AI in Hiring: Trends and How to Use it

“Dave, you need to talk about AI in hiring… people have questions! They want to know!”

(This is what my RAC co-organizer Danielle slacked me after an awesome Recruiting Daily conversation about AI in recruiting earlier this week).

She’s right… we get asked about AI all the time (not just by TA + HR leaders, either! Also friends, family, LinkedIn followers, and more).

Over the coming weeks, we want to start taking a magnifying glass to what AI actually means in the context of hiring:

1. What is AI doing today?
2. What are some emerging questions and challenges?
3. How are human recruiting teams and machines actually working together?
4. What does all this mean for candidates?

So, let’s start with the practical: What is AI doing in hiring?

From my vantage point (getting to connect with TA leaders and hear what they’re doing), here are some of the most exciting use cases today:

• Discover the RIGHT candidates: getting in front of the right candidates is often one of the most time-consuming – and expensive – things that recruiters do. AI uses huge amounts of data to understand how to reach the right people (think programmatic AI solutions like PandoLogic that optimize job ads AND your budget) or deliver insights to help guide your outreach (like SeekOut’s product that helps you target diverse talent)..
• Engage candidates: this is everything from automated messaging, scheduling, and conversation. Chatbots are the buzzword, but it’s deeper than that. AI that can help guide the process and take tons of work off the plate of recruiters while still delivering an A+ experience to candidates (admittedly, this is our bread and butter at Wade & Wendy). It could be SMS reminders that the interview is tomorrow or a deep-dive conversation about qualifications… advances in conversational AI allow recruiters to give personal attention to candidates at scale.
• Evaluate candidates: humans just aren’t great, yet, at predicting successful hires. But AI is helping use huge data sets to predict fit at a role. From advances in understanding profile traits (like pymetrics) to looking at millions of resumes and jobs to understand the relationship between skills, experience, and success (like HiredScore) plus the evaluative functionality of chatbots and other new streams of data… this is all just getting started. Here’s a webinar on how AI and Automation empowers recruiting teams today and tomorrow.
• Combat bias: this isn’t a standalone product per se, but it’s one of the most important use cases. We’ll talk more in the coming weeks about this, but AI gives an unprecedented opportunity to use data and insights to design less biased evaluation criteria. To engage and evaluate candidates equally and fairly (or without even seeing their identity), and expand the reach of opportunity outside of traditional networks.

This is just a little snapshot, by the way: if you want an expansive view of the tech landscape, you should definitely check out the Talent Tech Labs ecosystem.

We also want to hear from you! Let us know what questions you have about AI and hiring, and we’ll try to incorporate that in the coming weeks. Just respond to this email or find us (@wadeandwendy) on social media 🙂

This was excerpted from the 4-15-2021 RAC Newsletter. Sign Up for the Newsletter here.