Trevor Zelman

Trevor Zelman June 20, 2019 AI’s impact on recruiting: Seismic and just getting started It was a series of board games between a champion Go player and an AI that woke us all up to a new and astonishing reality: AI is going to change ​everything​. AI’s impact on recruiting alone has already been significant. Hiretual customers are telling us what once took hours of slogging search now takes minutes to source. Many say they can identify qualified candidates ​10x​ faster than before they adopted our AI. Such quantum leaps in productivity may seem improbable, almost fantastical. But that’s what exponential change feels like, and most of us are just experiencing it for the first time. To understand why AI is already shaking up so many parts of the recruiting process, it’s useful to consider what happened during those Go games of March 2016. Partisans of the game had long assumed that it would be years, or forever, before any AI could beat a champion. So complex is Go that there are fewer atoms in the observable universe than there are possible positions in the game. ​Far ​fewer, in fact. Go demands more than just keen intellect at the highest levels of play. It calls for originality, strategic thinking, and intuition — qualities that AI surely could not match. Elon Musk confirmed that most experts in the field thought it would be 10 years before an AI could beat a top professional player. Then, weeks later, an AI named AlphaGo beat 18-time world champion Lee Sedol by 4 games to 1. Eighteen months after that, AlphaGo itself was trounced 100 games to 0 by AlphaGo Zero, its successor AI. It had taken months to train the original AlphaGo to beat Lee Sedol; AlphaGo Zero taught itself from scratch, completing its training in 3 days by playing ​4.9 million​ games against itself. Delivers exponentially better results This blistering speed of AI improvement is why Hiretual customers are now able to screen profiles and engage candidates 10 times faster than they could before adopting our AI. AI grows exponentially by its very nature, not linearly, so the capacities it will give recruiters accelerate with every day that passes. AI already has brought enormous changes in the recruiting process, though. Let’s look at what’s become possible with AI today. Saves enormous amounts of time Every recruiter knows how time-consuming and exhausting it can be to identify fit candidates. AI cuts through this tedium in one swoop, winnowing the field to a stack of the 50 best candidates fro​m across the entire open web. Ranked in order of fit, no less, and based on what the recruiter directed the AI to search for. And it does this in seconds. No more hours of ploughing through resume after resume. Hiretual’s AI makes this possible by ​transforming the entire open web into a recruiter’s database. Our AI ​proactively, and continuously, pulls in fresh professional data from online job boards, resume databases, professional social networks, and over 40 social platforms, including LinkedIn, Indeed, Facebook, Twitter, GitHub, AngelList, Quora, and Reddit. The result is the world’s largest candidate sourcing platform, with over 750 million candidate profiles, far exceeding traditional sourcing platforms like LinkedIn (575 million profiles) and Indeed (200 million profiles). Then the real magic starts. The AI creates a knowledge graph for each of the 750 million candidates and analyzes how their skills, companies, and job titles relate to each other and to existing applicant pools. So when recruiters type in a​ job title like “Java developer with cloud experience in Azure AWS,” it knows exactly which candidates to deliver. It also parses the existing job description and recommends related skills to help recruiters cast the widest net. Identifies many more viable candidates One of the biggest challenges recruiters face is finding enough qualified candidates, ​especially for positions that call for rarefied expertise. With over 750 million candidate candidate profiles to draw from, the AI renders this problem nearly obsolete. Its continuous, proactive scraping builds talent pipelines without candidates needing to submit any data to the AI. Makes Boolean heavy lifting a thing of the past Back in the day, the only way for recruiters to source deeply on the open web was through Boolean searches. It took months, even years, for recruiters to master the science of complex Boolean queries. Now, with AI, all a recruiter has to do is enter keywords as they would into Google. Not only does AI free recruiters from an arduous task, it allows them to perform searches without knowing any Boolean at all. Cleanses data to deliver more accurate contact information Accurate contact information is the lifeblood of recruiting. Without it, candidates can stay beyond reach. With the AI continuously pulling in fresh information, though, all of the contact information comes pre-cleansed, making it easy to reach out to candidates in the returned ranked stack. Consolidates private candidate pools Having easy access to such a superabundance of specialized online communities and professional platforms comes with a consequence​: disparate talent pools galore. One of those pools is ​past applicants who may suit a position the recruiter needs to fill later. It’s a problem Hiretual solves with our new ​Intelligent Talent Pipeline​, which allows recruiters to consolidate all of this data into a single private pool at the top of their recruiting funnel. They can import ​stale profiles of past applicants from their ​Applicant Tracking System ​and CRM, and import candidates from other sources on the web themselves. After recruiters import their active applicant pipeline, the AI ranks the new candidates against past applicants and passive candidates already in the pool. Then the AI applies proprietary data fusion technology to refresh and enrich past applicant profiles with data from the open web, and voila! A private talent pool from which recruiters can source candidates for all future roles. It’s just one more way that AI is making life easier for recruiters. Permits customization to recruiters’ needs and preferences AI is not static in the slightest; it morphs ceaselessly according to the data it’s fed. Recruiters who adopt an AI as their recruiting partner will find that the system comes to know their needs and preferences very well. AI responds to