
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Recruitment
The rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technology is having a game-changing impact on the world of talent acquisition.
As we progress into the 21st century, AI-powered tools are setting us on the brink of another technological revolution. A recent report claimed the ‘full and effective adoption of AI by UK firms could save almost a quarter of private-sector workforce time – equivalent to the annual output of six million workers’.
From automating our workflows to streamlining talent searches or communicating better with candidates; it’s undeniable that these tools have the potential to free us from busywork and allow us to make more time for high-value activities.
The question is, how can you take the first crucial steps towards efficiency and a more agile approach that’ll help you stand out?
How have AI and ML developed?
While the origins of the most basic forms of AI were actually first developed in the late 1950s, many of us formed the first ideas about this technology from what was imagined in science-fiction films such as ‘The Terminator’.
Luckily, intelligent androids bent on destruction have not surfaced in the modern day, but until populations begin to interact with it directly, these early sources can influence much of the cultural zeitgeist around the topic.
People have, however, now begun on a broad scale to see for themselves what AI is about. In the last few years, generative artificial intelligence chatbots and search agents such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity AI have reached the mainstream.
These platforms have opened a window for the broad working population to see the potential of generating content, summarising topics, translating text and brainstorming topics.
These AI systems are made possible through three things: training computation, algorithms and the input data used for training. As this contributing infrastructure and technology improved, people developed new research tools and possibilities such as:
- Machine vision that allows systems to recognise images of objects such as dogs and furniture
- Game playing where systems learn structured rules of play and go on to make decisions and react to changing circumstances
- Drawing where high-quality images can be generated from written descriptions
- Language systems that can assess meaning and generate text in response
Over time, these different abilities emerged and built on each other until we arrived at what captured the public imagination, the freely available generative artificial intelligence chatbots that could quickly – and with a generally high level of accuracy – bring whim to life.
What the world of work is now seeing proceeding from these more generalised chatbots is a more specific software as a service (SAAS) products emerging that are powered by them. This can be anything from simple customisations for research or work coaching to entire custom AI models exclusively built on recruitment documents such as CVs.
How have AI and ML improved talent attraction?
You only have to scroll briefly on LinkedIn to stumble upon posts detailing how people are using AI in their workday – often in increasingly nuanced ways across their business operations and candidate outreach.
Here are some ideas for how cutting-edge tools are being used by talent attraction teams to deliver time savings, improve candidate experiences and even eliminate unconscious biases from the recruitment process.
Talent sourcing
AI-powered search can evaluate millions of data points in a matter of milliseconds. How? Instead of in-demand processing, it has previously scanned content and gained an understanding of what it contains for recall.
Aspects and wider patterns of the raw data that the system recognises have been translated into numeric equations – vectors. These can be understood without memory-intensive caching in a process known as vector space matching.
In Talent Attraction, you might see AI-powered tools used to understand vast talent pools at scale and easily shortlist candidates.
This could include AI systems cross-referencing job description copy across text from thousands of CVs within an employer’s talent pool to highlight the people with the most relevant experience and skills.
This is possible because the AI gains a strong semantical understanding of the information it scans. Keywords don’t have to match exactly for suitable candidates to be flagged – the AI model understands the words that are commonly found around it as well.
Volume screening
AI is streamlining the recruitment process when screening shortlists of candidates.
Rather than the time-intensive process of HR teams and hiring managers having to process CVs individually, AI models can automate comparing the job description against candidates’ CVs.
With top-listed rankings for candidates likely to be most suitable, teams are looking at much quicker time to fill roles.
These AI tools can also help with protecting candidates from bias. They will focus on skills and experience and ignore irrelevant details such as last name and the type of school the candidate attended.
This keeps protected characteristics such as race or class from being factored in, preventing unconscious human biases from impacting the process.
Assessments
In the new world of work, people are looking beyond the CV to explore other ways of understanding if someone would be good for a job, such as through video testimonies or submitting profiles in one click from LinkedIn.
This could be especially relevant for early careers candidates or talent involved in the gig economy, where accessibility can be a big factor in getting applications.
Rather than submitting a CV, an AI-powered chatbot could use natural-language processing to carry out conversations with potential candidates to interactively draw out their work experiences, approach, and aptitudes.
Gamified elements could even be combined with this to allow for live assessments and provide a new way for candidates to bring across their suitability for a role.
Efficient scheduling
Trying to schedule an interview is sometimes a tedious and drawn-out process, but with AI-powered virtual PAs that are integrated into the corporate calendars across hiring stakeholders, the process becomes smoother and more efficient for everyone involved.
These recruitment chatbots not only help with time scheduling, but their automated features could share information and interview prep guidance to candidates at each step.
This creates a more engaging and supportive experience for the candidate that may see them build a favourable opinion of your employer brand. It could even deter them from dropping out at a late stage of interview or onboarding.
Content creation
There’s a lot of ways that AI can help speed up your content creation, across job descriptions, career site blogs or recruitment ads.
While the generic AI tone of voice can be off-putting, there’s more and more customisations to give it more information about tone of voice guidelines, audience reading complexity and more that can help your business – though we’d recommend being careful with the following:
- Don’t generate or augment the employee imagery that you use. Your audience uses that to understand your culture and build trust with social proof. Replace it with generated photography, and they’ll be able to tell – don’t undercut the candidate trust that’s crucial for your employer brand.
- Avoid artificially generating testimonies – keep your employees’ authentic voices intact.
- False information – otherwise known as hallucinating – is an inevitable part of using AI writing tools. Always sense-check and make sure that company information is accurate. Save yourself the headaches of additional benefits or initiatives getting jumbled in that don’t represent what your employer brand actually offers.
As well as impacting the content you manually assemble, more sophisticated uses of AI can even interact between what is planned and then what is received by candidates.
By combining natural-language processing with available candidate data, their candidate persona can be matched and content rearranged to reflect what they are most likely to be interested in.
Imagine adverts or even whole career sites seamlessly rearranging themselves to catering for different candidate demographics such as experienced professionals, early careers and senior executives – all within the same websites, apps, platforms and recruitment journeys.
Making your to-do lists possible with AI
AI offers a technological acceleration of what’s possible in the limited working day. It’s permeating into the world of work at every level, from broad initiatives to individual users. That means whatever stage of your career, you have an opportunity to become a grassroots adopter and lead the way for others and your organisation.
The level of sophistication of AI-powered tools you have access to may very well depend on your organisation. It may be integrated into your core infrastructure, available through subscription to a SAAS application or even just directly available through one of the commonly available generative AI chatbots – but it’s never too soon to begin getting a feel for what’s possible and what works for you.
By keeping principles of preserving trust, personalised candidate experience and transparency at the heart of what you use AI for, you can benefit what you do in talent attraction to streamline processes.
This incredible technology can also be harnessed to enhance efficiency, and help your organisation become more accessible for a wider range of candidates – improving the quality of your hiring.
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- Topics:
- News
- Ongoing Candidate Attraction