As your business grows, you may be eager to fill empty roles with qualified, hardworking employees. But as any recruiter will tell you, attracting a good candidate isn’t as easy as it sounds – much less dozens of them.
To HR workers overwhelmed by the hiring process, AI might seem like a viable tool to help you manage the deluge of applications. Companies are already eager to utilize AI in the HR department, shown by how the size of the HR tech market is expected to increase to almost $40 billion by 2029.
But can AI and HR really work together to attract good employees? How could AI benefit the recruiting process, and how could it detract from it? To answer these questions, let’s take a look at the pros and cons of using AI in the recruiting process to cast a final verdict.
Pros of AI in Recruiting
AI recruiting tools could help HR find and review more candidates faster, assess candidate qualifications, and remove bias in the hiring process.
Using AI and automation tools, recruiters in the HR department can attract and process a much larger pool of applicants in a very short amount of time, with the AI generating and managing job postings across multiple recruiting sites at once.
Then, rather than reviewing resumes one by one, the HR department can instead tell the AI tool which keywords and qualifications to look for, and the AI will scan for those qualities by itself. This saves HR employees time and mental effort that they can use for more serious interviews.
On top of simply scanning resumes, AI-powered recruitment tools can also proctor assessments to test candidates’ technical skills, such as coding, and conduct video interviews where the candidate records their response to designated questions. Again, this filters out the most skilled candidates without any effort on the company’s part.
Because the AI doesn’t need to sleep, it can process applications submitted at any time of day, decreasing turnaround time and making the entire process faster. And, of course, AI recruiting tools tend to be much cheaper than hiring a full-time HR recruiter.
Finally, using AI can prevent bias in the hiring process, as candidates won’t be subject to any internal prejudices a recruiter might have in the resume screening and assessment processes above. This could lead to a more diverse and talented employee body for the company.
If you’re looking for AI-powered tools to save time in your hiring process, you might also be interested to hear how other software tools can help you save time in other HR functions, such as payroll. Visit humanresource.com to find more information on how to find the best payroll software for your company’s needs.
Cons of AI in Recruiting
On the other hand, there are demerits to using AI in recruiting.
Rather than attracting good candidates, using AI runs the risk of disenchanting qualified candidates who oppose using AI in the recruiting process. Potential candidates may take offense at not warranting a human interviewer or feel that the AI-run recruiting process feels impersonal, and decline to apply or continue with the application process.
Unfortunately, these easily-disenfranchised candidates tend to be the highest-quality ones – people who believe that human talent can’t be replaced by machines, and who have skill sets that are irreplaceable themselves.
Additionally, using pre-recorded interviews and AI-proctored assessments deprives the company and recruiter of getting a personal sense of the candidate – recorded interview questions don’t accurately capture a candidate’s soft skills and personality as accurately as a real-time interview would. There’s no chance to build a natural dialogue and ask follow-up questions, which prevents HR recruiters from gaining a comprehensive understanding of the candidate.
Interpersonal, conversational, and other soft skills are arguably as important as technical skills, so it’d be remiss of a company to hire a candidate without assessing them.
Plus, though AI may be able to create job descriptions and hiring processes for the most popular industries and roles (such as software developers, website designers, marketers, and finance experts), it might not know how to hire for more unique roles that have no precedent in the data set. In other words, your company would be unable to capitalize on new industries and trends or reinvent its image, as your AI-generated job listings and assessments fail to consider skillsets that would be useful in the future.
Speaking of only being trained on historical data, there’s also a high chance that AI recruiting tools were trained using discriminatory data sets and, instead of removing bias and prejudice, perpetuate it instead. This was the case for St George’s Hospital Medical School, whose computer-run applicant screening process was found to discriminate against women and people with non-European sounding names.
Conclusion
If you’re dealing with a very large applicant pool, AI could help HR quickly trim down the less qualified candidates so hiring managers can focus their attention on the most promising ones. However, solely recruiting using AI leaves considerable blind spots in assessing candidates’ soft skills and could create a stagnant and biased employee body. Therefore, while AI can aid HR employees in attracting the best candidates, it’s best used as a tool rather than a crutch – rather than replacing HR, it’s only with a combination of both AI and HR that companies can truly attract the best employees to stay competitive.
