Can AI Really Spot Top Talent? The Pros and Cons You Need To Know!

Key Takeaways:

• AI Revolutionizes Recruitment: AI has significantly impacted recruitment processes, streamlining tasks like resume screening, candidate profiling, and talent matching. This automation leads to increased efficiency and speed.

• Balancing AI and Human Touch: While AI offers numerous benefits, it’s crucial to maintain a human touch in recruitment. AI can’t fully replace human interaction, especially in areas like building relationships and assessing soft skills. A balanced approach, combining AI tools with human expertise, is ideal.
• Ethical Considerations in AI Recruitment: AI algorithms, if not carefully designed and monitored, can perpetuate biases and discrimination. It’s essential to use AI responsibly and ethically to ensure fair and unbiased hiring practices.

AI has been around for a long time and by the looks of it, it’s here to stay. From the 3rd Industrial Revolution that primarily focused on the Internet and IT Devices, we have rushed into the 4th Industrial Revolution – the World of AI and Automation!

Just like the previous industrial revolutions, AI has been around for a while and has slowly revolutionized the way we operate in our business environment. Recruitment, for instance, has engaged with this development in interesting ways recently. In recruitment, AI helps in areas like resume screening, candidate profiling, and filtering top talent for exact matching with the job descriptions. 

Nevertheless, there are some reservations that other companies and businesses have had in terms of AI’s ability to truly deliver its potential in the field of recruitment. In this blog, we will discover how AI has been included in recruitment and the pros and cons associated with this aspect.

AI Use in Recruitment 

To truly appreciate AI’s use in recruitment, it’s important to realize the gaps that the AI will have to fill. If you are in the recruitment industry, you might have faced one of the following challenges: tedious screening of piles of resumes, time-consuming talent matching practices, assessing talent but with fears of bias and prejudice, and many more to count.

With the entry of AI, companies like Mastercard and Brother International Corporation quickly started to utilize its ability to bridge gaps in their own recruitment procedures. 

As for Mastercard, their main concern was to make their recruitment procedure more seamless for their candidates and internal team members. To accomplish this, Mastercard partnered with Phenom to revolutionize its recruitment process. By implementing a new Career Site, Talent CRM, and automated interview scheduling, Mastercard streamlined operations and delivered a superior candidate experience. Dedicated recruitment marketing and direct sourcing teams, coupled with advanced analytics, enabled the identification and engagement of top talent at scale.

Brother International Corporation had some different concerns. They wanted to brand their company in such a way that it would automatically draw in pools of top talent. They urgently needed a career site that would authentically represent their employer brand, offer personalized job recommendations, and introduce potential candidates to the company through a conversational chatbot. After launching their revamped career site and implementing a new CRM for screening passive candidates and capturing qualified leads, they leveraged AI-powered talent analytics to automatically optimize apply options based on data insights. This allowed for a 140% increase in completed applications, 40% increase in job seekers, and 25% decrease in time to fill!

DigitalHire has also assisted various companies in conducting smooth, AI-assisted recruitment. Utilizing our unique Video Resumes and Video Job Board, businesses have been able to grasp the talent, soft skills, and experience of potential candidates on their screen without the need for going through a separate schedule of interview. This has proved a great asset for those companies that wish to incorporate talent matching based on skills and culture fit to optimize recruitment operations but also maintain the human element in this crucial area.

As you can see, AI can be used in multiple ways within the niche field of recruitment. It all depends on the needs of your company, the gaps you wish to fill, and your larger concerns and goals for the future.

The Ethics of AI

Before we begin to consider the pros and cons of AI use, it’s important to be aware of what’s at stake. Risk assessment and evaluation for both parties – company and candidate – must be conducted by you before you consider incorporating AI into recruitment procedures. 

Although the buzz of AI is intoxicating, moving on from now, the ways that businesses approach AI will slowly begin to evolve. As the candidate market shifts with ever-evolving trends, so will you have to adapt accordingly. At the same time, on the employee’s end, what’s at stake here is their recruiting experience and livelihood. Your incorporation of AI tools and automation must be dealt with a huge sense of responsibility with both these mutual agents in mind.

For this, you can prioritize some departments or areas when approaching AI. For instance, instead of going fully automated in all aspects of recruitment, try experimenting through a chat bot that engages with a potential candidate in the early stages. Or you can conduct a pilot study by posting jobs on DigitalHire by utilizing our Video Job Board whilst keeping the rest of the procedures intact. In any case, your incorporation of AI should be smooth, calculated, and just to all parties. This care and concern for ethical practice of AI usage will certainly result in more top talent conversions and optimized recruitment operations.

Pros of Using AI To Spot Top Talent

Every business wants the top talent for their team and that’s a fact. AI can be quite useful in this area as well in the following ways:

1. Efficiency and Speed: AI-powered tools can quickly sift through vast numbers of resumes and applications, identifying the most promising candidates in a fraction of the time it would take a human recruiter. This saves valuable time, labor, and resources.
2. Talent matching: AI algorithms can predict a candidate’s potential fit for a role based on their skills, experience, and behavioral patterns. DigitalHire is also able to perform its talent-matching function by doing something similar. This helps recruiters identify high-potential candidates who may have been overlooked in traditional recruitment processes.
3. Reduced Bias: One of the significant challenges in traditional recruitment is human bias. Whether you like it or not, prejudice is a hard bug to kill. Here, AI algorithms can analyze candidate data objectively, eliminating factors like gender, age, or ethnicity from the initial screening process. This ensures a more equitable and fair evaluation of candidates.
4. Personalized Candidate Experience: AI-powered chatbots can provide personalized interactions with candidates, answering their questions, guiding them through the application process, and even scheduling interviews. We saw this in the example of Brother International Corporation earlier as well. This enhances the candidate experience and improves the company’s employer brand.

Cons of Using AI To Spot Top Talent

Although all these aforementioned benefits are true, there are still some caveats or altogether cons that you must be aware of:

1. Bias and Discrimination: Although AI can be objective, it necessarily relies on algorithms trained on historical data. If the training data reflects past discriminatory practices, the AI system could perpetuate these biases, leading to unfair hiring decisions.
2. Lack of Human Touch: While AI tools can automate, they cannot fully replace human interaction. Candidates may feel impersonal and disconnected from the company if they do not have opportunities to interact with real people. 
3. Technical Limitations: AI systems are not perfect. They may misinterpret information or make errors in their assessments, leading to the rejection of qualified candidates or the hiring of unsuitable ones. This may require constant check-ups and regulation of AI systems to ensure smooth operations. 

If you can avoid these landmines, AI can work wonders for your recruitment. It will optimize, streamline, and enhance your recruitment process, thus facilitating potential candidates. This facilitation would be enticing for the top talent pool, especially if this is coupled with good company branding. 

Closing Thoughts

At the end of the day, using AI is a huge responsibility. This becomes even more true in the case of recruitment. For the candidate, this sensitive process is the key to livelihood, while for you it is the key to elevate your company. Needless to say, it must be handled with great care and mutual concern for both parties. 

Keep the wants, needs, and goals of your company in mind before you take a step into introducing AI in your recruitment processes or upgrading it. What might have worked for one company may not necessarily work for you. What is essential, then, is to utilize those powers of AI which either fix an issue that the recruitment team is facing or enhance a unique potential latent in the team.