It seems like artificial intelligence (AI) is all over the news these days. ChatGPT seemed to take the world by storm in 2023, and there’s no indication that the AI craze is going to loosen up any time soon. In fact, it seems clear that AI is only going to become more and more relevant to almost every facet of society.
But what does that mean for HR departments? After all, isn’t the human part of HR the most vital? How can something artificial really help HR professionals do their jobs any better?
Whether you think robots are about to take over the world or you’re leaning into AI as hard as you can, ignoring the importance of conversational AI in HR—particularly in recruitment—will be at your peril. Conversational AI can give a huge boost to overworked recruiters and make filling those open positions at your company a quicker, smoother process.
What Is Conversational AI?
Conversational AI is exactly what it sounds like: software that’s able to speak with people and answer their questions. When people message your company about open positions, AI will be able to have a brief screening conversation with them before pointing them toward their next steps. Chatbots are the most common form of conversational AI, and many companies already use them on their websites or Facebook pages. AI can also be trained with your company’s values and branding, meaning it’s able to respond how one of your employees would truly respond—not just like a cookie-cutter computer. It makes sense that more and more recruiters are embracing conversational AI.
So how can conversational AI help your recruitment team do what it does best? If you’re hoping to fill your open positions as quickly as possible, conversational AI might be a good investment for your team.
Conversational AI Helps Recruitment Teams Scale
Conversational AI is about scalability. It allows more to get done with a smaller recruitment team because a lot of the nitty-gritty tasks of getting basic information from a candidate can be handled by the AI software. It speeds up the process, as well—thousands of candidates can be evaluated and processed in a day instead of multiple weeks. Scheduling also takes much less back-and-forth because AI can answer questions instantly instead of waiting on your employees to send an e-mail.
When candidates first reach out to your recruitment team, AI can get information like their name, degree, and years of experience. Plenty of people who reach out aren’t going to fit into the basic requirements you’re looking for, and they need to be filtered out. Now, one of your teammates doesn’t need to spend time going through all of those conversations—AI software can. That means you can process more candidates than ever before. The more leads you can get in your pipeline, the better because you have a solid filter in place. Your recruiters only need to be spending time and resources on your top-tier candidates, and conversational AI frees them up to do so.
Conversational AI Saves Recruitment Teams Money
Many people think of conversational AI as a huge expense. The software does have a cost to it, especially if you want high quality. But the truth is, AI will save you money in the long run. Instead of having to hire even more recruiters, AI can handle the smaller tasks on your team without the hassle of a full salary and benefits. It can quickly turn down candidates who aren’t a great fit instead of clogging up time in your recruiters’ days, and some pieces of software are able to point candidates to positions they may be a better fit for, helping them with their career advancement, as well. AI can also tackle a lot of the employee onboarding process, meaning you won’t need to hire as many HR employees.
Moreover, AI helps your recruiting be more strategic, saving you money in the long run. If you hire an employee who isn’t a good cultural fit, that employee won’t be around very long. The time you spent on the hiring and onboarding process is now wasted, and you have to go out recruiting again. If you do more of the work upfront, making sure you get terrific candidates hired, they’re more likely to stick around. This saves businesses tons of money in the long run—every HR professional knows employee retention is incredibly important.
Conversational AI Prevents Mistakes from Slipping Through the Cracks
Small mistakes are to be expected from human workers. If someone is offered an interview who shouldn’t have been offered one, it was probably an honest mistake made by a hardworking employee on a busy day. There are so many steps in the recruiting process that it’s easy to accidently move someone from one area of the pipeline to another. But conversational AI allows you to bypass those mistakes. Its accuracy can be laser-focused, making your recruitment process much tighter and reducing any friction.
Furthermore, AI is data-driven. It can take in data from career sites and job postings and filter through it all much quicker than a human employee and with greater accuracy. That data is invaluable when it comes to ranking potential candidates and organizing them in terms of priority. Human workers are more likely to bring in their own personal biases, whereas conversational AI can rank candidates on the hard facts.
Is Conversational AI Right for Your Business?
You never know until you try! At the end of the day, AI needs to be run by humans, so if misplaced fears about job losses are holding you back, don’t let them. With the AI rise, we’ll still need human-focused jobs and skill sets that software will never be able to tackle. We’ll always need the human element of HR—conversational AI just makes the process a little smoother, quicker, and cheaper. With constant updates to technology, who knows where AI will be able to take recruitment in the future!
Claire Swinarski is a Contirbuting Editor at HR Daily Advisor.