While we worry about artificial intelligence driving us into unemployment, a lot of job positions remain vacant and a large percentage of applicants never hear back from employers.
This is largely due to the inefficiency of the manual recruitment tools and processes, which make it extremely hard for employers to find the right candidates. Among problems that recruiters struggle with are company job boards and applicant tracking systems that fail to deliver, email threads that become unmanageable, resumes that get lost in the corporate hiring pipeline and online job posts that become cluttered with low quality applications.
Fortunately, developments in artificial intelligence have created a huge potential to fix the problems of antiquated hiring systems and accelerate the process to make recruiters more productive.
A handful of software vendors are incorporating AI algorithms into their tools in order to automate tasks such as examining resumes, sending follow up emails, or finding potential candidates for your company’s new vacancies.
Beamery, a candidate relationship management software, uses machine learning software to enhance its clients’ applicant tracking systems and build relationships with their candidates. Beamery searches across social media channels to find and parse information and fill the gaps in candidates’ profiles.
The company, which provides its service to Facebook and VMware among others, uses data mining algorithms to keep track of interactions between candidates and employers to find the best candidates to engage. The service can help companies scale their recruitment efforts without the need for large teams.
Alexander Mann Solutions, a recruitment outsourcing and consultancy services provider that made early investments in AI, creates profiles of candidates by processing their resumes and extracting information that is publicly available on the web. The company uses AI to analyze the data and determine which candidates are best suited for each job role.
ThisWay Global, another recruitment platform, has tried to incorporate AI while avoiding bias, a problem that exists in both humans and machines. ThisWay focuses on gathering skills data instead of identifiable information such as gender, race and age, and it uses that information to match the employer’s requirements.
Automating mundane tasks will help recruiters perform better by freeing up their time and enabling them to engage applicants at a more personal level.