This post was originally published on this site.
With all the hype around AI, I (an AI novice) was keen to understand more about how companies are using the technology in one of the most “human” activities of any company: hiring.
While AI can assist with tasks from candidate sourcing to note taking during interviews, it can’t do everything: after all, no one wants to have a job interview with a chatbot. Talent experts Gonçalo Sequeira, founder of tech recruitment consultancy Hiire, and Heleen Anderson, a technical recruiter and executive researcher, give us their roundup of where AI can — and cannot — be useful in recruitment right now.
AI-powered recruitment tools
Sequeira says his company currently uses AI in the following ways:
- Writing job descriptions
- Sourcing candidates (the process of searching for, identifying and contacting potential candidates)
- Taking notes during interviews with candidates
- Producing scorecards (a checklist of criteria for a role that can be matched against candidates)
ChatGPT, for example, is useful for writing a template for a job description based on a list of criteria for the role, which Sequeira estimates can save 10-15 minutes per job description. Recruiters will still have to look over these descriptions, check for errors and rewrite parts of them to make them more specific, detailed and human-sounding.
Advertisement
ChatGPT is also useful in helping hiring managers produce a sourcing strategy — a plan for how and where to find qualified candidates. You can ask ChatGPT questions to learn more about what skills and experience are required for a specific role. You can also ask it to draw up a list of alternative job titles related to the position you’re trying to fill. This helps capture more people who may have the relevant skills, but typically use a different title.
Juicebox AI is an AI search engine for finding qualified people, which draws on a range of data sources. Sequeira says it’s easy to create filters to find a wide range of profiles — although a lot of the candidates are similar to those found on LinkedIn, where every recruiter has eyeballs. “We’re trying to find people that are not so obvious to our competition,” explains Sequeira.
Metaview, which produces AI-generated interview notes, is another tool popular among recruiters. It can translate conversations into different languages — helpful when sharing interviews among international colleagues. However, it can sometimes spurt out random information, says Sequeira. “I always tell my team, don’t trust AI 100%.”
The caveats
One major pitfall of using AI to source candidates, says Anderson, is that it often concentrates on specific keywords which it matches to candidates’ LinkedIn profiles or CVs. Some fantastic candidates won’t be playing that game and will potentially not be as discoverable — while other underqualified candidates will be cheating the system, filling up their CVs with keywords that match the job description to get past the AI.
AI is also not yet good at searching for unique profiles — for example, an engineer needed for a defence company that has experience in both software and hardware. “This is the type of context or nuance that AI doesn’t understand yet,” says Anderson.
There’s also a human element of recruitment that AI can’t really replace. “When I think about what type of candidates get hired and why — it’s not always the candidates who tick all the boxes, but… the candidates who have the right attitude or spark in their eyes or a mindset that a company needs in a certain phase of growth. And these are not the nuances an AI can detect at least today,” says Anderson.
To get the most out of AI, it’s important to have a strategy, concludes Anderson: “Think through your recruitment process and ask yourself: who is the talent that you want to attract? Which are the specific tasks where we can use some tools for automation, and which are the tasks where our human touch really makes a difference?”
On the subject of… AI in recruitment
1. One from the Sifted archives: How to use AI to support your hiring process.
2. Will AI enhance bias in recruiting? Organisations must be aware of the ethical implications of using AI in HR practices, writes Value Matrix founder Aditya Malik.
3. How to use AI in hiring 101.
4. The seven deadly sins of hiring — from “spray and pray sourcing” to “ghosting.”
5. Companies are leaning on AI agents amid talent crunch — but with the tech in its early stages, they’re not a silver bullet.