How AI Will Change Hiring
This is an executive summary of an article written for the LinkedIn Talent blog. You can read the full article here.
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The unveiling of tools like Open AI’s ChatGPT, Google Bard, and Microsoft’s new Bing have certainly meant one thing: Everyone is talking about how generative AI may change the way we work.
For talent professionals, this raises a lot of questions: How will advances in AI affect talent acquisition jobs? And how will the automation of some tasks transform the skills recruiters need?
While it will take time and experimentation before all of the answers are clear, we spoke with talent leaders and industry experts to get their perspective on how AI will change hiring in the next five to 10 years – and on what recruiting teams can do to prepare.
Jo-Ann Feely, global managing director of innovation at the talent solutions firm AMS, may have summed up our conversations with talent leaders best: “AI is going to revolutionize the whole TA industry.”
Most talent teams already use some form of AI in their hiring process today.
“The recruiting industry has been a fairly early adopter of using different AI tools,” says Jennifer Shappley, VP of talent at LinkedIn, “Whether that be through chatbots or other ways to help improve the candidate experience and the overall efficiency of the recruiting process.” This includes those day-to-day tasks of answering candidate questions, scheduling interviews, and optimizing job posts.
AI has become increasingly beneficial in aiding recruiters in sourcing candidates.
LinkedIn Recruiter has been continually updated with features to help hirers find potential candidates for them based on skills, shared values, and how and where people want to work.
In a recent Talent Blog post, Glen Cathey, a thought leader in recruiting and HR tech, speaks to how GAI specifically can help tackle recruiting fundamentals like writing job descriptions, assisting with candidate outreach, writing Boolean search strings, and generating potential interview questions.
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In our Future of Recruiting 2023 report, two-thirds of hirers surveyed in February 2023 said they were “Very hopeful” or “Cautiously optimistic” about the impact of GAI on recruiting and how it can save them time.
As AI continues to evolve and automate day-to-day tasks, recruiters may be able to take a lot of repetitive things off their plates and focus on the more human aspects of recruiting.
“You’re going to see more recruiters adopting AI into their existing processes,” Jennifer Shappley says, “Because they’re going to get more comfortable in the ways that it actually makes their job easier.”
Recruiters will become increasingly important for outbound recruiting.
While AI promises to make recruiting more efficient, there are also concerns.
“But the broader message is that recruiters who become fluent in AI and leverage the tools to free up more time for the human aspects of recruiting will continue to lead talent efforts through the rest of the decade.”
“That’s especially true when it comes to outbound recruiting. While GAI can assist in outreach to potential candidates, Glen Cathey believes human involvement is still important. “If you’re on the receiving end,” he says, “I think there’s a different perception of having completely robotic outreach rather than a human being reaching out to you, showing genuine interest, and listening to you.
“A skilled recruiter can convert the conversation from ‘Why are you reaching out to me? I’m not looking‘ to ‘Actually, I’d like to be considered for that job.'”.
“Focusing on skills and past experience and performance,” says Stacy Donovan Zapar, founder of The Talent Agency, “Is a much more accurate predictor of success and will lead to stronger, more diverse teams that have both the breadth and depth of skills to deliver.”
Many of the experts we interviewed believe that the recruiter role will transform and possibly become more specialized.
“You’re going to see more fluidity in the recruiter role,” Jennifer Shappley says.
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“You’re going to see recruiters looking at areas of the talent space and HR functions where they can specialize.”
Some recruiters may be focused on DEI while others may become internal mobility advisors, helping employees navigate their next roles within a company.
Hung Lee, a recruiting industry influencer and editor of the talent business newsletter Recruiting Brainfood, predicts that even the name of the role could change, from talent acquisition to “Something like talent delivery or talent fulfillment.” He explains that a business may have a problem to solve or a skill that they need, and that recruiters will “Go in and deliver those skills, whether they find them internally or externally.”
The most successful recruiters will lean into their soft skills.
As much as recruiters will need tech skills in the future, their very human soft skills will become more important than ever.
While some companies may try to automate more of the hiring process, especially for roles for which there is an abundant labor supply, companies will increasingly rely on recruiters‘ soft skills for roles where labor is in short supply.
“It’s almost like the service you experience in executive search will become the standard in recruiting,” Jo-Ann Feely says, “Because that depth of understanding – of what skills are needed, what the team makeup should be, and whether the manager might be willing to hire someone with 60% or 70% of the skills needed – will become even more important.”
If there’s one thing our experts agree on, it’s that talent leaders need to upskill both themselves and their teams on how to use AI efficiently now.
“Talent leaders really need to take a few days to just dive into these tools so that they can be making decisions from a position of knowledge and not theory,” Hung Lee says.
Because this is a time of experimentation, Glen Cathey adds, talent teams should be doing “Some serious A/B testing” to see if AI actually drives better outcomes.
He cautions that it could take more than a year to do this right – asking questions such as “How does this affect the quality of hire?” and “What if the quality of hire goes down?” – and that recruiters would be wise to raise their hands and get involved.
“It needs to be very thoughtful,” Glen explains, “And teams are going to have to look at not just the ROI and cost savings, but what is the impact to applicant, candidate, and talent experience?” He suggests that you look at the impact on the experience, time to hire, or other metrics your company uses to gauge the efficacy of your hiring process.
Offer recruiters additional training on skills that will be essential.
As we mentioned above, soft skills will become increasingly important for recruiters.
“We’ve been really focused for a while on these core skills that we think make a really great recruiter,” Jennifer Shappley says.
She predicts that organizations will put extra effort into how they train recruiters and that training will focus less on process and more on soft skills such as negotiating, influencing, and telling a story.
They’re also learning how to recruit and assess AI talent and recently asked a few of their more AI-savvy recruiters to build a training course that was shared with the entire team.
“It’s not enough for a few folks in TA to understand what great AI talent looks like,” she says.
It’s still early in the adoption of GAI, and most talent teams have just begun to experiment, figuring out what works and what doesn’t and how it can improve the hiring process.
“I think the main thing is really encouraging leaders to get back to what their purpose is in recruiting and remembering the experiences they want to be creating,” Jennifer says.
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