AI and recruitment

June 21st, 2024 | Industry News

AI is a hot topic – and recent research shows that recruiters across the globe think it will be the biggest force in recruitment in the near future. 45% of those surveyed believe that increased AI and automation will change the nature of recruitment. And 62% are feeling positive about how AI will impact the industries for three main reasons – they believe AI will:

1. Free recruiters to spend more time face to face
2. Improve productivity
3. Make it easier and quicker to engage with candidates.

However, there’s a note of warning too. While recruiting software is already automating and simplifying processes for recruiters, AI is just not great at some tasks.

AI – recruitment pros and cons

It’s estimated that a million machine learning specialists will be needed by 2027, just to support the AI industry – however, recruiting this workforce is going to require a blend of soft and hard skills. And AI is not so good at identifying the latter. Paradoxically, human recruiters are essential to identifying the people who will help AI grow!  But even the best recruitment CRM can’t undertake the probing, intuitive dialogue that identifies key soft skills. For example, most sectors require now staff to be agile – there’s just no room for people who insist on keeping things as they are. Assessing curiosity, adaptability and problem solving skills is an iterative process. While web based recruitment software, especially with AI input, can appear ‘human’ it still relies on logic paths, and recruiting for key technical and managerial roles is increasingly demands logic leaps – the ability to see beyond today’s issues to tomorrow’s solutions. AI has already been found lacking in key recruitment areas such as reducing bias, and there’s no evidence it can perform anywhere near as well as human intuition in recognising soft skills.

Other areas where automation improves recruitment processes without AI input include speeding up onboarding, where recruitment database software can remove the grind of necessary but boring paperwork and processes, allowing the recruiter to focus on relationship building and ensuring the client/candidate bond is developing strongly.

Recruitment agency software can also provide data insights and analytics that help any recruiter to stay on top of key issues: market conditions, skills demand, best engagement routes etc. AI may have some additionality here, although most recruiters fail to make the best use of the data they already receive, and are more likely to benefit from a refresh on their current software and a brainstorming around how they could utilise it better.