Recruiter Bots and the Rise of AI in HR

Imagine you’re a bright-eyed job seeker sending your résumé into the bowels of the world wide web. You get a call and, expecting the cheery voice of an HR professional on the other end, you hear the robotic voice of Siri asking about your five-year plan.

Rudimentary forms of artificial intelligence are all around us, but could this scenario really be in our future? Could AI tackle not only screening of resumes, but the entire recruitment process?

Such an era may already be underway. Well-known brands such as HP and CNN are already integrating rudimentary AI into their workflows, mostly in the form of chatbots. But what about bots designed solely for business recruitment? Last July, the AI-powered Mya was launched with the intention of one day automating 75 percent of the recruiting for FirstJob, a job search site for new graduates.

With automation unburdening them, recruiters can focus on key moments when professional acumen has the biggest impact.

Of course, that limited human capacity stands in high contrast to the unbeatable speed and computing power of software. Recruitment processes have nearly doubled for human HR departments since 2010, and machines are simply faster. That massive speed is already at work for the U.S. Army in the form of “SGT STAR,” a Q&A chatbot that has fielded 11 million questions and equals the efforts of 55 Army recruiters.

With such changes on the horizon, how can HR departments prepare today? To prepare for a world of intelligent recruiting software — whether labeled “recruiter bots” or otherwise — it’s important to look at the whole picture and not dismiss long-term opportunities based on early results. Here are some viewpoints to consider when implementing a system of this magnitude.

Play to Software’s Strengths

An AI can’t be a good judge of a candidate, can it? It seems obvious, but with judgment comes bias, which is also part of humans’ repertoire. Look at Google, a company with hiring practices that have yielded a workforce with only 9 percent non-white, non-Asian employees, which despite good intentions happens to us and many other technology companies as well. Companies that master unbiased hiring can mitigate this potential blow to their reputations — with recruiter bots lending a helping hand.

Why is this? Machines can be impartial, with no biases regarding candidates’ backgrounds, genders, or anything else. These and other such biases are much easier to pinpoint in a line of code than they are in a human mind, making them much easier to remove.

When correctly tuned, a recruiting bot will dispassionately indicate candidates who best match the role without biases — or the grumpiness of staffers who skip their morning lattes. Leaders who leverage this impartiality can give a leg up to qualified candidates who might otherwise struggle to get a foot in the door.

In this way, automated recruiting software can boost efficiency and fairness, adding a whole new dimension to recruiting. AI can even work from recorded video such as Monjin, an interview-by-video service in which AI helps categorize interviewees, allowing post-interview analysis (and reanalysis) of candidates.

Yes, human judgment is critical to recruitment — but it’s a finite and often delicate resource. People simply have a limited capacity for research, outreach, analysis, logistics, and scheduling.

With the ability to understand and react to complex information and patterns, recruiting bots will be able to process more candidates, schedule more meetings, and review more résumés than any human possibly could. Dutch airline KLM has already applied this theory in the customer service world, utilizing a Facebook chatbot to raise the company’s responsiveness by over 40 percent.

And software beats humans not only in speed, but also in scope. With increased digitalization of our lives through social networks, recruiting bots can thoroughly index candidates’ network connections and use that as predictive data. In some cases, systems can even monitor social media to forecast when candidates are ready for a job change — a capability far beyond human recruiters.

The Human Factor Goes AI

The human factor — or lack thereof — is a key topic when considering bots. Will companies seem more impersonal with machines as part of recruiting communications? Will that alienate candidates?

It’s an understandable concern, but even the experts say that “bots are better without conversation.” Often, the choice is between getting help from a machine or not getting help at all. Utilizing AI in the recruitment process will provide more qualified leads, reach more people, and stay connected with candidates without any outside assistance.

Some of the subtler judgments may be more challenging for bots, at least at first. For example, business is a team sport, so companies must hire for cultural fit. But bots may need time to understand culture in an organization and match candidates well.

Leaders might aim to circumvent this issue by using AI for the initial screening process and keeping a human phase at the final in-person interview to focus on personality and culture. But wouldn’t it be much better to have bots participate in the internal discussions as well, allowing them to develop a sense for the company culture?

Bots may struggle without human intuition, but even that can be learned. In the end, hiring is a very personal decision, and the key will be to develop the AI equivalent of a “gut feeling” so bots can develop to match a human recruiter’s instincts. In “Our Immortality or Extinction,” Tim Urban discusses how AI might jump the evolutional steps so fast that we might not even realize how above-human machines might get. The one thing we shouldn’t do is underestimate the possibilities.

Goodbye, HR Admin

Like any automation, this technology will one day replace basic jobs. Scheduling meetings, sorting through résumés, and sending update emails will soon be automated.

A retention AI could screen the whole staff and see who’s at risk to leave, who’s outperforming, and who should get special attention.

But what does this mean for HR departments? If anything, it means an opportunity for evolution. As AI takes on the administrative work, HR professionals will be able to focus on where they’re really needed: employee engagement, team motivation, and productivity.

Recruitment bots will soon be commonplace. They won’t remove the need for HR completely, but rather work with highly skilled HR professionals side by side to recruit stronger employees and provide better assistance to the company — all in record time. Just like the rise of smartphones, we’ll one day look back on the prebot era as a primitive time.

While this technological evolution is on the way, it’s not quite ready just yet. The key for today’s HR departments is to keep utilization of this software agile for when tech development inevitably shifts into exciting, unexpected directions.