As Australian companies struggle to fill roles with the right talent amid one of the country’s worst skills shortages, many are taking a shot at Artificial Intelligence (AI) to source, interview and match candidates to open roles.
It’s been an interesting few weeks for Artificial Intelligence. AI chatbot ChatGPT is being tested to detect early signs of Alzheimer’s, DALL-E is creating images from simple text, and Anthropic is working to build reliable and interpretable AI systems grounded on safety.
Following years of disappointment, the technology has finally emerged from its “AI winter” and is making waves in all business areas, including recruitment.
Between 35% and 45% of businesses are tipped to use AI talent acquisition technology to help source, shortlist and interview candidates in 2023.
Just under three-quarters of businesses increased their spending on talent acquisition software last year, with the vast majority saying they will continue investing in it this year (Modern Hire, 2023).
As Australia continues to suffer its most significant labour shortage in decades, businesses are now adopting AI to identify highly skilled candidates and automate some of the lengthy processes involved in shortlisting and selecting the suitable candidates for their open roles.
Can AI effectively parse resumes for skilled roles at scale?
Hiring managers often have hundreds of resumes and cover letters to scan through in the first round of shortlisting candidates. For skilled roles, there may be only a handful of qualified candidates hidden beneath them.
At the best of times, hiring managers can only afford to spend as little as 10 seconds on each resume to identify the relevant qualifications – a specific degree, experience in a particular role etc. even though the vast majority of candidates are not qualified for the position.
To solve this challenge, AI technology can identify qualified candidates at scale by crawling the text within each resume and matching it against specific keyword data. Budget airline Air Asia implemented a similar system to identify candidates from the thousands of applications they received based on how their skills managed the requirements of the role. Its recruiting team saved 60% of their screening time as a result.
2023 will leave behind reactionary hiring practises
In 2023, businesses will leave behind the era of reactionary hiring and refocus on seeking out quality candidates; those with the right skills and tertiary qualifications but also passion and motivation to learn on the job.
According to PwC’s recent report, however, just under half of all candidates decline job offers because of their dissatisfaction with the recruitment process. It’s clear that businesses need to work on their recruitment process, but they also need access to higher-quality skilled candidates to fill difficult positions.
One aspect of AI that recruiters can use is data manipulation to analyse hundreds of applications for skilled roles that demand very specific requirements, such as specialists and engineers.
“If you think about it, recruiting is a data-centric function with a lot of unstructured data found in people’s resumes and CVs (curriculum vitae),” Rowan said. “The sophistication in this process of matching has evolved from matching up skills with requirements to include analysis that helps determine candidate fitness for the role.”
What tools can hiring managers use to shortlist candidate resumes for skilled workers?
Utilising artificial intelligence to sift through candidate applications and source the best talent for skilled roles, without gender, age or race bias has become a valuable tool in the back pocket of hiring managers when it comes to filling roles with specific and nonnegotiable requirements.
The process of sourcing, posting, searching, parsing and matching capabilities to job posts can save hiring managers an enormous amount of time.
So, what are the most popular tools among hiring managers?
Skillate
Skillate is an SAP-developed talent engagement software for recruiters and hiring managers. The platform will write job descriptions and offer recommendations for more effective keywords.
It will collect resumes from multiple sources (owned and third-party mechanisms), and match resumes to job requirements at scale by running them through their machine learning model, ranking and scoring them along the way.
ICIMS Talent Cloud
ICIMS Talent Cloud is an AI bot that sources, opportunity matches, and suggests skilled workers as candidates to hiring managers.
The chatbot will automatically send answers to candidate FAQs and can schedule interviews in over 20 languages. It will parse relevant data from the resumes of each candidate and combine it with publicly available third-party information from sources like LinkedIn to create a unique profile for each candidate.
Integrations available: text messaging, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Teams.
Fecher
Fetcher, an AI-powered recruitment automation tool, employs a straightforward yet efficient 3-step sourcing, engaging, and tracking approach to guarantee a steady flow of suitable candidates and fulfil your hiring requirements.
Fecher is particularly useful for hiring managers seeking highly skilled professionals, with a sourcing tool that provides access to the most suitable candidates with specialised skills and backgrounds.
In addition, the platform has an automated outreach feature that hiring managers can send cold emails and personalised messages to candidates from.
