The top 9 AI applications in recruiting for 2024 and beyond

Though rudimentary versions of artificial intelligence have been around since the mid-20th century, it wasn't until late 2022 that it took center stage as the top trending business technology. As Forbes reports, that was the year of two landmark AI developments by the research organization OpenAI. The first was DALL.E, a text-to-image model that could transform written prompts into detailed images. The second was ChatGPT, a natural language processing chatbot whose ability to carry on conversations and generate text was almost humanlike.

These developments inspired awe among the public and headlines in the media. Employers realized they could leverage this technology, and since then, they've devoted their resources to integrating AI into their business models. In a recent white paper, "AI in Hiring: 2024 Trends, Insights & Predictions," CareerBuilder has found that much of the integration effort has gone toward learning how to use AI in recruiting. This article looks at nine of the most common hiring-related AI applications and the potential each has to transform the hiring process.

Sourcing candidates

Recruiting starts with sourcing candidates who could potentially fill a vacancy in your organization. Outside of AI, candidate sourcing might involve scrolling job boards or social media, attending networking events, relying on employee referrals, or passively waiting for applicants to respond to a job listing. These methods are slow and offer few guarantees that the candidates are suitable for the job.

AI-based sourcing automates the entire process. Your AI sourcing tool will search the above channels for you in a fraction of the time it would take your entire HR team.

Screening candidates

Candidate screening is an important first step in the hiring process because it's how an employer evaluates whether an applicant is generally suited to the open role. It's also time-consuming, particularly when HR must manually screen a large volume of resumes.

Screening is one of the most common AI applications in recruiting. Using algorithms, AI can rapidly scan resumes for skills and experiences and compare them against keywords in the job description. AI can also review thousands of resumes in minutes. Meanwhile, the HR team can direct its efforts toward other value-adding endeavors.

Ranking or rejecting candidates

Ranking is a common feature that comes with AI screening. Once past the initial screening stage, your AI tool automatically sorts candidates by relevance to your organization's needs. Candidates whose application documents include more of your designated keywords will rank higher. This allows you to focus your assessments on however many candidates you'd like to examine more closely. This feature also makes it easier to identify candidates for rejection.

"Employers realized they could leverage this technology, and since then, they've devoted their resources to integrating AI into their business models."

Communicating with candidates

Some AI-based sourcing and screening tools also include features that allow you to connect with candidates, particularly via chatbot. With the rise and ongoing development of technologies such as ChatGPT, chatbots have become incredibly sophisticated, capable of handling the complex conversations expected from a candidate striving to learn more about a job or your application process.

AI recruiting chatbots offer several benefits to employers, such as:

Timely communication: While it wouldn't be reasonable to expect the HR team to reach out to each one of the hundreds or thousands of candidates who may qualify for a job, an automated AI chatbot can easily do so and keep them interested in the job.
Qualitative insights: A chatbot is also a channel through which a candidate can give actionable feedback to the employer via surveys. Through the chatbot, you might inquire about the candidate's perception of your organization's application and hiring process. Their response may provide valuable insight your organization can use to improve the applicant's journey.
Improved engagement: Chatbots foster ongoing engagement with your candidates. In doing so, they improve the odds that a high-quality candidate will accept a job offer.

Further analyzing candidate data

Even after screening, you may have more candidates than you can reasonably consider. When that happens, use AI recruiting applications with predictive analytics features to further assess candidate data. The tools' algorithms can analyze not only each candidate's information to rank applicants more fully but also associated areas such as their social media profiles. The idea is to examine qualities such as their online behavior to ascertain their likelihood of success in the role and whether their personality indicates a good culture fit.

Scheduling interviews

When a candidate seems like a good fit for the job, the logical next step is to bring them in for an interview. Interviews are another resource-intensive part of hiring. They involve a great deal of coordination, and what you discover about a candidate during their interview may reveal they aren't really what you're looking for.

AI can streamline the process through pre-screening interviews, a low-resource preliminary step for gauging whether a candidate can truly satisfy a job's requirements. During a pre-screening interview, various narrow AI tools can analyze factors such as the candidate's tone of voice, their attitude, the content of their responses, and the time taken to deliver their answers to determine their suitability for the job and the company culture.

Delivering and scoring pre-employment assessments

Many employers follow the screening or interview stage with pre-employment assessments to test candidates in areas such as job knowledge, job skills, ethics, personality, emotional intelligence, and cognitive aptitude. These are another layer of validation for your applicants to better ensure that you're dealing with the most qualified candidates.

Most AI tools let you customize the assessments as you see fit and set up your preferences to deliver them to candidates according to your hiring timeline. Often, the AI system grades each assessment, sparing your HR staff the need to examine each one.

Storing applicant information

The hiring process involves collecting quite a lot of personal information from applicants. For example, practically all job seekers submit identifiers such as their name, phone number, email address, and even their mailing address. Those who get hired provide even more, including their Social Security number and banking information. Employers are required to hold on to such information for a specified length of time, even when an applicant is rejected.

Automating applicant data collection is a common feature among AI tools, and some advertise themselves as being necessarily compliant with laws and regulations about applicant data. Taking the AI approach to data collection simplifies the coordination, movement, and eventual expungement of personal information. This allows an organization to operate within the borders of the law with no conscious effort.

Onboarding new employees

The process of bringing a new hire fully into the organization involves numerous moving parts that can be difficult to track manually, especially when you take on multiple employees at once. If you let AI tools take the wheel, the process becomes largely hands-off. Following your onboarding timeline, the AI system can:

Deliver essential company information, such as policies and benefits
Clarify each hire's role in the company
Help acclimate each hire to the company culture via gamification
Send tailored messages to each hire at each milestone they hit

Using AI in recruiting is becoming more widespread, as more and more HR departments are realizing its advantages. By leveraging AI, an organization can improve the candidate experience, establish faster times to hire, reduce the costs of hiring, and help new employees feel taken care of without having an HR member constantly at their side.

Learn more about AI's proliferation in the HR space by downloading "AI in Hiring: 2024 Trends, Insights & Predictions." Then reach out to us at CareerBuilder to discover how our AI tools can streamline your hiring process. Write faster and better-optimized job descriptions and source higher-quality candidates to reduce your time to hire and improve your return on investment.