AI and Background Checks: Enhancing Accuracy While Avoiding Unconscious Bias in Hiring

AI is one of the hottest topics in HR right now, and it’s no surprise: these tools and integrations offer incredibly powerful capabilities to help HR teams and hiring managers streamline processes and hire the best people for the right role. One of the lesser-explored areas right now, although a very promising one, is using AI to help in background verification, including checks and reference requests, as well as eliminate unconscious bias in hiring. Here’s what you need to know. 

How AI is Used in Background Checks 

Currently, AI serves a purpose in multiple ways in the background check process. It can sort through public databases and records to confirm employment and education details for candidates, plus check for any potential concerns. It can increase the accuracy of background checks and references to confirm candidates are who they say they are. 

AI integrated into your recruiting software can help collect reference information from candidates automatically, sending reference requests to previous employers, and adding the information received into your ATS so nothing gets missed. AI can also help prevent fraudulent references by checking for duplicate IP addresses, like in Cangrade’s Reference Checking feature. 

This is just what’s possible with the AI in recruiting capabilities of today—with how quickly the field is advancing right now, more and more possibilities will open up in the near future to help hiring managers find the best people for their teams. 

The Benefits of AI in Background Checks

The main advantage of using AI tools in your background and reference-checking process is the significant time-to-hire savings they can offer. You won’t have to rely on time-consuming manual checks (and their resulting inaccuracies) any longer to check on prospective employees. Instead of calling multiple strangers, waiting for them to get back to you, and following up again and again, with AI you can eliminate the back-and-forth while still getting that valuable information. The time saved in your recruiting process can be used to have more in-depth conversations with potential hires, spreading the word about open roles, or any other tasks that will make your recruiting efforts more successful. 

Also, hiring the best people matters just as much as speed, and AI helps there too. By ensuring that your candidates are really who they say they are, and verifying employment information where possible with external public sources, you can feel confident in your hiring decisions and avoid costly mistakes. 

How AI Helps Eliminate Unconscious Bias in Hiring

Plus, and most importantly, AI can help you eliminate unconscious bias in hiring. It can make your background checks more objective, presenting you with just the facts and leaving out potentially biased information. Instead of just confirming education and employment history, which can be important but can also lead to hiring the same types of people over and over, AI tools can help you ask about soft skills that are actually critical to the role’s success. 

The Disadvantages of AI Background Checks

Of course, using any kind of technology, especially a relatively new one like AI, also comes with downsides. AI is still prone to hallucinations, which means that it can confidently state things as facts that are not actually true. You should always have a human check over all the work your AI tools produce, with reference checking and anything else. 

Also, employees and candidates are still wary of the use of AI in hiring, so it’s best to be very transparent about how you’re using it in your hiring process. 79% of candidates want to know if employers are using AI when they apply for a job, according to HR Magazine. (Encouragingly, 64% of candidates also feel that AI is as fair, or fairer than humans in hiring, so it’s more about transparency than avoiding the technology altogether.)

You have to be very careful to ensure whatever tool you’re using is protecting the data and privacy of your candidates with care, and also that you know exactly how it’s using any data your organization enters into it. 

Additionally, you need to be sure that the AI tool you’re using is designed to be free of bias—models are only as good as the information they’re trained on. Cangrade’s AI technology uses a patented bias-removal process, for example, so you can have full confidence that it will further, not hinder, your efforts to create a more diverse and inclusive organization.