Debunking the Top 4 Myths of AI Recruiting

Whenever AI is brought up in any context, we immediately jump to robots—kind of like the ones featured in the 2001 film A.I. Artificial Intelligence. To this day, there’s a lot of scrutiny around AI, especially when it comes to recruiting. And to add to that, there are also a lot of myths around AI recruiting. In this post, we’re setting the record straight and debunking the top 4 myths of AI recruiting.

Myth 1: AI will completely replace human recruiters

The first myth that always comes to mind with AI is that they’re going to replace human beings in the workplace. When you think about it, between sourcing candidates, screening them, engaging with them, and coordinating interview schedules, recruiters have more than they can handle on their plate. It’s a lot of tasks for one person to handle.

AI in recruiting is meant to help streamline the process and alleviate the administrative burden from recruiters. For example, when AI is used in a recruiting software, it can scan social media or job boards to look for qualified candidates so recruiters don’t have to spend hours on end manually scraping these sites.

In addition, 75% of resumes never get seen by a human, so qualified candidates are slipping through the cracks due to a recruiter’s bandwidth. AI-backed technologies can help with the resume-screening process by pulling from a question bank. To take it even a step further, AI can form questions and answers to screen pre-qualified candidates, and those qualified candidates will then be handed over to the recruiter for next steps such as a technical screen or writing test.

Myth 2: AI means replacing all human intelligence in recruiting

The next myth is a follow-up from myth #1. AI can’t be set up on its own—it needs human intelligence to build it from the ground-up. Think of AI being a tool, and recruiters being the craftspeople. That question bank mentioned above? You’ll need human intelligence to form those questions. Technical screens and writing tests? You’ll also need human intelligence for that, which brings us to the next myth.

Myth 3: Chatbots can handle the entire recruitment process

Remember how we said that AI isn’t going to replace human intelligence? This also means that chatbots can’t handle the entire recruitment process. Sure, AI-based chatbots can help screen candidates and engage with them by helping answer questions from the candidates. AI can help with objective decision-making such as making sure candidates meet a specific experience requirement or they have certain skill sets, but ultimately, you’ll need a human eye to evaluate something subjective like a writing test. Chatbots also won’t be able to hold a full interview, where interviewees ask follow-up questions in order to get clarification on answers. These are the reasons why chatbots won’t be replacing human beings any time soon, if ever.

Myth 4: AI is too expensive for recruiting

Unfortunately, many executives and even recruiters think that AI will break the company’s bank. Without AI and automation, companies can expect 35% higher costs from the recruitment process. If you think about the time recruiters spend doing administrative tasks (that’s 14 hours a week on average to be exact). And when a recruiter has too much work to take on, the next step is to hire more headcount, which can also get costly.

There are a lot of rumors spreading around AI in recruiting. Instead of thinking that AI is going to replace human employees or human intelligence, think about AI working hand in hand with recruiters to help improve the candidate experience from end to end.