AI and recruitment: how much can a bot really do?

The rapid digital transformation over the last couple of years has seen AI become commonplace in many industries, and recruitment is no exception. 

AI can make the recruitment process more efficient by handling time-consuming tasks like interview scheduling or candidate screening. It also powers chatbots that can be available night and day to answer candidate questions, which are often a huge time sink for human recruiters.

With over 1,000,000 job vacancies in the UK just between June and August this year, employers are caught up in a cut-throat war for talent, and it’s particularly hard to keep the attention of good candidates who have the pick of the opportunities. AI can help here too, enabling candidates to get their questions answered, get screened, and get interviews scheduled immediately, without waiting for human staff.

Controversially, AI can also use algorithms to widen the talent pool by analysing people’s online presence, determining the kind of roles they might be interested in, and showing them targeted job ads, similar to how ads for the last product you looked at online follow you around the internet.

The controversy here is that without active efforts towards inclusivity, AI can replicate human bias. Facebook was recently accused of breaching equality legislation after campaign group Global Witness showed that Facebook job ads for mechanics were seen almost exclusively by men, and ads for nursery nurses by women. If you train an AI on gender-biased data, you get a sexist AI.

However, AI in recruitment has undoubted benefits. Rather than replacing human interaction, it will complement it, tackling routine tasks to speed up the candidate’s experience and free up the recruiter to focus on the more nuanced parts of the job that require contextual understanding and empathy.