Artificial intelligence in recruitment – how does it work in HR? (update: September 2021)

HR recruitment is one of those fields where artificial intelligence can offer huge improvement and acceleration of work. From resumes and candidate selection to face recognition, we can predict that within a few years every big HR company will have artificial intelligence recruitment applications onboard to help human recruiters in finding the best candidates.

What is artificial intelligence in recruitment requirements? What is the impact of artificial intelligence in the recruitment and selection process of candidates? How does artificial intelligence work in recruitment and what are the benefits of artificial intelligence in recruitment?

We will take a closer look at this issue. Using artificial intelligence in recruitment is the next milestone in HR recruitment. The benefits are indisputable, recruiters of the future will be able to focus entirely on candidates chosen by AI. The entire process of job candidates selection will be transferred to the artificial intelligence-based applications.

First, let’s check how companies are using AI for the recruitment process. How can it be beneficial to the recruiters and to the company itself? It is crucial to answer these questions – that can change the way you think about the recruitment process in general.

AI in recruitment: CV/resumes selection

Primarily, artificial intelligence in recruitment shortens the entire process. Let’s just focus on CV/resumes selection. For almost every single job offer, there are hundreds and thousands of resumes sent to the company. Even with fully developed recruitment staff, it is almost impossible to check every single resume thoroughly, because it would take months to do that.

Let’s take a look at this artificial intelligence in recruitment research[1]. Recruiters say that they have about 6 seconds for one resume! By no means, this is enough to fairly judge the candidate. No wonder that 66% of recruiters said that they would like to implement artificial intelligence in HR recruitment to improve their ability to identify proper candidates.

Thanks to the use of artificial intelligence in recruitment, the initial selection of resumes can not only greatly simplify the job of a recruiter, but also significantly improve their accuracy. Сompanies using AI for recruitment can “teach” this system what to look for while browsing through every single resume. The result? After several seconds a company receives 20 best candidates. Now the recruiter can spare more time and attention for each candidate. The benefits are amazing:

• Huge time savings
• A greater chance that the company will hire the right person because the recruiter can simply concentrate on insightful checking every resume proposed by the AI

It might be interesting for you: How AI is used in Business Area

AI during the interview and searching for candidates

Artificial Intelligence in recruitment can conduct not only the initial selection of the candidates but also interview them, with a usage of a telephone, Skype or conversational chatbots on the website itself. Although this stage is still way ahead of us, we can expect that in the future ¾ of the whole HR recruitment processes will be executed by the artificial intelligence algorithms.

Furthermore, artificial intelligence in recruitment can be helpful not only for screening resumes but even for looking out for the candidates! LinkedIn is one of the biggest databases of employees, especially for office-based and highly qualified positions. LinkedIn accumulates almost 600M of professionals worldwide! Just “tell” AI to search for particular candidates in this database, and you’ll receive tens of candidates without even publishing a job announcement! This will be also beneficial to the company’s budget because publishing job openings regularly is costly for the company.

Benefits of artificial intelligence in recruitment

There are plenty of other benefits of artificial intelligence in HR recruitment! It has even gone to the stage where a company can show that they want to cooperate with candidates who, for instance, have experience in volunteer work. Or candidates with experience in AI companies. Whatever is in the resume, we can adjust AI to search for it and select only candidates who meet the requirements. Here are also some more benefits of using artificial intelligence in recruitment:

• Improve the quality and objectivity of recruiting
• Attract the right candidates and get less irrelevant applications
• Save time and complete positions faster

Moreover, artificial intelligence can check the social media profiles of the chosen candidates. How does that help? First, it can be used to check if all the information provided in the resume is consistent. It can also search for signs of activity inconsistent with the company’s policy, for example, racism or xenophobia. This is especially important for companies hiring remote employees and co-workers such as Uber or even Airbnb.

Real-life examples of artificial intelligence in recruitment

Paradox and its AI algorithm “Olivia”

What we talk about here is not a vague future, it happens already! For example, Paradox is an AI development company based in the United States. They have made an AI algorithm called “Olivia”, which helps in screening candidates and even answering their questions during the HR recruitment process! When a recruiter decides that a candidate is qualified enough to invite them for an interview – “Olivia” schedules it on her own! So the recruiter can focus on the essential part of hiring a new employee, where computers will not be sufficient for many years to come.

Artificial intelligence in HR recruitment helps recruiters to screen thousands of resumes in order to speed up candidate selection. So you can think of an AI application as an online recruiter, working 24/7 with no delays of hesitations.

