Why AI in Recruiting Will Never Replace Recruiters

In recruiting, AI has been met with skepticism, fear, and excitement. The narrative that many jobs will be replaced is rampant across industries and roles. With this said, hiring teams and talent acquisition have been particularly stretched thin in recent years. And many emerging and now-mature AI applications are enabling these relatively small teams to tackle the goals they’ve been presented with. 

Humanly enables many of the world’s highest-volume hirers to keep their processes human-centered (with AI). Simply put, we’re in a unique position to weigh in on how AI-enabled hiring can actually improve the quality of human-to-human interaction, judgment, and just being able to get back to what you love. 

Today we would love to share some of these notions as well as some actionable tips for teams looking at AI in hiring. 

Looking for a deeper dive into how AI can be deployed equitably in hiring settings? Check out our ebook.

There’s more than enough job funnel to go around 

Human hiring teams can spend hundreds of hours on mundane tasks associated with individual roles. It’s not scaleable. But thankfully many fundamental – and time-sucking – components of hiring are automatable. 

AI's prowess in parsing vast datasets enables it to identify potential candidates more efficiently than traditional methods. By automating the initial stages of candidate sourcing, AI frees up human recruiters to focus on more strategic aspects of their role. 

With this said AI's algorithmic approach, while efficient, lacks the nuanced understanding of human soft skills and cultural fit. Herein lies the irreplaceable value of human recruiters: their ability to discern and evaluate the complex interpersonal skills that are crucial for organizational integration. 

The future lies in leveraging AI for its efficiency while entrusting humans with the depth of personal engagement.

AI’s role: automate initial job posting, outreach, screening, and scheduling tasks, saving teams time and the need to do repetitive tasks. 

Recruiter’s role: provide nuanced understanding of what the business needs to achieve, how culture needs to change, and actually build relationships with candidates. 

AI Can’t Sell, But it Can Make Humans Better at Selling 

Let’s say you're on the fence about a role. No AI in the world will pursuade you alone. Sure, there may be some machine learning behind the scenes that helps to reach out at the right time or to take notes about past interviews that can be used to tailor an offer. But “selling” itself is still wholly in the recruiting team’s domain. 

With time savings elsewhere in the hiring funnel, and help reaching out to the candidate at the right time and armed with the right information, hiring teams can focus on being the knowledge brokers for their organization. They know the culture, they know the mission, they know what makes their teams special and why others may want to join. 

AI’s role: support your candidate conversion efforts with insights, timing, and potentially the delivery of comms. 

Recruiter’s role: make a human connection and persuasively connect the interests of the candidate with that of the hiring organization. 

Continuous Improvement and Innovation in Recruitment Processes

Within bounds, AI can improve its output over time. And some generative AI applications can plan to some extent. But no organizations are leaving the direction of human-powered processes solely up to AI. Data needed to support process change often requires too much ingenuity to surface, and truly novel solutions to process-level issues require too much creativity. 

In short, process changes are often driven by a unique blend of hard data and lived experience. The range of skills needed to adapt recruitment processes include understanding nuance and context, emotional intelligence, empathy, as well as strategic thinking and collaboration. While AI can support data gathering and domain-specific insights, these generalized (and very human) skills aren’t yet in its wheelhouse. 

AI’s Role: Collect and analyze feedback and trends efficiently. 

Talent Acquisition Team’s Role:  Interpret data, know when to dive deeper or ask different questions, collectively implement new processes, lead with empathy.  

Ethical Considerations and Bias Mitigation

Finally, one of our most synergistic areas for AI-recruiter collaboration: ethics and bias mitigation. Both AI and human actors can perpetuate bias. But humans can be trained to recognize, mitigate, and design systems that monitor unconscious bias. Through awareness, education, and circumspection, humans can reduce bias in their organization. 

AI, on the other hand, can ignore demographic information, but may still develop biases based on the data its fed. Humans are needed to regularly audit AI processes and outcomes to identify trends and correct proceses.

This disparity in the ability to effectively address ethical considerations becomes wider in complex scenarios where there may be no “clear-cut” answers. Additionally, many nuances related to culture (at work or in the wider world) may be topics that are particularly hard for AI to understand. 

AI’s role: minimize opportunities for bias and flag instances where decision making may be off at scale. 

Recruiting team’s role: Provide judgment on what ethical considerations are most important, how they should be implemented, and what aligns with larger organizational objectives. 

Pulling AI into the hiring game is super exciting—it's like unlocking a new level where everything runs faster and smarter. 

But let's not forget, that nothing beats the human touch, especially when we're talking about fairness, quality of experience,  and understanding people. Across all the high-volume recruiting teams we work with, human recruiters are the true drivers of innovation, empathy, and high-functioning organizations. 

Our human recruiters are the heroes here with their knack for empathy, making the right calls, and getting the vibe of different cultures—super important stuff for making sure everyone gets a fair shot. They simply have more time to do what they’re best at when paired with tools like Humanly’s AI hiring co-pilot 😎.

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