The majority of the professionals agreed that Artificial Intelligence (AI) benefits recruiters when it comes to cutting down routine and administrative tasks. Hence recruiters have more time to focus on the best matches. The use of AI in recruitment helps recruiters, especially in the evaluation, ranking and qualification processes of job applicants and hence it is possible for recruiters to start the recruitment process with the most potential job candidates directly by interviewing them. When it comes to communication between recruiters and job applicants, many of the professionals would not mind whether the communications happen through human or AI-based robots. Five out of eight professionals mentioned that with the help of AI, it is possible to speed up the recruitment process and hence the recruitment processes become less time-consuming.
It was also mentioned that AI allows more equal chances to all candidates for being selected for the job due to decreased human bias. The professionals adduced that with the help of AI, it is possible to find and notice both potentially silent job candidates and excellent job candidates. Even though it is possible that AI will replace some tasks conducted by humans in the HR department, it is important to keep the human touch in the recruitment process and one of the professionals mentioned that the purpose of their company is to bring the human touch back to recruitment. An important issue brought up by professionals was the real need and benefit of the use of AI for the company. Hence it is crucial for the companies to consider the real effectiveness brought by AI to the organizations and ponder how the use of AI in recruitment affects the company’s effectiveness.
Some identified challenges that AI can bring to companies are the adaptation of new technology within AI and lack of trust. Having adequate adaptability towards AI and having proper tools to utilize AI is extremely important because it needs to know how to use AI in the organization. Several professionals mentioned that HR departments are considered as traditional and hence it is extremely important to pay attention to the overall adaptability of new technologies. One of the professionals mentioned that in order to gain all the benefits that the use of AI in recruitment brings, organizations need to be able to buy AI. This implies that organizations need to have enough time to dedicate to new technologies.
It was discussed during the consultations that several organizations consider that they want to use AI, but they do not necessarily know why and how to use it. It can be the case that the organization does not necessarily need the speed or quality brought by AI or the organization might not even have the technical team to implement AI. An important aspect of using AI in the recruitment process is to consider how well AI can understand the company’s values and whether AI completely understands what kinds of job candidates the company is looking for. This comes to the concept of biased machine learning and to the Amazon case example that was brought up by three interviewed professionals. It was discussed that there is a danger of biased machine learning as was in the case of Amazon in 2015, when the company uncovered that their new recruiting engine favoured men when it came to rating candidates for software developer positions and this AI recruiting tool showed biases against women. According to one of the professionals, an area where AI might have difficulties in understanding cultural barriers since terminology varies between cultures and nations. Hence one of the most fundamental challenges of using AI in recruitment that was discussed during the interview is how to train people to train machines in order to avoid biases.
The majority of the professionals agreed that AI can be a tool to help when it comes to unconscious biases in recruitment, but not solely solve or remove them. However, some professionals agreed that AI is the right tool to solve unconscious biases and one of the core purposes of AI-based recruitment is to solve these biases. One professional stated that AI can solve unconscious biases. This is because the way an applicant’s Curriculum Vitae(CV) is written or the quality of their CV does not matter if the applicants have the skills which are stated in their CV.
On the contrary one professional hoped that AI would not completely take away biases, since in certain situations a job applicant might be suitable for the job position based on his or her passion or attitude and not solely based on the work experience she or he has. In these situations, AI might not recognize the motivation, but only the amount of work experience and other qualifications and hence it is good if the recruiter’s opinion matters. However, the same professionals agreed that AI can greatly improve and help with these biases. However, recruitment must always be legal and there are also laws that require recruiters to act equally and non-discriminatory in all areas.
The major conclusion of AI study is that even though application of AI in recruitment is relatively new, it is an increasing area in Human Resources Management (HRM). It can be drawn from research that the real need of implementing AI should be carefully considered beforehand by organizations. In order to do that, the implications for organizational effectiveness are important to study.
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