While the future of artificial intelligence in all fields including recruitment marketing is cloudy, to say the least, the big question right now is: can artificial intelligence help you attract more quality candidates, faster? As a talent acquisition professional, you’re already executing on a fleet of strategies to lure talent into your hiring funnel. And unlike your recruiting strategies further down the funnel (like at the point of phone screens and interviews), here at the very tip-top of your funnel, it’s crucial to get attention, make a good first impression, and efficiently target only the best candidates to move to the next step. That’s why it’s the perfect place to employ a little help from artificial intelligence.
Current AI capabilities and other automation tools can support your recruitment marketing efforts in a number of ways. They can help improve speed and efficiency, as well as the quality of your hires. The addition of AI tools gives employers an advantage that competitors may not have, thereby strengthening your employer brand. From sourcing and screening to chatbots and analytics, AI can enhance your recruitment marketing efforts and bring better results, fast.
Here is a closer look at five of the ways employers can benefit from using AI in recruitment marketing.
Better sourcing
Since sourcing is all about getting to the best candidates faster than your competition, AI’s uncanny ability to process magnitudes more information than humans and much faster can help improve sourcing efforts. AI sourcing tools enable recruiters to identify quality candidates exponentially faster, setting up a different playing field for the rest of the recruiting process.
And this includes passive candidates, who can evade some of the most sophisticated recruitment marketing strategies. As AI tools improve the candidate experience and employer brand, as I’ll explain shortly, you’re more likely to attract passive candidates into your funnel. And, as we predicted for the future (although certainly not this year), AI sourcing tools will eventually have the ability to go out and look for potential candidates, and engage with them, all without any involvement from a human recruiter.
But for now, AI sourcing tools have the ability to parse through tens of millions of online profiles and identify which candidates may be open to switching jobs, as well as identifying passive candidates who would be good targets for recruiting teams to contact.
Some of these tools are saving recruiters up to three hours each day on research that is now performed by the AI. This frees up your human recruiting team to spend more time building relationships and assessing the fit of quality candidates that will move forward to the next step.
Improve time-to-hire
Job seekers want to get to an offer quickly. Sixty-two percent of job seekers want the entire application and recruiting process to happen in two weeks or less. Implementing AI-powered tools into your recruitment marketing can help your team work directly toward this goal. For example, once you’ve driven qualified job seekers to your career site through your AI sourcing efforts, your efforts are all for naught unless you can engage these highly qualified candidates. A recruiting chatbot is just the solution you need. And the recruiting chatbot can improve time-to-hire by as much as 70 percent. The customers of many recruiting chatbot providers are realizing similar benefits: conversion rates increase, more connections are made, and more qualified candidates move forward.
This is due, in part, to being available the moment a job seeker needs any assistance at all. This could mean anything from addressing questions and issues to just making the job seeker feel as if they are important and highly sought after.. A recruiting chatbot helps more of the right job seekers complete an application which also means spending less time with the job seekers that are not the right fit for the job. The reasons job seekers abandon an application without completing it have been well documented. A recruiting chatbot is ready, around the clock, to answer basic questions that might have otherwise made the candidate decide to quit the application process.
Good fit for high volume hires? Not so fast.
Thanks to their speed and reliability, AI tools offer major benefits to employers that routinely hire large volumes of new employees. John Sumser, Principal Analyst at HR Examiner, agrees. “AI tools will be most useful for companies who are hiring large volumes of people,” he said in an interview with Rally. “The usefulness of AI tools is linked to how many of the same types of people you’re looking to hire. I think these companies are already starting to see success here with machine learning and natural language processing.”
That’s all true. But we also know that recruiting chatbots and their intelligence are still in the early stages of development. Some day, recruiting chatbots will be able to carry on a more natural and human-like conversation, but for now, they can play a consistent and important supporting role in the recruiting process. A recruiting chatbot helps a job seeker navigate through site options and open positions, guiding the conversation at each turn. This improves the candidate experience, while also helping target hard-to-find talent and maximizing efficiency for high volume employers.
More actionable insights
As with most aspects of any business, everything is a process and a progression. Through analytics, AI tools offer insights into job seekers’ behavior that talent acquisition leaders can use to fine tune their strategies, define more realistic goals, and more efficiently track their efforts. In fact, one of AI’s biggest contributions to the talent acquisition world overall is more effective decision-making through predictive analytics. Applying those benefits to the top of the funnel helps recruiting leaders see results faster, and more broadly.
Let’s pause to describe how this works. If we return to our AI sourcing tools example above, the artificial intelligence will start by crawling the web to find profiles of candidates that may seem like a good fit for the organization based on some preliminary conditions. But these conditions will be revised over time as the AI is trained to know which candidates became high performing and employees and which ones did not. And unlike its human counterparts, the AI can make these predictions based on millions of data points, meaning that the results will be that much more accurate.
Real results
At the end of the day, we realize AI-powered recruiting tools still don’t hold a candle to a human recruiter. But that’s a good thing. What AI does offer, though, is a way to extend our human workforce, expand its efforts, and meet quality candidates where they are. Starting right at the top of your hiring funnel, AI can be a valuable partner for your recruiting team.
For more about how chat is helping recruiters hire top talent faster, check out our Definitive Guide to Recruiting Chatbots or download our Chat Revolution Guide.
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