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4 Ways Small Businesses Can Recruit Smarter with A.I.

Mar 14, 2018 1:05:28 PM / by Abby Desmonds, Arya by Leoforce

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Let’s enter the world of lean and mean small and medium-sized businesses for a few minutes.

Whether you’re a staffing company, a corporation, or a privately-held business, reaching the top talent before the big firms and large corporations swipe them up can be extremely difficult. Not to mention, exhausting. You don’t have the resources they do, the budget, the talent, the headcount, or even the diversity. So, how do you stay in the ring without getting knocked out? 

The candidate experience is now more important and personalized than ever before, making it a prerequisite to landing the best talent. But, to be honest, you just don’t have the time on your calendar or the resources at your fingertips to do your research on each candidate and provide them the experience they desire. You’re sick of taking piles of resumes (or files) home with you to study and find that perfect match that the hiring manager won’t get off your back about.

You don’t have the intel you need to be able to make quick and quality hires that the hiring managers want. You know those candidates are out there, but you just don’t have the time or resources to identify them.

These are harsh realities to face in the middle of an industry revolution where recruiting the best talent is more critical than ever to the success of an organization. In the past, the “big dogs”, so to speak, are able to impress candidates and meet their needs quicker. So, how can smaller organizations continue to make a difference in the lives of candidates while being an even competitor with the large companies who have always landed the best talent first?

Two words. Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). Say this with me, “I can recruit better, faster, and smarter with A.I. A.I. will take my business further, deeper, and will cast my net wider than I could without its aid.” A.I. for small business recruiting and hiring is here.

The need for A.I.

52% of recruiters say the hardest part of their job is identifying the right candidates from a large applicant pool while 70% of hiring managers say that improving long-term business impact requires recruiting teams to become more data-driven.

A career path as intense as a recruiter’s, combining administrative, personal, and strategic tasking constantly needs sophisticated ways to advance above old archaic practices we no longer want to rely on. With A.I., you have it.

70% of staffing firms believe A.I. will play a role in improving recruitment. That stat alone makes the next few minutes worth your attention.

 

Here are 4 ways small businesses can recruit smarter with the aid of A.I.:

 1. Maintain a consistent higher quality candidate pool

Almost 7-in-10 (69 percent) of talent acquisition professionals find that A.I. as a sourcing tool garners higher-quality candidates. Different A.I. tools may specialize in specific sourcing methods. Some may focus on sourcing from job boards, others focus on social sites, and many focus on your internal database. The true gems offer all three. A.I.-powered sourcing means recruiters are no longer sifting through resumes and trying to identify one in a million talent. Their candidate pool will constantly populate with the best candidate for each requisition found on job boards, social sites, internal databases, or all of the above.

 

2. Deep dive into job, industry, and candidate intelligence

A.I. is known for making large amounts of data meaningful and digestible to the average human being. Do you know how much information is available on the open web about one individual? Probably too much, but it’s data that can be useful to a recruiter and future employer. An A.I. engine will take that data and present key facts about a candidate to a recruiter. Including, past job roles, their tenure in those roles, growth in the companies they’ve worked for, industries they’ve worked in, and what kind of skills they excel in. A.I. can also measure the kind of jobs that specific candidates would be a good fit for, and what industries and companies in their database are currently in need of that role. By combining all of this data, this approach creates a much smarter process to painting a more complete picture of an applicant.

 

3. Personalize your candidate engagement

Most A.I. tools offer automated candidate engagement through drip email campaigns and one-on-one communications. But the top A.I. tools are now offering tips to communicate with candidates based on their individual personality and communication style. Not only will these solutions engage with candidates on your behalf, but they’ll meaningfully engage with them by speaking their “language”, so to speak. A.I. can track a candidate’s social footprint and learn their communication style then provide that information to the recruiter. This allows recruiters to tailor their communications to resonate with potential candidates and nail that first impression and meaningfully engage throughout the onboarding process.  

 

4. Learn from hiring trends and retain recruiter intel

 I saved the best for last. The most crucial and compelling benefit that A.I. offers is a tool that learns and grows with your company. Yes, I mean through that magical term we call, machine learning. True A.I. tools build machine learning into the core of their product. Machine learning can comprehend, reason, and learn from every data point, interaction, and outcome. This means that an A.I. tool tracks your successful hiring trends and repeats them as you continue to source new candidates. Recruiters don’t have to remember certain keywords they used during their searches or track down that successful hire they had a few months back. The system already knows. It tracks where the candidate was sourced, their background, their previous jobs, their experience level, etc. So the next time you have to fill a position similar to a previous one, the system already knows where to look and who to look for.

Last but not least, this information and intelligence is stored within your system, meaning your top recruiter’s best practices don’t go with them if they ever leave your company. The knowledge is retained and stays within your organization, growing along with your company.

 

Final thoughts

A.I. is a lot to comprehend. But, when you break it down, it’s easy to gauge its untouchable value.  A myth for small and mid-sized businesses is that they’ll get left behind by the tech-savvy, large organizations. A.I. can do as much or as little as you want it to. It’s not just a must-have for the large companies, it’s a must-have for organizations of all sizes to stay relevant. As for the smaller companies, if you know how to leverage what it’s capable of in your own organization -- that’s the ace up your sleeve. It allows you to compete with the big guns. It’s a tried and true innovator, one that will keep you in the game instead of leaving you behind.

  

Want to learn more about Arya’s true A.I. recruiting platform? 

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Guest Blog Contributor

Abby Desmonds

Abby Desmonds from Arya by Leoforce. Arya is the market-leading A.I. recruiting tool, for companies of all sizes, that turns average performers into star recruiters. Arya's artificial intelligence learns from recruiter behavior, predicts candidates' success and cultural fit, and provides unprecedented candidate and job intelligence through machine learning and predictive analytics to hire quality talent faster. 

  

Topics: Trends, employees, workforce, artificial intelligence, a.i., recruiting, hr, sourcing