IBM designates new-hire chatbot

Another interesting example of using artificial intelligence in the recruitment process is the IBM company and its chatbot [2]. Did you know that IBM receives several thousand CVs/resumes a day? As we can read in the company’s report, “ it is one of the busiest chatbots at IBM, answering 700 questions a day. New hire chatbots are particularly helpful because they resolve the challenge of not knowing who to ask for help. IBM’s goal with chatbots is to get answers to employees quickly and accurately while reducing the amount of effort it takes to support HR programs. The time saved can then be spent on experts answering more complex questions and problems about HR issues”.

This is exactly what AI in recruitment is about. To deal with simple, repeatable questions and issues. So, implementing a chatbot is the most reasonable solution.

HireVue – AI-powered hiring platform

HireVue is the most famous AI-powered recruitment platform implemented in over 700 companies, using AI for hiring. There are such famous companies as Unilever, Vodafone, PwC, and Oracle. The platform is effective in reducing hiring times by 90% and increasing hiring diversity by 16%.

In addition to voice and facial recognition software, HireVue has its own algorithm that determines which candidates are ideal for a specific job by analyzing their vocabulary, speech patterns, body language, tone and facial expressions. You can learn more about this platform in this video:

Mya System – AI hiring chatbot

Another popular real life example of AI in recruitment is the Mya Systems, hiring chatbot. It uses conversational AI to streamline the recruiting process for large recruitment agencies and companies such as L’Oréal, Adecco, Hays and Deloitte.

Maya accompanies candidates throughout the recruitment process, from job search to hiring. To ensure a natural сonversation with candidates, hiring chatbot employs state-of-the-art approaches from natural language processing apps and understanding:

• by using dynamic dialogue management, Mya can understand context, complex statements, and changes to previous responses
• by constantly learning from millions of interactions, the conversational system constantly improves the accuracy of its answers. The solution is supported by a team of experienced machine learning and NLP engineers

Impact of AI in hiring process

Recruiters themselves are expecting that artificial intelligence will be a standard in the recruitment process. Here are some stats that prove the worth of using AI in hiring[3] :

• 35% of talent professionals and hiring managers say that AI in talent acquisition is the top trend impacting how they hire
• Recruiters using AI in the hiring process found it to be most helpful with Sourcing Candidates (58%), Screening Candidates (56%) and Nurturing Candidates (55%)
• 17% of companies use AI-based solutions in their HR function and another 30% will do so by 2022, according to the Gartner 2019 Artificial Intelligence Survey.

Recruitment of the future – face expression analysis

We can expect that in the near future HR recruitment process will look a bit different. It will be quicker and more accurate. One of the best examples is face expression analysis. This is helpful on two main levels:

• Analysis of the picture attached to the resume
• Analysis during a video interview

Of course, not every candidate attaches their picture to the resume. In some countries, just to mention Canada, it is even frowned upon. If you do that, your resume lands in the bin. But elsewhere it might be a powerful tool to tell the recruiter what are the personality traits of a given candidate. And still, even in Canada, professionals do attach their photos to the LinkedIn profile, so we might expect a worldwide application of the face expression analysis systems.

And what about video interviews? Let’s say, a recruiter talks with a candidate via Skype, and during the entire conversation, they receive constant feedback from the AI algorithm about a candidate’s behavior and mood. Recruiter knows how the candidate feels, are they relaxed or nervous, possibly it will be even possible to check if they are telling the truth! Can it be helpful? Undoubtedly!

Big change is coming

The last answer is particularly interesting, as it turns out, implementing AI to your HR business or department can actually lower expenses on marketing and advertising. Another good reason to think about implementing AI in the hiring process in your company. As we analyzed earlier, with AI in hiring in some cases companies won’t even have to publish job ads, and that produces savings.

The conclusion is simple – artificial intelligence in recruitment will grow, because it is prominently beneficial for the company, and recruiters themselves say that they want AI tools in their work.

AI in talent acquisition – the next milestone

It’s time to sum up our deliberations. We can draw several important conclusions from the market:

• AI will speed up the recruitment process and make it more accurate
• Soon it will be a standard in the sector, mainly because there is a high demand from the recruiters themselves.

We expect that within several years all of the biggest corporations and HR companies will implement AI algorithms or apps in their businesses.

Will your company be among them? Give us a call and let’s talk about how HR recruitment with AI technology can be implemented to your business! Addepto is an experienced AI consulting company and we are always keen to help you with AI and machine learning innovations, no matter what sector you operate in.