If we may assume, you’re good at reading and understanding people. You have a brain that remembers people’s names, traits, skills, and experiences. This is what makes you invaluable as a recruiter. But in today’s recruitment sphere, your talent falls short due to an excessive amount of applicants for each job, and you simply can’t remember what you deemed interesting about specific candidates. And even though you use an ATS to help you remember candidates’ names, skills, and experiences, you’re at risk of forgetting or missing specific candidates simply due to the sheer amount of information you have at hand.
To make the most out of your own skills, you can make digital tools into your assistants by not spending too much time screening nor evaluating candidates. Today we will look into how using digital tools for screening and assessing candidates can enhance your workflow and increase revenue.
The negatives of manual screening and evaluations
As already mentioned, time management is a tricky one for most people in HR. Due to that, a hiring process stretches long, and every step requires your input and contemplation. If you wouldn’t give it your full attention, the hire might be faulty. But at the same time, you have to answer to a stressed client or superior, which may result in you involuntarily giving less thought to the process—a Catch 22 two of sorts.
Doing a manual screening of resumes is highly time-consuming and energy-draining, especially when hiring for high-volume positions. On top of that, a resume is, obviously, a good starting point for an evaluation, but they fall short in giving you information about a person’s personality. You’d have to talk to the person to get a feel for X traits. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves; when you’ve screened all candidates, you need to schedule the interviews, which in itself takes a lot of time and logistics. When you’ve conducted the interviews, you have to evaluate the candidates, again, based on all the new information you’ve gathered, and then, finally, create a shortlist.
In many ways, the first steps of the hiring process are the most important ones. If the job ad attracts the wrong people, then you’ve spent a lot of time for nothing. The same goes for the screening process; if you rush through it, you may end up missing a candidate of great importance. That’s why it’s beneficial to use methods, in this case, digital tools, that can help you achieve a balanced “tasks vs. results” working life.
Screening resumes with AI
Powered by artificial intelligence, automated screening tools “read” resumes, rank candidates, and give you shortlists in a matter of minutes. As a matter of fact, you’ll get an equally great result as if you would have screened them yourself, but 10x faster. As the AI tool works for you, you can instead focus your attention on planning interviews, getting to know candidates, and maintaining a steady relationship with the client (if you have one). Tools like these have been around for quite some time, but they’ve become increasingly more accurate thanks to Natural Language Processing (NLP) development.
Resume enrichers
By using public data from social media and other open sources, resume enrichers can create a preliminary analysis of a person’s personality traits, skills, and experience. This tool “simply” scrapes the web for information on the candidates in your pipeline and gives you a better idea of who you should move forward with. It understands what “Parsons School of Design,” “Illustrator,” and “Python” are and can therefore create an image of what this person is all about. At times, candidates exaggerate their knowledge in certain areas in order to gain trust. Something which can be easily deflated with the help of a resume enricher, your digital footprint seldom lie.
Evaluating candidates with AI
A resume and personal letter only hold so much information. In contrast, an interview is a lot more rewarding in getting a clearer picture of a person in combination with higher validity. But, interviewing every candidate is not an option, time-wise. Luckily, there are AI-driven tools that function as middle hands between the resume and the interview. Say you get 100 applications for a job. Every applicant is referred to a chat in which they talk to a conversational AI. The chatbot asks questions regarding the candidate’s experiences, why they want the job, and job-related questions such as when they can start, salary, etc.
When all applicants have been interviewed, the tool provides you with a shortlist of the ultimate candidates. Yes, the AI can decipher which candidate is most suitable for the position based on the responses it has gotten and the additional information provided by you. This is what we do here at Hubert, and, of course, we’re biased in how much we endorse the technology, but it’s of great benefit to be able to get a shortlist of candidates handed to you. You save time and money, reduce biases, and avoid doing monotonous tasks.
Yes, joy. Imagine focusing only on what you love the most about your job. Whether that’s building long-standing relationships with candidates or strategizing your hiring process, you’ll be able to move faster by getting some help. The investment you make in tools will bring some sought-after work-life balance and higher revenue in the long run.
