Historically, the human resources industry has been fraught with time-intensive tasks, identifying the top candidates and coordinating their interview and screening processes. One study found that the time to hire in 2017 was, on average, 23.8 days, an increase of 13 days since 2010 as the marketplace has grown ever more crowded.
Artificial intelligence-powered technology opens up nearly limitless possibilities, and 2019 is poised to be a year of innovation and high adoption across thousands of industries. HR, recruiting and talent acquisition are no exception and will benefit greatly as the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more ubiquitous.
The coming year will see vast amounts of HR teams relying heavily on AI and machine learning (ML) to take care of much of the behind-the-scenes work that goes into talent acquisition. Thanks to this shift, recruiters will have the ability and time to engage with and build strong relationships with their top candidates on a deeper level — instead of studying and digging through a huge quantity of resumes and profiles for a significant part of the day.
Talent Acquisition Powered By AI And Machine Learning
I believe one of the most exciting shifts we will witness in 2019 is AI leading the change in recruiting from data-driven to intelligence-driven. In fact, 42% of executives in one survey believe AI will be of critical importance within the next two years. Thanks to the powerful forces of AI and ML and their incredible ability to gather and sort information intuitively and shorten the time to insights, HR specialists will spend less time sifting through data and more time acting on it.
For the moment, this will require fundamental changes and upgrades from a company’s existing talent acquisition (TA) system and tech stacks by adopting and deploying an AI engine into their existing systems. The whole workflow and process will be reshaped as HR efforts become dramatically more proactive as they are enhanced by AI. The new year will bring upgrades to infrastructure, software and operations as TA teams are retrained and processes redefined.
AI technology will also evolve both the recruiter's and candidate's relationships with the sourcing process. Organizations will enlist the same AI technologies to handle both active-job-seeker and passive-job-seeker pipelines. Because of the high levels of adoption anticipated in 2019, I also foresee companies hiring significantly more technical architects to help design and build scalable HR stacks. AI will take center stage and people will become much more knowledgeable about it in the coming year, which they will be forced to do in order to ensure they find and achieve ongoing success.
Heightened Candidate Engagement
In the next 12 months, more HR and recruiting teams will wave goodbye to many of the tedious tasks that have historically occupied a significant amount of their valuable day and eaten up too much of their time. In their place will be tools and platforms to accelerate the talent acquisition process. It will be a year of widespread adoption of augmented sourcing and writing and engagement technologies.
As sourcing and finding proactive and passive candidates becomes more efficient, we will see a shift in attention from sourcing to the next phase of the process, encouraging potential employees to talk to recruiters, also known as "heightened candidate engagement."
The ability of AI to streamline the hiring process — especially the beginning stages of sourcing and filtering candidates — will allow HR teams to spend time on more valuable tasks like getting to know the person behind the resume or online profile.
Improving The Candidate Experience
Thanks to unprecedented technological insights and abilities, recruiting methods are already highly intuitive and will continue to become even more so. As more and more processes start to take care of themselves, the candidate experience will rise to the next level. Candidates will have better, more comprehensive experiences as they apply for and express interest in positions. Gone are the days (and weeks) of waiting for recruiters to personally contact each candidate with the necessary information to simply move forward with the next step in the application process.
Through advanced matching and sourcing technology, candidates will receive more relevant and nuanced job suggestions and opportunities, while recruiters will benefit from being matched with the best candidates for the job at hand. Once candidates find jobs in which they’re interested, technology will play a part in the next stages of the process as well.
AI-powered chatbots and scheduling bots will enable candidates to ask questions and have them answered in real time. Chatbots will continue to be integrated into a company’s website, freeing HR team members to handle more pressing and complicated requests and have time to play an even more thoughtful role in the hiring process. Chatbots can lead applicants through the application process in its entirety, guiding the candidate from page to page to ensure accuracy and completeness. We will also see AI-matching technology flourish.
The new year will bring improved practice, unparalleled candidate and recruiter experiences and some of the highest levels of technology adoption the HR industry has seen in a decade. The impact of AI and ML will be felt by job candidates and recruiters alike. The candidate experience will continue to modernize, allowing companies to treat their applicants like customers, while giving recruiters more time and energy to devote to the human side of recruiting: engaging with talented candidates. Companies that embrace AI in 2019 will take their talent acquisition team to the next level.
