The How And Why Behind Recruiting AI

By Brian Wallace on February 11, 2021 - Fact checked by Dumb Little Man

by Brian Wallace February 11, 2021

Let’s start with the basics. What is recruiting AI? Recruiting AI is artificial intelligence used specifically for hiring. It can read resumes and job descriptions using its knowledge to match candidates to positions where they would be successful.

Recruiting AI and other software are increasingly becoming one of the main tools for the hiring process. Technology can help to make the process much quicker and more effective. This visual guide breaks it all down.

How Can Recruiting AI Be Used Successfully?

Recruiting AI makes the hiring process overall run better. It can instantly tell recruiters who the best applicants are and if it is programmed correctly with unbiased data, it can increase a company’s diversity. With an AI program trained on unbiased data, the implicit biases human recruiters have, which often unknowingly get in the way of hiring diverse people, are eliminated.

Several recruiters and HR professionals do not believe their current hiring practices are good. In fact, 81% believe their practices are average or worse. It is a daunting task to look through possibly hundreds of resumes and choose the best people. It has been found that recruiters typically spend only seven seconds looking at a person’s resume.

It is understandable why this happens given the bulk of their task, but it is not a good practice. In those seven seconds, recruiters do not have enough time to fully consider a candidate and make an unbiased decision about them.

Several implicit biases like similarity bias, the halo/horns effect, the contrast effect, and the central tendency effect can occur with the poor hiring practices currently in use. Similarity bias makes people value traits in others that are similar to their own, which directly works against efforts to increase diversity.

The halo/horns effect reinforces our first impressions of a person, making it difficult to challenge our snap judgments and bias. The contrast effect plays with the opinions people form when comparing candidates to the others considered directly before or after. Finally, the central tendency effect leaves people wary of rating anyone too extreme for fear of their opinions being formed on bias.

Fortunately, an unbiased recruiting AI can solve this. But first, you have to ensure the recruiting AI is programmed with unbiased data. In the past, AI has eventually learned the same biases as its human recruiters because it was trained with their narrow data.

To create an unbiased AI, a wide variety of job descriptions, companies, resumes, and outcomes should be used. The AI should also be blocked from seeing information like a candidate’s age, gender, or name (which could allude to the person’s race). Once you have a completely unbiased recruiting AI, the whole hiring process can be expedited and establish fairness for diverse candidates.

Higher Diversity Leads To More Creativity And Profitability

The whole idea of a quicker and fairer hiring process sounds great, right? Right! Let’s look at the many benefits of increasing a company’s diversity, which come from having an unbiased recruiting AI.

Diverse people bring diverse thoughts and processes to the table. Vildan Stidham, Divisional VP of Global Talent Acquisition at Abbott, explains, “D&I can bring innovation, creative thinking, and different perspectives that are essential in our growing businesses.” The new, creative ideas brought into companies by diverse people make those companies thrive. New inventions and ways of thinking greatly improve life as we know it.

The improvements diversity brings to innovation also brings about a company’s profitability. The 20 most diverse companies in the S&P 500 have a higher long-term profitability than the less diverse ones. Greater diversity in a company’s leadership for both ethnic and gender diversity ultimately leads to significant profitability and financial success.

Needless to say, the ability to succeed financially is what keeps companies alive and able to materialize the creative, innovative ideas their people create. And having high diversity allows a company to do both.

Using an unbiased recruiting AI throughout the hiring process can make everything easier and quicker while increasing the workforce’s diversity and the company’s success. After programming the AI to be unbiased with a lot of varied data, it can instantly recognize the top candidates for any position, including candidates that may have been discriminated against unconsciously by human recruiters.

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Author: Brian Wallace

Brian Wallace is the Founder and President of NowSourcing, an industry leading infographic design agency based in Louisville, KY and Cincinnati, OH which works with companies that range from startups to Fortune 500s. Brian also runs #LinkedInLocal events nationwide, and hosts the Next Action Podcast. Brian has been named a Google Small Business Advisor for 2016-present and joined the SXSW Advisory Board in 2019.