what your HR team can gain from integrating generative AI in recruitment.

Today’s HR and recruitment leaders face a long list of challenges in their task of sourcing and hiring top talent. An ever-changing business and technology landscape makes long-term planning difficult, and even in the short term, an ongoing talent shortage makes it difficult to find qualified candidates. 

Factors like an aging workforce, the growth of highly-skilled jobs and historically low unemployment levels in many countries all contribute to the lack of qualified candidates actively looking for their next position.

Companies struggling with a shortage of talent find it difficult to solve their immediate needs, and risk stagnating over time.

The situation is so serious for some companies that 24% of global CEOs see the talent shortage as the main damaging factor to their business outlook, according to a 2024 Gartner survey of 500 business leaders across 40 countries.

Against this backdrop, leaders are looking for ways to boost their performance — and generative AI could be one of them.

With its impressive ability to analyze input and generate original answers, solutions and suggestions, generative AI tools have the potential to enhance recruiters’ existing abilities and streamline their daily work, allowing them to get more done.

Despite the potential of generative AI in recruiting, the same Gartner survey found:

• Only 22% of HR leaders say they are highly engaged in enterprise-wide discussions on generative AI
• 76% of HR leaders are concerned they will be lagging behind in organizational success if they don’t adopt and implement generative AI in the next 12 to 24 months.

In this article, we’ll take a look at the key gains a recruitment team can expect from exploring generative AI applications in their workflow — and hopefully inspire you to start testing the technology in your own recruitment process.

AI tools can boost efficiency in the recruitment team

However successful their teams are, most HR leaders are looking for ways to do more with their existing resources. Labor-saving AI tools could be the answer. According to a 2024 study from Indeed, 68% of HR decision makers think AI has the power to speed up the recruitment process, and many AI users would say they’re correct.

Whether they’re using general-purpose generative AI chat tools as a source of inspiration and virtual sounding board, or taking advantage of AI-powered functions built into their existing ATS, AI can boost a recruiter’s productivity and even remove simple, repetitive tasks from their schedule entirely.

That’s why almost a third of companies globally are considering or already using AI recruiting software and  natural language processing for support in their HR operations, according to IBM’s 2024 Global AI Adoption Index.

The skills shortage has recruiters everywhere looking for solutions that can enhance their success rate. But it’s affecting all industries — and leaving HR leaders with not enough talented recruiters to meet their current and future needs. So it’s not surprising that the same IBM report found that 41% of global enterprises are looking at integrating AI into their recruitment and HR operations as a way to mitigate the effects of the skills shortage

Recruiting is harder than ever, so any HR leader who wants to multiply their team’s capacity and boost their performance should be seriously investigating the most effective ways to implement AI.

when used responsibly, AI tools can increase the quality of your matches

Recruiters have used technology to source ideal candidates for a long time. But this technology has usually had some serious limitations. For example, tools that scan resumes for keywords can assess hundreds of applications and identify the qualified candidates in minutes — but what if the perfect person for the job simply doesn’t use those keywords?

The impressive language abilities of today’s AI recruiting tools can prevent candidates like these from slipping through the net. By design, they’re better at intuitively understanding the subtleties of a resume or cover letter and getting closer to the true meaning. They’re also good at understanding and combining separate bits of information, assessing a candidate’s full background in an impressively human-like way. When implemented correctly, these capabilities can create much more accurate matches — which will hopefully lead to more successful recruitments. They can even identify promising candidates that cruder screening systems may have filtered out, potentially sourcing candidates from more diverse backgrounds.

However, this doesn’t mean that AI tools don’t also have their limitations, or that using AI for recruitment doesn’t involve serious potential ethical issues. As illustrated by the accounts in this BBC article, recruiters that rely too much on the wisdom of their AI tools risk discriminating against candidates due to algorithmic bias.

With proper use, AI can create more effective recruiters and happier candidates — but although AI recruiting tools will improve over time, close human oversight from experienced, responsible HR leaders will always be necessary to avoid bias in AI or AI discrimination.

AI tools can help strengthen your employer brand — and attract new candidates

However, there is another side of employer branding where AI can help out. As highlighted in this Harvard Business Review article, your company’s reputation is potentially the most important part of its employer brand. The popularity of employer review sites and the power of word of mouth means a single bad experience can lead to significant brand damage. 

For candidates, one of the most common bad experiences is the so-called ‘black hole’ phenomenon — when a candidate spends time crafting a great application or even attending an interview, only to hear nothing back from the employer. 

AI isn’t a universal solution to reputational damage, but it can at least eliminate black holes. When integrated into the right tools, automated candidate engagement can be dramatically improved with AI. Recruiters have used chatbots or automated emails to take care of mundane tasks like booking interviews or providing updates for a long time — but the messages are often generic and robotic. Now, the capabilities of modern AI language models can create truly personalized messaging with exactly the right tone. 

Even if a candidate faces rejection, a well-crafted response with useful feedback can soften the blow — and by using AI for recruiting effectively, recruitment teams can ensure that each applicant gets one. It’s a simple way to enhance your employer brand without consuming your limited recruitment resources.

start integrating generative AI into your recruitment process — responsibly

To make it easier to start taking advantage of some of these benefits in your recruitment process, we’ve developed a generative AI use case template. 

If you’re planning on using generative AI to fix a pain point in your recruitment process, go through the template and fill it collaboratively. It’ll prompt you to ask the right questions about your generative AI use case and help you identify its concrete business value, the potential risks, and the key metrics you’ll use to measure its success.