AI is disrupting a lot of industries and business sectors, and recruitment is no exception. In this blog post, we turn our attention to the advantages and disadvantages of AI in recruitment.
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The Advantages of AI in Recruitment
Maybe you’re responsible for the HR department in your company or maybe you don’t have enough resources to sift through all the resumes and applications that make it all the way to your software development team. Applicant Tracking Software (or ATS) is nothing new, in fact, it’s been around for quite some time.
Historically, these solutions used simple keyword-matching parsers to surface candidates which matched your particular recruitment requirements – but artificial intelligence is changing this.
What follows are some of the advantages that AI can bring to your hiring process.
Process Optimization
It’s safe to say that any form of automation is going to optimize any given process and deploying AI solutions into your existing recruitment funnel is no exception to this rule!
While ATS can also help achieve this, AI takes it to a whole new level. For example, chatbots can be developed that let prospective candidates interact with your business before an interview is arranged.
The chatbot can be asked targeted questions in relation to skills and gather structured information from the candidate, all of which lets you drill down into the key areas before an interview is even arranged, thereby ensuring that you only invite candidates to interview whom you’re truly interested in.
By using a chatbot in this scenario, it frees up valuable time during the early stages of recruitment that can often be spent sifting through poorly written resumes and your business can spend more time interviewing quality candidates.
Improves application engagement
Slightly connected to the chatbot is engagement. An AI solution, whether it be a chatbot or virtual assistant can also help keep your prospective candidate engaged throughout your recruitment process.
Occasionally, recruiters can find that candidates take positions at other employers simply because of poor processes management or lack of updates from the position they are waiting to hear back from.
Artificial intelligence can help your business mitigate the chance of this happening by giving the user channels to interact with, whether it be something as simple as a text message or even Facebook Messenger that allows candidates to ask for updates in relation to their application, which stage they are at and so on, all of which improves the candidate’s experience, too!
Reducing Human Bias
Another benefit that AI can bring to your recruitment funnel is that of reducing the chance of human bias. Artificial intelligence doesn’t have feelings or judge humans on characteristics such as their gender or age, they only deal in data. This can help you hire candidates purely based on skill and merit and removes any chance of discrimination.
The Disadvantages of AI in Recruitment
OK, we’ve looked at some of the great benefits that artificial intelligence can bring to your recruitment process. Now it’s time to look at some of the disadvantages that AI in recruitment can have.
Accuracy and reliability
Whilst advancement in artificial intelligence has no doubt come a long way, it’s still not an exact science and the results can sometimes be inaccurate.
Incomplete training data that doesn’t truly represent your pool of applicants or problem domain can skew results. In fact, Amazon recently had an issue with their internal AI-powered recruitment solution and had to shut it down!
Couple this with the fact that text analytics algorithms can be confused by formatting options and you might miss quality candidates simply because they choose to format their resume in a different layout or font.
Dependency on keywords and trickery
Whilst AI in recruitment is the next evolution from regular keyword matching ATS systems, keyword pattern matching is used at some level.
For example, training data (“c#”,”sql” and so on) might be used to form a corpus that represents “developer”, this could then be supplied to a Bayesian Classifier which is then responsible for predicting how suitable candidates are for development positions. Dishonest candidates could trick the classifier by supply specific phrases or keywords.
Lack of human judgment
As the machine only ever deals with data, it’s very difficult for it to identify softer signals such as personality, personal interests, character and work ethic. These are all important factors that businesses can value.
For example, maybe your business is looking to diversify its workforce, such as introducing younger people, the machine probably won’t be able to identify which graduates have a solid work ethic.
Although there is no such thing as bias-free, evaluating AI interview pros and cons is crucial. It’s in situations like this where human judgment is required and face-to-face interview needs to take place.
Examples of Recruitment Software that use AI
We’ve taken the time to find some examples of AI-powered recruitment software that you might find interesting. You’ll see there are different implementations when it comes to deploying artificial intelligence in the recruitment industry.
Arya
Ayra is a solution that “analyzes resumes, profiles, and information on the web, data uncovers candidates’ stories — creating an understanding of their background, to their tenure at different jobs, to the growth in the companies they have worked for. Each piece of data aligns to relay valuable insight into the characteristics, qualities, performance, and skills of a candidate.”
You can read more about Arya here.
Mya
Whilst Arya is more concerned in data mining, Mya, on the other hand, is a “conversation engine” that “leverages state-of-the-art natural language understanding and machine learning techniques to deliver the industry’s most robust and engaging conversational experience. Through open-ended, natural and dynamic conversations, Mya is able to gather deep candidate insights and build trust and confidence with its users.
Find out more about Mya here.
Paradox Olivia
Finally, Paradox Olivia is positioned as a “candidate capture and screening solution” that boasts more than a 90% completion rate. It’s able to do this by engaging with candidates through multiple channels such as mobile, web and social! It can also provide the next steps and automatically route “hot” candidates to the relevant department or recruiter.
You can find out more about Paradox Olivia here.
Summary
In this article, we’ve looked at some of the advantages and disadvantages of AI in recruitment. We’ve seen how AI can help improve your recruitment processes, improve candidate engagement and even help reduce bias throughout the recruitment funnel.
We’ve also looked at some of the disadvantages of AI has, such as its dependency on training data, potentially inaccurate results and lack of human judgment.
We’ve also given you some examples of recruitment software that leverages artificial intelligence that you might want to check out.
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