Is trusted AI the best step forward in recruiting?

The tighter the talent market, the harder it is for businesses to grow. The risks of not being able to hire pose a serious threat to your bottom line. On the flip side, the risk of successfully hiring the wrong person can be even greater.

Forty-one percent of Canadian employers had a hard time finding the skills they needed in 2018. Those stats jump for organizations of 250 or more employees, where nearly 60% reported talent shortages last year alone. From sales representatives to engineers, the lack of talent is an important issue for companies otherwise enabled with a growth agenda and an appetite for success. That’s not about to change any time soon.

The talent you hire is at once your greatest potential asset, and most significant possible risk. Trusting, without verifying, someone’s credentials and reputation at face value don’t help. But in a market short on talent, and long on internal staffing struggles, getting the vetting process right can feel like an uphill battle.

Recruitment is long. Interviews take time. Negotiations are complex. Move beyond that stage to on-boarding and training — which play big parts in the ultimate success of your team — and your investment surges.

Diving in without the full picture of who you’re hiring can mean starting the ball rolling all over again days, months or even years in. Factor in the reputational damage that would have occurred in the meantime, and the potential costs only grow.

Ensuring your team is enabled with the best possible tools to succeed in the proper evaluation of talent can be a factor in your future success.

New technology (and trusted AI in particular) has major potential to help recruitment and HR teams to level down those risks, and level up the chances of finding the right candidates, faster.

Still, it’s hard to know where to start. Technology is changing quickly; change can be intimidating. In a tough talent market like ours, refreshing the way you vet and hire talent now can send positive ripple effects throughout an organization for years to come. Automating key elements of your recruitment process doesn’t just ensure you’re getting a more fulsome understanding of the people you’re hiring. It can mean a team that might already be stretched is truly positioned for best and highest use (not mired in the weeds of hit-or-miss online searches and fact-checking).

The first step to embracing the possibilities new tech represents is being open to what’s out there. Keeping these three principles in mind as you explore the options can help:

1. Empowering the human touch with powerful AI can give you a clearer picture. Getting technology working behind the scenes to vet candidates through online and digital aggregation of their public profiles can generate a more comprehensive snapshot than a human alone. Pairing those results with your team’s keen ability to assess information gathered through high-touch technology helps you pull the real story from the reams of data out there, and ensure you’re making fact-based, bias-free decisions at every stage of the hiring cycle.
2. Uncovering new opportunities to free up your team’s time can move them away from the mundane and into the meaningful. Natural language processing (NLP) gives new meaning to the research phase of the recruitment process. AI can pull more results, faster, than a human can. Which means instead of spending hours online wondering if you’re vetting the right Jennifer Smith, your team can focus on the big picture — like whether Jennifer’s cultural and skills are a good match for your organization. What could’ve taken a human hours or days to cull from basic internet searches can now be accomplished in minutes. And that provides your team with a more meaningful work experience.
3. Making the most of technology with baked in privacy-by-design capabilities speaks volumes to your organization’s brand. Recruitment is the first way a potential candidate will experience your organization. You don’t want it to be the last interaction you have. Processes that feel clunky, or unsecure, have the potential to turn good candidates off in a market where talent has the upper hand. Show external audiences that your company walks a leading-edge employer of choice that takes privacy and confidentiality seriously. By opting for tools that speed the hiring process up while making it safer than ever for candidates to respond and participate, you can say a lot about your business. Showing you respect privacy and protect confidentiality can set you apart in the eyes of top talent.