With all the fads and trends that pass through the recruiting industry, it’s easy to become dismissive. Chatbots, gigs, search engine jobs, if we were in any other industry we’d be stuck with a warehouse full of fidget spinners and HD DVDs. But in the chaos of it all are a few things that manage to stick around.
In 2018 we watched AI enter trend-dom but held our breaths knowing it could quickly go bust (or become sentient and terminate us all). As word spread from early adopters, however, AI became a widely embraced, and semi-fixture, of many parts of the industry. Now, in 2019, we expect to see it become a dominant part of the recruiting process.
Here’s where we think AI is heading this year.
Mainstream Use
With AI inherently solving a dozen pain points for staffers and recruiters, this year will be about pushing the envelope. Not that people will be entirely written out of the process, but with onboarding, screening and organizing candidates already handled, other time-consuming tasks like sending out opportunities, checking in and even sourcing are sure to follow. This leaves industry professionals to spend more time working on relationships and candidate matching.
A Different Chatbot
While previous iterations failed to take off, we’re seeing more pieces of industries around the world find success in chatbots backed by AI. Canned responses and lapses in functionality are traded for a human-like voice that learns as it goes. With more capabilities, this has become the more mobile-friendly onboarding process we’ve been waiting for as applicants have a helping hand in being screened on the go.
Swimming Upstream
Right now AI sees its most use in the early stages of the onboarding process. But with its ability to handle, store and make decisions with large amounts of data, it’s sure to make its way to the job matching and candidate selection process. With its ability to learn on the go it can also adapt to current systems and provide customized services for each candidate.
