Machine learning, AI, and AI tools are finding their way into almost every element of our lives these days. Chef Watson can help you make amazing recipes and John Deere is using it to help machines decide which plants to apply pesticides onto. BBC allows you to have a dramatic storytelling experience with an AI narrator on their "Talking With Machines" series. Even the humble traffic light is about to see big improvements thanks to a smart robotic brain that will help control congestion.
A solid cookie recipe is great, but how can we make building amazing teams in tech easier and more effective using robots? Well, luckily we went out and found four different elements of recruiting that can be improved with AI solutions that are available today. Here's what adding AI tools to your tech recruiting strategy can help with:
Finding new talent
Chatbots and smart job opening advertising options are the two ways in which recruiting AI can help expand the top of your tech talent funnel today. The chatbots can be used to power more visit-to-candidate conversions on your website, nurture talent automatically, and can also empower more referrals.
The programmatic advertising approach to posting job listings is a demographic AI that helps analyze which sources for candidate submissions are leading to the best candidates and help you decrease your cost per acquisition (CPA) for each candidate.
Here are some of the best suppliers of recruiting focused chatbots and programmatic job listing advertising for finding new talent:
EmployUs - This AI chatbot company empowers referrals at scale and even comes with a referral focused CRM on the back end.
Woo - Helena - Woo features their proprietary AI "Helena" who helps you connect with candidates discreetly through text message and chat. Helena serves as an intermediary between you and the right candidates until they show interest. It's somewhat like a dating app for recruiting.
Talentify - Talentify helps de-mystify the programmatic advertising space for recruiting teams and professionals. Set your budgets and targets, Talentify will do the rest. A great addition to any top of funnel candidate pipeline strategy.
Improving candidate relationships
We all know that sourcing talent in the tech space is getting more and more competitive. It is definitely a seller's market. A slip up as simple as not responding to a candidate submission for a couple of weeks can lead to missing out on a rockstar candidate. These platforms help keep candidates happy and increase the perception of your company.
Mya - Mya has the densest feature set of any conversational recruiting AI. It is a true end to end candidate relationship platform that automates sourcing, screening, first touch, scheduling, post-hire onboarding, and even assists with candidate mobility in the company. We expect big things from Mya as the platform evolves.
Arya - This ATS automatically responds to candidates with personalized messages based on their submission inputs. We know you would do it too, but who has the time? Arya makes the time.
Ideal - This ATS combines chatbots, automation, and screening to automatically prioritize high-value candidates and ensure they get early touchpoints to keep the relationship warm.
Screening candidates
Many of the modern applicant tracking systems (ATS) are offering AI driven candidate qualification, screening, and scoring platforms. These platforms will greatly decrease your cost per hire and time to hire.
Ideal - This ATS has a proprietary AI driven "Ideal score" for every candidate resume submission. It also comes recommended by Google as one of the better AI-driven candidate qualifying/screening tools out there, reporting a 71% decrease in cost per hire... Need we say more?
Arya - Arya is noteworthy in the screening field as well, allowing you to source and screen from over 50 different channels simultaneously. The Arya platform has helped source over 40 million candidates to date and is used by over 10,000 companies, looks pretty good!
Evaluating and eliminating unconscious bias
Humans are not perfect (shocker, right?) and many times recruiting team members will unconsciously bias candidates because of three very common human thought-processing flaws. Similarity attraction bias is a natural tendency for human beings to give favor to other people who are similar to ourselves in status and appearance. Confirmation bias is when we have a preconceived notion of someone/something and shift our questioning and/or ignore certain information to confirm our pre-existing beliefs. The final bias is called the Halo effect and it is when we assume someone will be good in a position because they performed well in a different role, without objective evaluation of skills/traits.
All of these unintentional biases can greatly limit your effective candidate pool size and potentially cause your company to miss a rock-star team member. In the worst case scenario, these biases can even lead to a lawsuit if they are provable. Luckily big-data processing AI may be able to help evaluate and eliminate any recruiting bias your company may have.
Although some still believe the AI's are leading to more bias in hiring, like this case with Amazon in 2015. So until it is perfected, we will withhold recommending any particular tool. For now, it's worth tracking how these AI tools are evolving and add one when the confidence level is closer to 100%.
Here at BWBacon Group, we know and live what you are experiencing as an employer or job seeker in Denver, Boulder, Dallas, San Francisco, New York City or any of the other cities we work in. We believe great recruiting starts and ends with understanding people.
If you have any questions about living, working or playing any of the areas we serve, please contact us. We are happy to help. Seize the day, every day, that’s what we say!