choices recruiters make in a system, immediately reflecting back to them all of their accumulated experience, including their judgement of what sort of candidates are best suited for particular jobs. A technology recruiter with a few years of experience, for instance, may know that candidates who have already mastered Java programming tend to make superior coders in the newer Kotlin language. The recruiter can train the AI to show only candidates with expertise in Java for positions requiring Kotlin skills. With every candidate a recruiter assesses as a fit or otherwise, the AI understands ever more what they are seeking and readjusts their candidate stack accordingly, in real time. AI allows recruiters to differentiate themselves more than was possible before its advent. Cuts through the chaff Recruiters who have to sift through hundreds of resumes without the benefit of AI know how common it is for candidates to stuff their resumes with keywords and buzzwords. It can be difficult to discern who’s truly qualified behind all the buzz. AI with semantic search capability can help here as well. Hiretual’s AI always expands searches semantically to include terms related to the initial search keywords. Thus it corrals the sales whiz who states their title as “revenue growth superstar” when the entered job title was “inside sales rep.” Or a search for “corn breeders” will pull up results for corn molecular genetics researchers. No recruiter, no matter how gifted at sourcing, could account for all of these nuances on their own. Finds passive candidates with ease The odds of identifying the best-fit passive candidates in the dark ages before AI were not in a recruiter’s favor. Especially with social media in the mix, recruiters were inundated with far more information than they could sort through, let alone make sense of. The only option was to learn Boolean, conduct a complex skill set search, and pray for rain. Adding to the difficulty, most passive candidates in times of low unemployment are busy putting their skills to work inside other companies and often do not even look at job postings. It can be like trying to find the proverbial needle in a haystack. AI flips the script. Using AI is like strapping an awesomely powerful magnet to your hand and waving it over the stack: the needles come to you. And not just any candidates: the ones perfectly matched to the parameters you trained the AI to find. As a result, star candidates that would have taken a recruiter days, even weeks, to unearth on their own are now delivered within seconds. Recruiters do not just get 50 candidate matches for the position. They get the 50 ​best c​ andidates, ranked by the degree of match. Such distinctly better outcomes may seem almost magical. It’s true; they are. As the visionary science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Helps start-up and small-company recruiters, too For recruiters who source for startups, the problem of finding enough qualified candidates is even more pronounced. Historically, it has been difficult for start-ups and small businesses to attract the right people — especially when employment rates push past 95%. This is a life and death issue for start-ups, and a big, often unacknowledged, reason why up to 90% of startups fail. Even on AngelList, an epicenter for the startup community with nearly 30,000 member companies, job postings only receive 17 applicants on average (with 6 as the median). For highly in-demand startup roles like software engineer and product developer, the crunch is even greater. The market for these candidates is so highly competitive that they are usually already employed and well compensated, passive seekers with little incentive to switch jobs. AI mitigates this effect through its capacity to identify these unicorns. Lets recruiters focus on outreach The time and effort that AI saves recruiters in sourcing candidates relieves them of a huge burden. For many recruiters, sourcing is their least favorite part of the recruiting process. With AI as the partner, recruiters can focus their attention on their core strengths and interests: building rapport with candidates and hiring managers, selling candidates on why they should apply, supporting them through the recruitment process, and negotiating the job offer. One of the most important benefits of all is that it frees them to hone their intuition. With much of the dross removed from sourcing, recruiters get a clearer view of their candidate field from the start. AI allows all of their experience, knowledge, and recruiting expertise to shine. Far from taking the place of their intuition, AI actually strengthens and valorizes it. Makes candidate engagement more effective and personal Good recruiting AI supports recruiters in their outreach with email templates, email automation linked to Gmail and Outlook, features to track applicants through the hiring stages, and options to bring hiring managers and team members into the selection process. Hiretual’s AI identified the email templates that generate the highest response rates from candidates and has turned this intelligence into 10 new, entirely customizable templates. With the time recruiters save in sourcing, they can put more thought into tailoring effective first contacts with promising candidates. Adopt AI to stay in the game Though AI’s impacts on recruiting have already been impressive, bear in mind: the impacts are just getting started. In the near future, as Hiretual CEO Steven Jiang points out, “AI will find great candidates for a position before a recruiter even starts a search.” This will give recruiters even more time to connect with candidates. And that’s where recruiters’ highest value will be, because a company’s people are the crucial differentiating factor that sets them apart from all other enterprises. You will never find a company’s leader denying that people will remain the most important part of their business, even with all the talk of AI taking jobs. Yet as recruiters become ever more relevant, they still must adapt to ​stay r​ elevant. Adopting AI technologies is the only way to do that. Before long, every recruiter will need to partner with an AI to find and connect with candidates. It will become as unthinkable ​not t​ o as it would be today to try their next search on a typewriter or to drive a Model T to work. Adopt AI and stay in the game.