Recruiting Gets a Boost from AI

While artificial intelligence is often hyped beyond reality, AI-powered recruitment software is actually offering real advantages to businesses.

Companies have the ability to use AI to automatically crawl the web for the specific kind of job seekers they need, auto-interview those people via text chat or video on-the-spot and then auto-schedule the most promising job candidates for follow-up interviews.

Still other AI solutions can search out and engage passive candidates—people with valuable skills and experience but who are currently not on the job market. And other apps enable businesses to automatically rifle through resumes submitted at their business website for candidates who have the precise qualifications they’re seeking.

Sales Recruiters based in Salem, for example, uses AI-powered software from Kortivity to rapidly sift through resumes on file to find candidates. “If we have a candidate that has all the key traits we’re looking for, we can use the AI to find other candidates in our database that match that same profile,” says Henry Glickle, president of Sales Recruiters.

An increasing number of recruiting tools are also adding AI algorithms designed to ensure that diversity and inclusion are among the cornerstones of a company’s hiring practices.

These AI tools come at a time when job seekers have the upper hand. Businesses looking to attract top talent “must change their recruiting efforts,” to include AI, says Evan Sohn, CEO of Recruiter.com, an AI-driven recruiting service.

Kevin Parker, CEO of HireVue, another candidate interviewing tool that uses AI, says the pandemic has “created a unique opportunity for employers to redesign their hiring processes—leveraging technology that complements the capability of employees at a speed and scale not otherwise possible.”  

What’s in the Marketplace
There are many tools that use AI to automate much of the employee recruiting process, especially for companies seeking younger, entry-level candidates who tend to live online and on social media:

• Textio (textio.com), an AI editor that ensures the wording of job ads and descriptions is inclusive and encourages diversity.

• Talvista (talvista.com) uses AI to help ensure ads and job descriptions steer clear of disenfranchising applicants due to race, ethnicity or disability.

• Paradox (paradox.ai) makes a conversational AI text chatbot, which interviews job candidates on your website or other digital property and then schedules the best prospects for a follow-up interview.

• VCV AI (vcv.ai) screens resumes and reaches out to candidates to offer an online chat or phone call as an interview format. It can make hundreds of calls per minute. And it uses voice recognition technology to “talk” with job candidates and relay details about the job opening.

• Clovers (clovers.ai) is an AI-powered video interviewing platform designed to integrate into commonly used video meeting software, including Zoom, Google Hangouts and Webex. In practice, the interview feels like a typical video meeting and includes a highlight reel that Clovers generates featuring key takeaways from each interview.

• HireVue (hirevue.com) is a video and/or text interviewing tool that uses AI to evaluate applicants during the interview.  Its Builder tool enables HR to create structured interviews designed to mine for the key skills.

• Entelo (entelo.com) has an AI-driven web crawler that searches the web, including LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, to find candidates. Entelo also automatically sorts, analyzes and ranks a candidate’s eligibility for an open position across several attributes, including job title, work history, skills, likeliness to leave, their current role and more. Promising candidates are directly contacted by Entelo either automatically or on a schedule designed by your HR department.

• ZipRecruiter (ziprecruiter.com) offers an AI component to find the most promising candidates on its board. The feature studies how employers in specific industries rate the people applying for work in that industry on ZipRecruiter. Those insights are used to find the traits, skills and other characteristics exhibited by highly rated candidates and looks for those same characteristics in new candidates.

• Arya (goarya.com) studies the successful traits, skills and characteristics of people who are already employed at the business and then crawls the web for job candidates who exhibit similar profiles. Arya uses written performance reviews, the speed at which specific employees are promoted and the length of time they stay at your business among its metrics.

• HiringSolved (try.hiringsolved.com) puts a major focus on enabling businesses to maintain a running analysis on the job applications they have on-hand. It also features search tools to drill down into that database to find the best prospects for any given job. HiringSolved also auto-notifies the HR department in advance when the contracts for key people are up for renewal.

AI Caveats
While AI may be great for initial candidate searches and pre-screening of job candidates, you’ll most likely find the human factor still is critical to a quality hire.

“It’s important that those tools, like any technology solution, complement the human element of a business,” says Ted Darling, owner of Manchester-based Systems Engineering, an IT services and security firm. “There are aspects of a candidate that AI tools can ignore or under-prioritize—workplace culture fit, team cohesion and assessment of critical and creative thinking skills.”

Sales Recruiting’s Glickle agrees, noting that some AI recruiting tools may not work in all circumstances: “Most of my clients are looking for passive candidates—people who already have jobs—[who] may not want to interview with an AI chatbot.”

Meanwhile, some advocates of equal opportunity in employment argue that algorithms powering some of these AI solutions could result in biased hiring. Biases, which may exist consciously, subconsciously or unconsciously in the minds of computer programmers, have a way of creeping into the code they write.

Companies need to ensure that any AI or automation tools they use comply with U.S. federal employment laws.

“Artificial intelligence and algorithmic decision-making tools have great potential to improve our lives, including in the area of employment,” says Charlotte A. Burrows, chair of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission: “At the same time, the EEOC is keenly aware that these tools may mask and perpetuate bias or create new discriminatory barriers to jobs. We must work to ensure that these new technologies do not become a high-tech pathway to discrimination.”