Whether you’re looking for a new job, or you’re being sought out by a recruiter to fill an exciting open position, odds are AI is highly influencing the decision-making process. AI helps determine what job opportunities you see on LinkedIn or other job platforms, and it helps recruiting teams streamline everything from posting positions, evaluating candidates, matching skills to jobs, and even interviewing. And it does it lightning fast: what used to take days or weeks for human recruiters now can be performed by AI in a matter of seconds.
The Evolving Role of AI in Recruitment
Today’s job search platforms like LinkedIn, Monster, Indeed, and others are using AI at an increasing rate to streamline an otherwise tedious manual process for recruiters. The ultimate goal of these sites, of course, is to match qualified candidates with available positions. They do so by employing AI-powered recommendations algorithms (or matching engines) to curate a list of recommendations for each search. Recruiters are said to be able to scan a resume in seconds, but AI can reduce that time to milliseconds.
AI technologies are being applied in other interesting segments of the recruiting experience. Conducting an interview became a big challenge during the Covid-19 pandemic, for example, leading to a number of companies like Curious Thing to release AI-powered interviews that help engage candidates using voice-based conversational AI. Other hiring companies today might even request a candidate to play dan AI-powered video game that evaluates personality traits to see if you’ll be a good fit for different roles.
How AI in Recruitment Helps Companies
There is a special nuance to recruiting, so AI will never replace recruiters, of course. But it will improve how fast and how well recruiters can do their job, and that has financial and productivity implications for any hiring organization. Areas that AI can help include:
- Lowering Time to Hire: Matching candidates with specific roles can be a tedious task, so AI can help address this critical metric. Up to 40 percent of a recruiter’s time is spent on manual tasks like entering data into an applicant tracking system (ATS) or just reviewing resumes, time that is much better spent on the human aspect of building candidate relationships and improving the hiring experience.
- Improving Quality of Hire: Finding the absolute “right” candidate for any role is of paramount importance, and the devil is in the details. AI plays an important role in instantly searching through a huge data pool to match skills or attributes with jobs. The more a recruiter uses the AI engine, the faster AI learns on what an exact match looks like to improve prospective candidate quality.
- Pursuing Passive Candidates: AI is very useful in the recruitment of what’s known as “passive candidates,” or those who are not actively looking for a job. The talent pool is massive for this group (it’s pretty much everyone out there not in the job search), so AI can quickly zoom in on great candidates, whether they’re looking or not.
How LinkedIn Uses AI in Recruitment
LinkedIn in particular has been boosting its development of AI and machine learning to improve the overall experience for its users and customers, including:
- Job Matching: An AI-powered personalization tool that matches jobs and candidates has led to a 30 percent increase in job applications. Members receive highly targeted employment recommendations on their home page, or suggestions on connecting with other professionals in their field.
- Better Emails: AI can help improve a recruiter’s ability to reach out and engage a candidate with the right email messaging and content. Each message now sent is twice as likely to become a hire with the help of AI, and the number of two-way conversations (a vital part of recruiting engagement) has doubled.
- Overcoming Bias: It’s an unfortunate phenomenon, but ranked lists produced by an AI algorithm can sometimes inadvertently result in unintended bias, including gender bias. For example, men are more likely to apply for jobs beyond their qualifications, whereas women tend to pursue jobs that directly match the requirements. To address the issue, a new algorithm was developed to counteract recommendations skewed toward a particular group, resulting in a better distribution of users across gender.
- Internal Development: LinkedIn even developed a new AI tool to unify scattered AI workflows for its developers that use many different AI platforms for data analysis and collaboration. The unified tool called “Darwin” (Data science and Artificial intelligence Workbench at LinkedIn) enables data scientists, AI engineers, data analysts, business analysts, and even product managers to work together.
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Conclusion: AI in Recruitment Is Just Getting Started
Like many fields, AI is streamlining critical processes in recruiting to improve the speed, quality and satisfaction of both recruiters and job seekers. And at places like LinkedIn, there is a growing demand for AI engineers and data scientists that can put skills to work to build and expand amazing professional networks.
