The recruitment landscape has changed quite dramatically in the last few years. Before 2020 and the impact of COVID, recruitment typically involved interviewing at the office, touring potential desks, discussing commuting benefits, meal perks, and healthy breakfasts. It was a slower-paced hiring process in most cases, and a whole different experience.

In today’s world, our definition of success is being constantly challenged, leading to unprecedented peaks in speedy hiring. Especially with the remote work boom and the further development and democratization of artificial intelligence, we can positively say we’ve witnessed the beginning of a new era in recruitment.

There’s no question that AI is here to stay. You either make friends with the idea, or lose the race against those individuals who are using it to elevate their game.

The million-dollar question is: Can you become a Recruiter 2.0 through AI?

The short answer is YES.

But, how can you use AI in a way that sets you apart from the crowd and doesn't make you blend in with the millions of other recruiters relying on it?

Let’s explore a few ideas:

Don’t Overdo It

More often than not, faster does not mean better. Even though most Applicant Tracking Systems (ATSs) today offer at least a couple of AI features, in the wrong hands, this can lead to transactionalism, excessive automation, and an overall poor candidate experience, which comes at the expense of your recruitment strategy's success.

Automation tools are a great way to free up your time from daily admin tasks. But remember, as a recruiter, you are dealing with people. The difference between an immediate, automated response to a candidate’s email and a slightly later response that is whole-hearted and human can go a long way.

Select automation tools that allow you an high level of customisation, high detailed personalisation for each of your candidate and that leave you the freedom to manually adapt to the circumstances. Automation tools must give the possibility to you to intervene and add your human touch at any time. Discard immediately any tool where candidates are treated as a list of names, role titles, company and location. That is not personalization!

A truly good candidate experience is reached only when you are able to consider a full range of information, all details present in the CV, and when you can include a list of your personal annotations and tagging.

Stay Curious

The fact that different AI tools can come up with great boolean searches for your opening does not make you a Subject Matter Expert in the field.

Do your research, understand what you’re looking for, and how to find the best candidates.

Let AI be your co-pilot by handling the boring, repetitive, low-level tasks while you step up your game and focus on continual learning.

For example, tools that integrate AI to suggest relevant keywords, alternative role titles or skill wordings, and all sorts of semantic variations that are time consuming to think of and write down. This is particularly useful when recruiting technical positions where candidates may use jargon, strange acronyms and difficult to understand keywords. These are great occasions for AI to help enhance and streamline the task.

Another useful application for AI is when you identify a good candidate profile (or eventually an existing champion employee) and your tool is able to use that profile as a model to automatically screen for similar candidates.

Think Outside The Box

Recruitment processes deal with humans on a 100%, which means your strategy should be constantly challenged and kept alive. Expand the search parameters, contact those candidates who may possess only some of the required qualifications, and use a candidate mindset to approach your sourcing.

Focus on understanding the motivations, passions, and unique experiences of candidates you are looking to attract, and combine that human-centric approach with the analytical power of AI.

Manually reading each profile and custom writing each message can be very time consuming, so if you want to scale up, rather than devolving to bland and generic messages, use AI to draft or even directly write messages that automatically analyze and consider all these human factors. This will help you streamline your messaging even at scale without spending too much time or losing the uniqueness and human touch of your messages.
Sometimes it is just a matter of how much reading you can do before you start writing, and AI can do a lot of reading.

Be Data-Driven, but Keep Your Intuition Alive

AI tools help us make as optimal a decision as possible, but Recruiters need to learn to trust their instincts.

There is still no software application, supercomputer, or AI tool that can touch our ability to assess certain intangibles. When the right data and advanced analytics are combined with human expertise, the decisions made will be much more likely to create value for everyone. As Recruiters, we need to learn to trust our instincts.

And the best way to approach this is acknowledging our unconscious biases. These are those automatic, unintentional, and deeply ingrained stereotypes that influence our judgments and decision-making processes.

Many AI tools can detect biases and provide the necessary data and insights about your hiring process, which allows you to make more informed and data-driven decisions. However, a purely rational, automated model of decision making does not go far. The story behind that data, and striking the right balance with intuition and a human approach, is what will make your process different.

In other words, keep it human.

Conclusion

There's nothing wrong with automating tasks and getting extra help from tools and systems that do not harm your candidates’ experience. But recruitment is a people business, and the line between process efficiency and over-automation is thin.

Definitely do not delegate to automation but embrace it as a support to your humanized recruiting process and to enhance the candidate experience.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

Camila Castellani

Co-Founder

SeedTree Talent

Bettina Liporazzi

Co-Founder

SeedTree Talent

Camila Castellani and Bettina Liporazzi are two friends, colleagues, and the founders of SeedTree Talent, a boutique recruitment firm providing Fractional Talent solutions to tech companies hiring in Latin America. With recruiting experience both in-house and as part of agencies, they created SeedTree Talent to fuse the best of both worlds and do recruitment in a human-centric, non-transactional way.

About SeedTree Talent

SeedTree Talent is a boutique recruiting firm that offers sourcing, full-cycle recruitment, and Talent consultancy services. They are transforming company missions into reality by connecting remote-first tech organizations with Latin American talent.