What’s your biggest concern when it comes to recruiting? If you’re like nearly 40 percent of talent leaders, you use quality of hire as the top metric for measuring your recruitment team’s performance. After all, recruitment isn’t just about filling empty jobs—it’s about filling them with the best-fit candidates for your company. One of the biggest trends in talent acquisition—artificial intelligence, or AI for short—can help you get more quality hires, more quickly, with big benefits to your recruitment team along the way. Here are the three huge ways AI drives you to hire candidates who will help contribute to your company’s success:
1. Powerful AI targeting tools get you in front of quality candidates.
Want to improve quality of hire? Then you need to get specific—and AI allows you to do that, easily.
Persona-based targeting powered by AI can get you in front of specific target audiences so you can tailor your messaging to the best candidates. Instead of casting out “one size fits all” employer branding messaging—which, let’s be real, doesn’t exist—you can create hyper-specific messages that resonate with your best candidates, whom you’ve identified through data-driven artificial intelligence.
AI doesn’t just help you identify and initially reach your ideal candidates—it helps you nurture relationships with them, too, through behavior-based recruitment marketing. Through AI, you can target candidates who have already shown interest in your employer brand by tracking the behaviors candidates take, such as visiting your employer website or clicking on an ad. For example, if a candidate visits your employer website to learn more about your company, AI allows you to track them and then automatically serve up relevant content on other channels such as social media and other websites. This omni-channel approach to recruitment marketing that’s focused on quality of hire ensures that your employer brand stays top of mind with top candidates.
What’s more, by helping candidates learn about your brand through personalized retargeting, AI allows them to determine for themselves whether your company is the right fit for them—so you get more applications from truly enthusiastic, best-fit candidates.
By matching your with best-fit candidates and familiarizing them with your employer brand through retargeting campaigns, AI does something BIG for recruiters—it serves up higher-quality candidates who are already interested in your company. So when recruiters form 1:1 relationships with these candidates, they know that they’re now working with knowledgeable candidates who have been primed for an enjoyable recruiting experience. Imagine initiating a personal recruiter-candidate relationship with that kind of confidence. It allows you to take the candidate relationship further and faster, thus accelerating time to hire.
2. AI automatically sifts through applicant resumes to match you with the highest-quality candidates.
Ask any recruiter what the most menial, mind-numbing part of the job is, and they’re likely to answer, “sifting through resumes.” In fact, 52 percent of talent acquisition leaders say candidate screening is the toughest part of recruitment. Yet, strategic screening is crucial for companies concerned with quality of hire. If only there was a way to automate this universally reviled part of a recruiter's job …
Good news: There is, with—you guessed it—artificial intelligence! AI technology pinpoints quality hires amid all your resumes using algorithmic scoring systems. As Ji-A Min explains, writing at ERE Media, “When 75-88% of the resumes you receive are unqualified, it’s easy to see why resume screening is the most frustrating and time-consuming part of recruiting. ... AI for resume screening automates a low-value, repetitive task and allows recruiters to re-focus their time on higher value priorities such as talking and engaging with candidates to assess their fit.”
Again, you see how AI saves time and, therefore, shifts recruiters’ responsibilities back toward where their talent is really needed: 1-on-1 recruiter-candidate relationships. Not only does AI take the time-consuming, soul-sucking task of resume screening off of the recruiter’s plate, but it also actually improves the process. Using AI scoring means you’re no longer “guessing” at best-fit candidates, and integrating AI removes human biases from the sorting process. In this way, recruiters aren’t the only ones who benefit from AI-driven resume screening—candidates do as well.
2. AI Powers Your ATS
Think about a typical ATS: You have a standard candidate view, but what if your best candidate is at the bottom? We’re talking hours of work your recruiter has in front of them in order to sift through that data to find the right candidate to engage. AI provides delivers actionable insights so your recruiters know where to start reviewing resumes and profiles. Remember, it’s not about the AI selecting the person, it’s about the AI telling the recruiter where they should start in the evaluating process. It’s like having a consultant telling you who is best for the job. The tool is saying, “this person is an ideal match and do you want to make them a lead? If so, you can run proactive email campaigns and personalized outreach to bring them in as applicants. Today one recruiter may have to use one solution to see applicants (who applied,) and another one to see leads (who expressed interest.) By having AI at the core of your solution, you can unify this experience and gain strategic recommendations you normally wouldn’t have.
To take advantage of the edge AI gives you in driving quality of hire, it can’t be treated as an unknown. We know exactly how AI gives recruiters a boost and which of its tactical elements you need to tap into to get it to work for your recruiting team. When you truly harness the power of AI, you benefit from sophisticated candidate targeting and job matching optimization. That, in turn, frees up your recruitment staff to focus on what matters—the 1:1 recruiter-candidate relationship.
