How will artificial intelligence impact your job as a recruiter in the future?

62 per cent of enterprises are expected to be using AI by 2018, with the market growing to $47 billion by 2020

How will successful recruiters look a decade from today? Currently, it takes a specific skill set and mentality to succeed in a recruiting career, but how will the future of AI impact your job as a recruiter?

Applicant Tracking Systems are already evolving at a fast pace – with most being centralised portals and databases that you rely on to keep track of and manage candidates. With the advancements in AI, these tools will have a tremendous amount of new capabilities only limited by the imagination of developers.

Future Applicant Tracking Systems are proposed to be able to instantly search and compile a candidate’s available public information from social media and search engines, providing the recruiter with not just a personality assessment but also a schedule of the hours that candidate is most digitally active. Combine it with instant background checks and revolutionised automated CV screening, and matching the right candidates to the right roles and knowing when and how to contact them will be more streamlined and effective than ever.

Everyday software is also set to quickly become smarter and more robust. Programs already exist that can analyse recorded interviews by scanning facial movements and voice patterns to gauge emotional intelligence and truthfulness, and this information could be instantly available and compiled in a future ATS.

Automation will naturally follow suit with the way candidates are marketed to evolving.  According to a survey of 500 staffing and recruiting firms, only 32% said they send candidates emails on a regular basis. In an effort to improve communication, talent acquisition departments are increasingly partnering with marketing departments, working together to better capture the interest of potential candidates. At a time when 46% of recruiters say finding qualified candidates is their biggest obstacle, AI can be extremely valuable

Once again, this is an area that AI will streamline and improve. Artificial intelligence thrives on data, and marketing communications provide figures such as which candidates opened a correspondence, if they clicked on a link, how long they spent on a page, and even where they scrolled to on the page. AI can take this into account in order to tailor future correspondences to each individual.

Building relationships will of course remain top priority – cognitive recruiting AI chatbots like Karen, based on IBM’s Watson, can help keep candidates engaged throughout the process, but the human touch is irreplaceable when building trusted and lasting relationships. 72% of candidates find current recruiting through digital channels to be “spammy” and impersonal.

AI software will need to be able to work in conjunction with recruiters and not in place of them – when many organisations start to heavily rely on automated recruiting chatbots and inundate candidates with messaging, those candidates will take notice of human recruiters personally reaching out to them.  The recruiters that nurture vital relationships with both client and candidate will be the ones who are most in demand.

Of course, these advancements can leave a recruiter feeling both excited and concerned. As long as you focus strongly on relationship-building, utilise the improvements AI can bring, and place yourself in an organisation that understands the right balance between the two, your career as a recruiter can still be a long and fruitful one.

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The British Institute of Recruiters is the Professional Body operating The Recruitment Certification Scheme

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