On one hand, the recession hitting technology companies hasn’t eased as layoffs keep coming, including at some of the industry’s giants. On the other, a CompTIA report shows that the tech unemployment rate continues its years-long trend of beating the overall unemployment rate, which was 3.4% as of the May jobs report. A key factor currently sustaining that trend is hiring at AI firms.
This comes at a time when organizations must compete in a rapidly changing business environment, and one of their most significant differentiators is intellectual capital—the collective knowledge, skills, and abilities of their workforce. How can AI companies lure the top talent they need to maximize their intellectual capital? By incorporating the very technology they’re developing and championing into their own talent acquisition strategies and hiring C-suite leaders highly committed to talent development.
Incorporating AI-Powered Recruiting Tools for Enterprise-Wide Hiring
As the AI community knows, this intelligent technology is revolutionizing many facets of our world, including the way healthcare providers treat diseases like cancer to how the financial services industry detects fraud. It’s doing the same for how companies recruit, hire, and develop employees from entry-level to senior management roles.
Firms like Eightfold, HireVue, Phenom, and others offer AI-powered talent management platforms that boast an incredible amount of functionality and yield significant benefits for the organizations that invest in them. The most notable ways they are transforming the recruitment process include these:
Talent Sourcing
By analyzing social media profiles, online resumes, and other digital footprints like visitor abandonment of job listing pages, AI can identify a wider pool of job seekers for positions up and down organizations. This includes potential candidates who have not yet or have no intention of applying for a particular open position. As a result, organizations don’t miss top talent hiding in the marketplace.
Skills Matching and Predictive Analytics
AI-powered platforms can quickly review and aggregate all the information gleaned from applicant resumes, interview results, and personality assessments to identify candidates most likely to succeed in particular roles. The same analytics can also identify and flag potential concerns related to otherwise promising candidates so recruiters can follow up with highly targeted questions. Ultimately, organizations can make more informed decisions about who to hire for what role.
For example, Eightfold uses deep learning to compare every job seeker’s experience, skills, and potential against more than one billion global profiles to rank order candidates. It even makes recommendations to candidates about jobs matching their profiles.
Bias Elimination
The algorithms of these platforms are built to analyze a candidate’s skills, experience, and personality traits without looking at personal information like their name, age, or gender so that they are assessed based on the same objective criteria as every other candidate for the same job. This keeps unconscious bias and personal preferences out of hiring decisions.
Diverse and Inclusive Hiring Practices
Through job description review and analysis, AI-powered systems can identify and remove gender-biased language to create job postings that are more appealing to a diverse candidate pool. Why does that matter? According to Glassdoor, diversity is important to 76% of job seekers and employees, and 32% aren’t interested in applying where it’s lacking. Moreover, we know that talent acquisition and retention is just one of the benefits of DEI, along with innovation, productivity, and profitability.
Improved Candidate Experiences
Automated, yet personalized AI-generated communication engages candidates throughout the recruiting process, making a better brand first impression. This includes real-time notifications, on-demand interview scheduling, and chatbots to answer questions or provide information about a company or role.
Such a seamless job search experience is critical to luring top talent. PwC reports that 49% of candidates in high-demand fields, including technology, have declined offers from companies after a bad recruiting experience with them. Even worse, 56% of them would discourage others from applying to the same company.
On-Demand, AI-Powered Interviews
Some AI-powered recruiting tools are even revolutionizing the interview process. HireVue, as an example, lets companies create on-demand, recorded screening interviews that ask the same questions of each candidate and provide them with 30 seconds or so to prepare a response and two to three minutes to record their answer per question.
Combined with automated communications, video interviewing lets internal recruiters focus their valuable time and attention on the most promising applicants and on the most important conversations, such as negotiations over pay and benefits. From the candidate perspective, they can self-schedule and self-complete their interview whenever it’s convenient. This is yet another way to avoid unnecessarily limiting the candidate pool, in this case to only those who can interview during specific windows.
Executive Interviews and Recruitment
Organizations are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence to conduct interviews for executive-level roles, revolutionizing the traditional hiring process. Companies such as Unilever, Goldman Sachs, and Vodafone have embraced this tactic to streamline their recruitment procedures. AI-powered interview platforms leverage natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to analyze candidate responses, facial expressions, and other behavioral cues.
This approach provides a standardized and consistent experience for all executive candidates, eliminating bias and ensuring a fair evaluation. Combined with the fact that AI can also assess a larger pool of candidates in a shorter time, organizations are able to identify top talent more effectively and efficiently.
However, there are some drawbacks to using AI exclusively because it may struggle with understanding complex or nuanced responses, potentially overlooking exceptional candidates who don’t fit predefined criteria. Furthermore, the total absence of human interaction may hinder the assessment of qualities such as interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence. Balancing the advantages and disadvantages of AI interviews is crucial for organizations to make informed decisions about their hiring practices.
Hiring C-Suite Leaders Committed to Intellectual Capital
The growth potential for the AI industry through the end of this decade is significant. Market Research indicates that the global market for AI was worth an estimated $68.8 billion in 2022, and it is projected to increase to $459.3 billion by 2030. The AI software segment alone is expected to reach $188.2 billion by that year.
AI companies intent on capitalizing on this growth need C-suite leaders up to the task, which includes the ability to maximize their firm’s intellectual capital. This starts with a willingness to invest in AI-powered recruiting tools that complement human judgment in fairly and equitably identifying and luring the most qualified candidates for open positions. Then internal recruiters must be trained and motivated to use these tools effectively.
The C-suite also needs to be committed to proactively identifying and developing the top talent in its rank-and-file employees. This requires a continuous feedback loop between employees and managers. In this, too, AI-powered talent management tools like Eightfold help employees clarify their professional goals, map out potential career paths, identify skill gaps, and create personalized learning experiences that promote their career progression.
In this type of culture, where continuous learning and development are prioritized, employees are more likely to remain engaged in their current roles while working to reach future goals they see as attainable. This improves talent retention and helps organizations build robust leadership pipelines.
Balancing AI and Human Relationships in Talent Acquisition
As AI transforms talent acquisition, some in my industry may fear that it supplants human involvement and judgment. At Focus Search Partners, we know that, on the contrary, AI enhances human intelligence and interaction by providing tools to streamline the hiring process and the objective analysis and data-driven insights to help companies make more informed hiring decisions. Organizations who effectively balance AI and human intelligence have the greatest chance of unlocking the full potential of their workforce, crucially allowing them to stay ahead of the competition.
Focus Search Partners’ technology practice is poised to help AI companies find the type of C-suite leaders needed at this critical inflection point. In fact, we’ve already placed top tier executive leadership in the C suites of AI industry leaders like BigPanda, Google Cloud, Grammarly, Reflektion, and Teradata.
By Adam Charlson, Steve Finder, and Paige Westhoff at Focus Search Partners
Need to find the ideal executive for your AI company? Contact Focus Search Partners today.