4 benefits of using AI when recruiting

Advantages of using AI for hiring

1. Cutting costs

Hiring is a cost activity – there is an associated cost-per-hire which includes the recruiter’s hours spent on attracting, screening, interviewing, and onboarding candidates. However, as AI automates tasks and lets recruiters focus on fewer tasks, costs are reduced.

Not to mention the costs of hiring the wrong candidate! On average, the cost of a bad hire even up to 125% of an employee’s annual salary depending on employee’s position and the impact on the organization and the customer activity. Not only does that cost money, but also the valuable time allocated to the supervision of poorly performing employees and finding a new employee. With the help of AI recruitment, there are more insights available to recruiters as they make a decision for their next hire.

2. Finding quality candidates within the application pool

In a previous blog, we mentioned that, on average, one job posting receives around 250 applications (according to a study done by Glassdoor). Among those, only 4-6 candidates are invited to an interview. But before one gets to that point, a good recruiter would ideally need to go through all those resumes and filter for the best match for the job. On top of that, as the size of the business increases, so does the chance of having multiple job positions available. Therefore, more job openings mean more applications to review. Needless to say, this is a time-consuming task that nowadays rarely gets done thoroughly when performed manually. In fact, research indicates that a recruiter spends around 6 seconds in scanning a CV. 6 seconds. Are those enough to get a good idea of the candidate’s qualifications and whether their personality is an excellent addition to the organizational culture? We find this questionable.

Fortunately, there are alternatives in the face of technologies such as an applicant tracking system (ATS) that automates these tasks. With the use of those systems, a recruiter can benefit from speedy identification of potentially suitable candidates for the available job postings. However, a disadvantage to those ATS is that those systems often search on predefined keywords, which can lead to recruiters potentially disregarding qualified candidates.

To avoid that, there are further augmented AI recruitment tools that incorporate more elements for evaluating points when screening applications. For instance, some linguistic application readers are built with 4 variables “in mind” – so that recruiters can see the holistic picture of a candidate.

4. Reducing subjective gut feeling

The talk about artificial intelligence in recruitment and how it brings or reduces bias is an ongoing debate. In 2018, more than 2 years ago, Amazon had to shut down on their AI recruitment tool as it was built on data that was inducing favouritism towards white male candidates. Since then, much more improvements and research has been made on the topic, and a couple of different scholars prove otherwise: AI in hiring reduces biases. Unlike human recruiters who might subconsciously bring biases in their decision-making towards candidates as they read through applicants solely, AI screens the resume “blindly”. Furthermore, AI recruitment software has no prejudices based on candidates’ name, gender, religion, etc. Can the same be said about recruiters?

In the pursuit of finding out whether candidates’ gender plays a role in selecting the job, the recruitment company Hays conducts a study with more than 1000 recruiters. Half of the recruiters were given a CV with a candidate called Simon, the other half had a candidate with the same qualifications but named Susan. The results showcased that: