7 Recruiting and Hiring Experts Weigh in on Artificial Intelligence in Recruiting:
Welcome to Recruiter QA, where we pose employment-related questions to the experts and share their answers! Have a question you'd like to ask? Leave it in the comments, and you might just see it in the next installment of Recruiter QA!
Today's Question: Do you think artificial intelligence (AI) will change recruiting and hiring? How so? Or, do you think the effects of AI are overstated? Why?
1. AI Will Change the Way We Assess – and Develop – Soft Skills
Artificial intelligence will help organizations place employees within roles and teams that make the most sense based on their specific skill sets, both hard and soft.
While it's relatively easy to detect hard skills via someone's resume or work background, it's more difficult to assess soft skills and one's propensity to succeed as a manager. Tools designed to score and ultimately coach these types of soft skills will be critical when it comes to placing employees in roles within an organization, and even externally. It's not far-fetched to envision a future in which this data is transported as employees move from job to job, serving as an ever-evolving profile designed to match employees with the best opportunities, and vice versa.
— David Mendlewicz, Butterfly
2. AI: A Corporate Lie Detector
3. AI Can Do Great Things – But We Should Be Careful About How We Use the Term
4. What's Time-Intensive for Recruiters Is Child's Play for AI
Right now, AI still has its flaws, but its real strength is pattern recognition. Its role in recruiting in today's world is first to analyze resumes and social media profiles.
Let's take a simple example: AI could easily sort through thousands of resumes and LinkedIn profiles, scanning for grammatical errors. It could eliminate thousands of candidates simply based on the frequency of grammar and spelling errors in a matter of seconds. Then, it could analyze keyword frequencies used to see what knowledge base and interests candidates have. This is an extremely time-intensive activity for humans, but child's play for AI, which means that companies could quickly create their short lists in a non-scary, robots-aren't-taking-over kind of way.
— Carrie Wood, Lease Ref
— Sabrina N. Balmick, ACA Talent
6. Recruiting Is in a Sorry State Today – But Maybe AI Will Change That
I very much hope AI will change recruiting and hiring because it is in a sorry state at the moment.
— Dave Denaro, Keystone Partners
7. Don't Let the Hype Distract You
The hype that comes with the incremental developments in AI technology often seems to supersede the immediate impact. There's no denying machine learning and automation tools will have significant impacts on recruiting, especially in terms of early-stage tasks, as the ability to move quickly and maintain up-to-date, detailed information is imperative in today's staffing market. While there's a lot of buzz around how AI tools will provide more flexibility in the research phase of the recruiting process, ultimately, it continues to be up to the actual recruiter to understand and navigate the challenges of placing the right candidate in the right position.
— Hilary Craft, Addison Group