Very few things in a business context are as important as building the right team. And very few things are as tedious as finding the people who make the team “right”.
So, for the longest time, we’ve seen new products being built to make this process less painful. With AI being the buzzing technology over the last year and a half, the natural question is whether it can be a powerful force in the hiring industry too.
To understand that, we can start by breaking the hiring process down into 3 important parts: Sourcing talent, evaluating them, and making the final match. Slowly but surely innovative AI solutions are being developed for each phase.
As a company, you need to learn how to leverage AI to achieve better hiring outcomes. So, let’s do that.
Ease of access to quality talent
It all starts by sourcing relevant talent. The first obvious development in the past decade is companies being able to find candidates across the globe through various online talent networks. What’s more, you even get access to passive candidates (those not actively looking for jobs).
Over time, the problem has gradually moved from “lack of talent” to “lack of access to relevant talent”. Here’s where AI is beginning to provide some game-changing solutions.
Firstly, it saves a serious amount of time by performing the initial filtering by analyzing resumes against the job description of a role. Especially in engineering roles, where recruiters often struggle with technical jargon, AI holds a significant edge.
Thereafter, it helps keep the hiring pipeline healthy by keeping such candidates engaged through automated, contextual, and personalized communication & updates.
Together, companies only talk to relevant candidates while ensuring they are invested in the process.
Saving time & avoiding bias in evaluation
The obvious next step is to evaluate candidates on the skills required for a role. Unfortunately, in most companies a sizable amount of developer time goes in conducting these assessments, rather than in coding (what they were originally hired to do!).
In this regard, online assessment tools have helped companies reduce the time invested in the hiring process. This allows them to tap into a wider talent pool and find the right candidate for the role. AI is now improving this ability further.
Now, companies can interview candidates asynchronously by asking a certain set of questions which candidates answer through an audio or a video recording. Large Language Models (or LLMs) can then interpret these responses and shortlist candidates whose answers indicate a high degree of relevance to the role.
With fewer manual touch points in screening and shortlisting, the bonus advantage has been the decrease in human bias that creeps into any process.
However, over-reliance on such automation can be dangerous. Technology (in particular AI) has its shortcomings and does not provide 100% accuracy in evaluation. Therefore, the goal should be to tastefully use automation as an enabler, rather than the sole evaluator in the process.
Smartly handpicking the right candidate
The last step in hiring the “right” candidate is making the final choice from a smaller pool of candidates. The goal is to handpick the candidate who is the best fit taking into account all the parameters. This is where a purely manual process can get tricky.
Basically, one needs to review all the information gathered and provided by the candidate. This includes the resume, technical & cultural evaluation details and more.
AI can step in here. It can digest the information, including hour-long video transcripts of interviews, and provide key summary notes such that no important points are missed for any candidate. A score can be given against all parameters of the role, making the decision-making process easier too.
Overall, this not only decreases the load on recruiters but also makes the final selection a more thorough, objective and well-thought out decision.
Conclusion
The future of hiring is being rewritten by AI. A lot of the impact is quite positive. However, companies need to be cautious.
The role of AI should be as an enabler or an assistant, not to replace the recruiter or an engineer conducting the hiring process.
At its core, hiring will always be a people-to-people business.
