The secret’s out! AI is disrupting industries, common processes, you name it. And recruiting and hiring are not exceptions.
In fact, 67% of HR professionals in a survey believe that AI has many benefits and could net a positive impact on recruitment (Tidio). With good reason, too. This quickly advancing technology can fully automate candidate search, engagement, and diversity. In turn, it raises recruiter productivity, speeds up time to fill positions, lowers costs per hire, and builds a pool of top talent. But, businesses that fail to embrace AI recruiting are falling behind.
In a talent market that’s more competitive than ever, falling behind the times can have a serious impact on your organization.
Here are 5 ways avoiding AI recruitment technology can hurt your recruitment game.
Traditional Methods Are Slower, Losing You Top Talent
According to an Indeed report, top candidates expect to be hired 14 days after applying. A study of candidate behavior also reveals that 66% of job applicants wait less than two weeks before moving on–and the best candidates are off the market in less than ten days.
According to the Society of Human Resource Management, the average time to fill a position is 42 days across industries. When the best candidates disappear in less than a fourth of that time, there’s simply no way to leave a slot open that long and attract the best talent.
Part of the reason your positions may be staying open for so long is that you’re using slower, inefficient traditional methods while your competitors are embracing new technology and hiring much faster. Tasks to consider automating include:
- Uploading a job description and sharing it on different platforms like social media, career portals, job boards and newspapers.
- Collecting resumes and screening them.
- Shortlisting relevant candidates and finding passive and active job seekers.
- Contacting relevant applicants across platforms.
These processes take countless hours before even getting in touch with a candidate—or contacting them for interviews. By automating search and engagement, companies can capture the best talent in a matter of days.
It’s Harder to Find Diverse Candidates Without AI’s Targeted Searches
The traditional method of finding and recruiting employees is, unfortunately, both flawed and limiting. This is doubly true for finding diverse candidates who are less likely to apply for jobs if they don’t meet 100% of requirements.
On the recruiter’s end, unconscious bias can also creep in when you only use names and photos to find diverse profiles. For example, hiring managers often favor men more than women in job applications. This was proven in a Stanford University study, where hiring managers deliberately ignored women’s resumes.
Lack of diversity in your team robs you of the opportunity to work with a strong, more creative, and more productive workforce.
AI-powered recruiting technology, like Paycor Smart Sourcing, can predict candidate demographics and tweak your searches to include more diversity. Avoiding these benefits can hurt not only your recruiting game but your employer brand. Candidates today are more interested in working with companies that match their values, such as equity and equal opportunity. Similarly, many investors look for companies putting in their best effort to level the playing field in their workforces. Therefore, avoiding the AI tech that will exponentially raise your employee diversity is losing you the best talent both in terms of highly qualified diverse candidates and in terms of optics.
Curious about Paycor’s approach to AI? Discover our guiding principles for artificial intelligence.
You Can Only Contact a Few Potential Candidates at a Time Manually
Even if you do manage to find enough qualified and diverse candidates using search, reaching out to all of them takes up more time than most recruiters have. If you’re sending individual messages one by one, there are only so many candidates you can actually reach out to.
That means you’ll want to reach out to only the candidates with the best chance of responding and fitting the role. Which, let’s be honest, requires not a small amount of guesswork.
AI-powered tools, however, can automate the engagement process and send messages to thousands of candidates on your behalf. Not only that, they can predict which contact information is out of date, send follow-up messages to candidates who don’t respond, and figure out who is most likely to consider a career change. When candidates indicate interest, they will be pushed back into your ATS at no time-cost to you whatsoever.
Even if you’re not concerned with your individual engagement speed, it’s a good idea to think about the consequences of falling behind on new technology. That is to say, most candidates you reach out to have probably been contacted by a number of other companies that are using AI to get ahead. Getting the best talent to come aboard will be doubly difficult if other recruiters are reaching out to every candidate you do and more, before you have the chance to see them.
Missing Out on Top Passive Talent
According to an Apollo Technical study, 70% of the global workforce is passive talent. Though these are people who are not actively job-hunting, they possess skills and experience that can benefit your company. But knowing who to reach out to can be tricky.
AI-powered recruiting software can optimize the passive talent you contact. It does this by predicting which candidates are most likely to leave their current jobs based on factors such as past behavior and current interests. Thanks to its superior engagement capabilities, it can also reach out to hundreds of passive profiles which saves you the time you’d normally think twice about taking to contact someone who already has a job.
In addition to clearing up the worries about wasting resources on passive talent, using AI to engage passive candidates can also get you out ahead of your competitors. Rather than competing for a few available candidates who are already fielding offers, piquing someone’s interest before they’re even on the market can secure you a candidate who isn’t even in the pool yet.
High Employee Turnover
According to a survey by Jobvite, 28% of new employees quit within the first three months. Employee turnover can happen for any number of reasons, but a bad candidate experience seems to be significant on the list. Making application and onboarding processes positive and productive also fall under the HR teams’ responsibility so it helps to use technology tools to make those seamless as well.
When teams have to spend such a large chunk of their time and energy on sourcing, searching, and engaging, it directly cuts into time that could be spent improving those processes so that new hires have a positive experience. It also takes away from the time and mental energy a recruiter has to use during interviews and screening.
How Paycor Helps
High employee turnover is costly and affects productivity. That’s why finding the right talent is so important. An AI-powered platform can search and optimize candidates to find the best matches and bring them directly to the ATS, freeing up countless hours of a recruiter’s time for employee onboarding and retention.
At the end of the day, it’s not easy to stay ahead of the game without also staying up to date on technology. AI-powered tools are quickly becoming essential in recruitment—without them, it will become harder and harder to secure top talent when every other company is using them. However, AI platforms, such as Paycor Smart Sourcing, will save you time and resources while helping to find you more qualified and diverse candidates than ever before.