AI Recruiting vs Human Recruiters

Employee recruitment is a crucial activity for any successful business. In a competitive hiring market, finding efficient, cost-effective recruitment methods have become more important than ever. It's estimated that the average cost per hire of a new employee is $4,129, and it takes around 42 days to fill an open position. For a company with many vacant roles to fill, these empty positions represent lost production, more expenses, and the potential to miss out on the most experienced candidates. 

The introduction of tools that utilize artificial intelligence (AI) to eliminate repetitive tasks and save time during the recruiting process brings many companies hope. However, there is rising concern and public distrust surrounding AI recruitment tools. To decide whether such tools are the right choice for your organization, it's important to know the facts about how AI affects recruitment and where humans fit into the equation.

How Will AI Affect Recruitment?

AI recruiting provides organizations with a way to automate many of the time-consuming, repetitive tasks during the hiring process. A Gartner Recruiting Efficiency Survey revealed that 25% of today's candidates apply for 10 or more jobs. This leaves talent acquisition specialists facing 39% more applications for every position, and as much as 72% of these candidates are a poor fit (underqualified) for the position. 

There's no doubt that the extra work of examining more applications and weeding out poor-fit candidates leads to a slower process for HR professionals. Yet, many employers fail to realize the impact of this stagnant process on qualified candidates. 

When weeks pass without contact from a potential employer, candidates often move on. In fact, 83% of employers report being ghosted by candidates they were interested in hiring, and 13% of potential employees reveal the reason they discontinued contact was poor communication.

AI Improves Efficiency in Recruitment

When recruiting professionals are forced to examine piles of applications, and schedule one-on-one interviews and conduct reference checks on each candidate the process slows to a crawl. This can lead to disengaged candidates and limited time for face-to-face interaction. 

AI (artificial intelligence) and ML (machine learning) software can eliminate repetitive tasks in these ways:

• Recruitment through AI engagement and candidate referral networks, like Crosschq’s Recruit, attract qualified, active candidates for vacant positions.
• Automated pre-hire reference checks can help filter candidates with the proper qualifications to fill the role.
• Data tracking offers employers specific information pre-and post-hire to help build an efficient and successful recruiting process, such as providing insights into where bottlenecks are in the recruiting funnel. 
  
  

AI Increases Engagement in Recruitment

Overtasked HR employees have limited time to respond individually to the deluge of candidates who apply for a single position. When more candidates apply for each position, the hiring process slows to a crawl. 

According to Gartner research, this slower process causes a 16% reduction in candidates accepting offers. An automated communication process can help keep candidates in the loop so that they know they're still in the running for the position.

Recruiters can benefit from AI in recruitment by:

• Being proactive with their hiring strategies
• Spending more time building quality relationships with candidates, ensuring a good job and culture match when recruiting 
• Closing the loop with hiring managers, using data to show their KPIs

AI Yields Better Results in Recruitment

While technological advances reduce cumbersome manual tasks and increase production across every industry, they also require frequent changing skill sets from new employees. This makes it more difficult for employers to understand which qualifications are most valuable in certain positions. 

With Crosschq Analytics, you can conduct regular evaluations based on standardized measurements in order to ensure that employees are meeting performance benchmarks, as well as being happy and engaged. Tracking this data can help recruitment teams decide which recruitment methods are working best.

Will AI Take Over Recruitment?

What AI Recruitment Tools Can Do:

• Engage candidates
• Complete employee pre-screening
• Collect essential data
• Provide qualified referrals
• Give feedback

What AI Recruitment Tools Can Not Do:

• Conduct one-on-one interviews
• Choose a candidate
• Interpret the value of soft skills

Consider the way that internet searches and job boards give candidates the means to find multiple vacant positions that they can apply for at once – technology improves the job search, but the human candidate must take the final steps to communicate with employers and land the job. 

AI recruiting simply describes the use of tools that efficiently complete data-centric tasks to free up time for recruiters to spend communicating with qualified candidates. Instead of eliminating recruiting jobs, AI recruiting works to improve the entire hiring process for both employers and qualified job seekers.

How To Integrate AI Recruiting into Your Hiring Process

Like all tools, AI recruiting software must be used responsibly to create an ethical process that decreases the time, human effort, and costs continually burdening the recruitment process. Much of the resistance surrounding AI recruiting is due to a lack of understanding about the process and limited transparency from potential employers. 

Use these tips to help qualified candidates feel comfortable with the use of AI recruitment tools in your hiring process:

• Provide easy-to-find information about how the process works and request a signature for consent.
• Offer access to case studies, statistics, or other data-driven information that shows why the tools benefit candidates.
• Share how algorithms eliminate unconscious bias during the hiring process.
• Create points of contact during the process to keep qualified candidates engaged.
• Customize the system to provide specific criteria for qualified employees.

When addressing the best methods for recruitment, the question is not whether you should use AI recruiting or human recruiters. Instead, companies should decide how the two can best be used together. 

AI recruiting allows employers to reach more candidates who might otherwise know about the position and eliminates applicants who are not qualified. The result is a faster, more successful process that allows human recruiters to spend more time actively engaging with qualified candidates to choose the most qualified employee for the role. 

The data collected during this process even shows promise for creating improved recruiting processes in the future.

Partner With Crosschq for AI Solutions

Crosschq creates data-centered software designed to enable companies to gather information on prospective candidates, screen and source new talent, and onboard new hires more efficiently and effectively to improve the quality of hire.

Schedule a demo to learn more about how AI recruiting strategies can help you gain access to more candidates, streamline your recruitment process, and make better quality hires.