time every week on formerly manual tasks, like scheduling interviews and doing a first pass of resumes for open roles. With AI handling these mundane tasks, your recruiters can spend more time on valuable tasks like helping candidates through the hiring process, offering guidance to hiring managers, and ensuring your employer brand is consistently strong.

Reduces Bias

By using data to help inform recruiting and hiring decisions, you can eliminate many sources of bias that often subtly hamper your DEI efforts. Instead of using instinct and feeling to make hiring decisions, you can evaluate what will truly make for a successful hire and your recruiters can make decisions based on facts.

Speed Up Time to Hire

By saving recruiters time on manual task processing and giving more data to make informed decisions, you can speed up your time to hire with AI. This will help you attract and hire more top talent, because they’re unlikely to wait around for slower-than-average hiring processes when they have other offers on the table.

Improve the Candidate Experience

By streamlining and automating regular candidate communication, you can avoid accidentally ghosting candidates or leaving them without updates for weeks (or even months). You can automatically send updates and important, timely information, and answer candidate questions promptly, making your candidate experience top-notch thanks to AI.

The Types of AI in Recruiting

With the explosion of AI’s potential in the past year, there are now several types of AI in recruiting you can opt to use as part of your hiring process.

Chatbots: These tools have been around for years, but with AI they’re much more sophisticated. They can provide answers to frequently asked questions from candidates and offer additional information and basic guidance to applicants as needed.
Generative AI: ChatGPT is the best-known form of this technology, which can use existing information to create written materials and graphics. Be careful with these tools though, as they often “hallucinate” (give inaccurate information) and may have copyright issues as well.
Data Analysis and Reporting: These AI tools can help you collect and synthesize large amounts of data into easily understandable and usable formats. You can collect information on both existing employees and candidates to understand patterns, best fit for roles, retention predictions, and even survey responses.
Recruiting Tools: There are recruiting-specific tools like Cangrade that offer an all-in-one solution to incorporate AI and automation into your recruiting process in a bias-free and people-first way.

All of these different tools and technologies use the power of AI a little differently, but they have similar best practices: use them as helpers, not replacements, for your recruiters, and be sure to check everything an AI tool puts out for accuracy, tone, and the warmth only a human can add.

Also, with most AI in HR tools, you will need to check to be sure you’re considering candidate data privacy concerns, copyright issues, and other legal considerations before you onboard a new tool (particularly with generative AI tools). Always do your due diligence before you test out a new technology.

None of these tools should be your final or only contact point with applicants, and they can’t make the final decision on hiring either. But as helpers and assistants for your experienced recruiting team, they’re valuable aids.

How to Use AI in the Recruitment Process

There are many potential ways to use AI in recruiting to make your hiring more effective and efficient. The best uses depend on your specific organizational needs, processes, and size.

These ideas can get you started on incorporating AI into your recruiting efforts — feel free to start with just one and expand from there, if this is all very new territory, or add on if you’ve already started to experiment with AI tools.

Candidate Sourcing

Finding the right candidates for your open roles is challenging, particularly when top talent is scarce. AI tools can help you automate the search by scanning job sites like LinkedIn, Indeed, and other sources for potential applicants that meet your initial criteria and even handling the initial outreach (with a communication approved by a human, of course). Then, if they’re interested, your recruiters will have a warm lead to reach out to who is already at least a bit informed about the role and the company.

AI can also help you write more appealing and accurate job descriptions. As these are often the first encounter a potential candidate will have with your company, you want them to leave an enticing impression. They also need to be written so they attract the perfect candidates and don’t harm your commitment to diversity — try Cangrade’s Job Description Decoder to see an example of this kind of helpful tools.

Candidate Assessment

Once you have a deep pool of applicants, including those you’ve proactively sourced, it’s time to assess them to see if they’re initially a good fit for the role. AI is very useful at this stage, as going through each and every resume manually to see who stands out can take hours while AI can scan for critical keywords in seconds. It can also prevent bias from entering the assessment process by adhering to the same standard criteria for every applicant.

AI can also orchestrate talent assessments and tests to help narrow the initial field into a more manageable pile of qualified candidates. By giving your recruiters more helpful data on the candidates’ skills and aptitudes, they can make better-informed decisions about who should progress to the later stages of the hiring process.

Of course, it’s important to let the data guide you, but AI shouldn’t be making any final decisions on candidates in early or late stages — that’s a recruiter’s job. AI is there to make those decisions easier, not to make the decisions in finality.

Candidate Interviews

Scheduling candidate interviews alone can take up hours of your recruiting team’s day, between coordinating with the candidate and everyone who needs to speak to them. But interviews are too critical a part of the hiring process to eliminate — so consider adding AI in intelligently. It can’t conduct face-to-face interviews for you, of course, but it can schedule meetings and provide all the relevant information to the candidate so they’re prepared.

Some AI recruiting tools can even give you the best questions to use in structured interviews, where all candidates are asked the same questions to increase fairness and eliminate bias. There are also recruiting tools that allow you to conduct asynchronous video interviews so the scheduling problem is eliminated entirely.

Offer and New Hire Onboarding

Once you’ve made the decision on the perfect new employee, AI can also provide a lot of value in time savings. Offer letters, reference checking, and background checks can all be automated to speed them up and improve accuracy.

When the candidate has accepted and officially becomes a new hire, the paperwork load gets even heavier as they need to sign up for benefits, systems, and employee agreements. It’s common for those tasks to fall behind as the employee focuses on learning the ropes of the new role and HR moves on to other tasks.

AI tools can automate reminders and keep track of which tasks still need to be completed so everything gets done smoothly. This allows your HR professionals to focus on welcoming and guiding the new employee so they feel right at home, instead of tracking paperwork.

Takeaways

As AI tools become more and more sophisticated, new use cases are sure to arise for tech-forward HR teams to take advantage of. But while you should feel free to (carefully) experiment with new tools, always be sure you’re keeping the candidate experience in mind, and the human touch at the forefront.

AI can be an incredible tool, but people should still be driving all decisions and communications to candidates. It should support, not replace, your recruiters, so they can spend more time on the tasks where they deliver the most value. AI simply improves access to talent by streamlining the hiring process and reaching more people who might be a great fit for your open roles.

With that caution in mind, AI can deliver incredible efficiency and time savings that are critical in today’s fast-moving recruiting world. If you choose your tools carefully, it can also reduce bias and make your hiring process more equitable. If you’re looking for an all-in-one recruiting and talent management platform with certified bias-free AI technology, Cangrade’s ethical AI capabilities could be a great fit. Learn more about how easy it is to integrate into your current processes by requesting a demo with our award-winning support team.