how will artificial intelligence affect your talent acquisition strategy?

According to the Harvard Business Review (HBR), about 44% of businesses are incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) in IT functions, and a further 19% use it to anticipate their customers’ future purchases and present relevant offers.

Companies are beginning to see the benefits of adopting AI in recruitment, with 96% of senior HR professionals believing AI has the potential to greatly enhance talent acquisition and retention. Here’s why.

1. AI helps predict employee success

Bringing the right people onboard is a major part of long-term business success. Employees are your company’s most important asset, so having a talent acquisition strategy in place will give you the foundation for ongoing success.

AI has the ability to establish what a successful employee in a specific position has done, and look for candidates with backgrounds and capabilities that match up with those workers. It can identify certain qualifications, educational history, work experience and other factors that suggest a candidate has the background to emulate the top performers at your organisation.

Chris Nicholson, co-founder and CEO of AI firm Skymind, told CIO that “The question everyone’s trying to answer through all the interviews, screenings, tech and coding challenges, is, ‘How can I predict someone’s performance?’”.

Explaining the importance of AI in talent acquisition, Nicholson said, “The smartest recruiters and hiring managers would start gathering resumes, performance reviews, work product, any information at all about highly successful people that already work for them and plug that into an algorithm to figure out what you are looking for. The system can then help distill and point them to the right candidates accordingly.”

2. AI boosts candidate engagement and performance

AI in recruitment can significantly improve candidate engagement through improved communication between candidates and employers. According to HireVue, the market leader in video interviewing and AI-driven video and game-based assessments, its system has increased quality of hire by up to 88% and new hire diversity by 55%.

This is because it performs a preliminary analysis of the candidate’s resume for cross-checking the skills, speeding up the recruitment and hiring process when there are many applicants for just one job opening.

Furthermore, analytics can allow HR managers to easily identify the activities that can have the maximum impact on the performance of the employee. The organisation can then direct their effort to the initiatives that would attract the maximum engagement level. They could also predict the red flags, for example, the employees who are underperforming, whether they are likely to perform better or worse in the future, and more. The managers could use the information they’ve gathered to plan the right strategy to improve the performance of their employees.

3. AI makes onboarding easier

AI also has a role to play in onboarding new starters. This is particularly relevant when it comes to providing new hires with the information they need to make their working lives easier in a remote working setting.

These systems can offer new employees a resource to turn to whenever they have questions. Whether they have queries regarding how to sign up for health insurance or where the conference room is, they just have to turn to the intelligent automated system to get an immediate answer instead of troubling HR and their other colleagues. It provides a central point to access the kind of information every employee will require, which would minimise confusion and leave workers less likely to feel overwhelmed.

AI developer Talla has explained the benefits of incorporating AI in the onboarding stage of the talent acquisition process. According to the firm, “An organisation needs to provide tools that support new hires throughout the onboarding process”. This lets hiring managers free up time for “connecting with a new hire in more meaningful ways”.

The main benefit of AI in recruitment is that it will save your organisation’s HR department time. These hours can then be spent working to solve more complicated issues that require a human’s creativity and, often, emotions - traits AI just can’t copy just yet.

Learn more about the HR technology we use at Randstad and how you can access them by working with us.