Integrating AI into Recruitment Can Be Beneficial for Companies Facing the Labor Crisis

Unemployment in the United States is at the lowest level (3.7 percent) in almost 50 years. However, while this shows the positive state, it also shows a shortage of key workers in some of the country’s biggest sectors, including construction, retail, hospitality, manufacturing and health care.

And with 60 percent of entrepreneurs surveyed by CareerBuilder saying they struggle to fill vacancies in a period of 12 weeks or even longer,  tight market is an expensive problem that needs to be resolved, quickly.

With many of these industries experiencing a boom, especially the construction sector, it is not uncommon for businesses to find that they cannot manage their teams well enough to follow expansion. So, companies that intend to grow quickly must stay one step ahead of their competitors. And that’s where artificial intelligence (AI) enters.

Integrating AI and chatbots into the high-volume recruitment process will help you get the people you need for your company, and get them faster than later. This technology promises to give you an edge over your competitors; let’s just say 85 percent of executives in a survey reported by MIT Sloan Management Review said they believed AI would help their companies maintain a competitive edge.

So you can’t wait. This is how AI can make a direct impact on your recruitment needs.

Chatbots speed up the recruitment process:

Many blue-collar job applicants are likely to have a living salary for salary, and will take the fastest job they can get. This means you cannot have a slow recruitment process that is delayed at the time it takes for human employees to filter out resumes, contact candidates, and contact them with updates and answers to questions. In fact, integrating AI into the first phase of the recruitment process has been proven to increase recruiters’ productivity by 3.7 times.

With AI, the initial stages of the application process are maintained faster than those done by human recruiters: Chatbots are available for applicants 24/7, and can answer questions they may have about salaries, holidays and work schedules, among others.

Chatbot can also ask candidates all initial mandatory questions, such as questions about legal employment status, past experience and transportation needs, and immediately process this data. If the candidate is then approved, based on these formal criteria, he can be scheduled for an interview.

Think about how long this whole process is done when done by human recruiters who must spend time contacting each individual applicant and reviewing the person’s questions and responses one by one. So, if your industry lacks labor, and you need to recruit quickly, this is the way to do it.

AI can assess the quality of candidates better than humans:

By adding predictive-analytic components to your recruitment process, you will see how AI, in many cases, can assess how well a candidate is, and can do this better than what your current recruiters can do.

Ensuring that you get quality talent to fill your position will result in fewer employee turnover, greater cost savings, and more productivity in the future. And this is very important, considering that the costs of poor recruitment can be very large, and 69 percent of recruitment companies in one study reported making poor recruitment decisions based on a flawed interview process.

Predictive analytics, on the other hand, can process data about previous and current employees, then find correlations between the best performance indicators and individual applicants.

From here, they can make predictions about whether a candidate will last long in the company and even be promoted. AI can also confirm the skills of a candidate based on concrete data points, while humans often make excessive qualifications of candidates based on their descriptions.

AI can even be used to attract more people to apply for roles that you need to fill, by finding the right partner online, and putting your company’s work opportunities in front of them.

Of course, AI is not perfect: Leaving recruitment decisions for predictive analysis to be handled alone without human input has resulted in unfair biases related to gender and race in some cases. That is why it is important to review the demographics of the people you employ to ensure that everyone is given a fair chance, and that AI is not inclined to stay away from groups such as women or ethnic minorities.

Chatbots can eliminate human bias:

Members of your Acquisition Talent team may believe that they are aware of an unintentional bias or not, but in the end, people with disabilities are in their ability to be completely impartial when they choose new employees.

Again, that’s where AI comes in. Any decision that might be influenced by prejudice on race, age or sex is eliminated once this technology takes over the pre-interview recruitment process.

Because your AI scans the demographic information of applicants, intelligence can be programmed to specifically not allow these demographic points to be used in any decisions made about candidates. In this way, diversity in the workplace can be increased; and that alone has proven to have many benefits, including increasing the number of your workforce.

In fact, 58 percent of candidates surveyed by Allegis said they did not mind interacting with chatbots in the first stage of the recruitment process. And this high percentage bodes well in terms of making AI more a household concept and less related to science fiction films.