Dear recruiters,
I have a question. Have you told your hiring managers that AI can help them (and you) hire faster and better? Probably not. If we’re being honest, they probably don’t know much about AI to begin with, let alone how it can be used to help them hire better.
Here’s a harder question: Do you even want to tell them?
Yeah, I’m calling you out. Because I’ve had the exact same thought. As AI has exploded in popularity and usage over the last few years, all anyone talks about is how great it is for recruiters. Look at all the stuff it can do for you, aren’t you thrilled? My immediate reaction was: HECK YES. But then doubt creeped in. What if people look at us recruiters differently? What if they look at all the good work being done and go, it’s not you, it's the AI. What if we lose all our credibility and trust? What if we become obsolete?
We want AI to help us, but not too much. It’s a real predicament.
But the reality is, AI is here to stay. We can’t run from it. It will help us, and in turn, it will help our hiring managers. That’s the most important thing. The more we know, and the more our hiring managers know, the better we’ll all be at recruiting the best talent for our teams.
If it’s been a tough conversation for you to have, here’s how I would go about teaching them what the technology is doing for “us”:
- “Hey, did you know we are saving 12 hours per week because AI is now scheduling all of our interviews?” Why should you care? Because of this time savings, I’m now able to actually hunt for your purple squirrels instead of posting and praying candidates apply!”
- “Hey, did you know that before AI, only about 5% of candidates who looked at your job actually applied? But now, with AI improving our ability to nudge candidates back, we can get upwards of 40% of those candidates to apply! Why should you care? That’s a 700% increase in candidates we’ll see apply to your jobs, and our hiring quality will be much better.”
- “Hey, did you know that our AI tools allow us to immediately let previous candidates know that your job is open, again, to see if they would be interested in applying? Why should you care? We can see upwards of a 50% decrease in the amount of time it takes to get candidates in your hands. This speed will get you and your team up to speed that much faster!”
The value of using AI in recruiting can be very clear to us as recruiters, but we often forget how valuable it is to our end client, the hiring manager. Another big part of that value is what AI allows us to do for them. And ultimately, this is why we should all be OK that AI is “taking some of the credit.” Because, if we’re being honest, this isn’t stuff we really want to do anyways. It’s just stuff we think we have to do.
But we don’t. There’s more valuable things for recruiters to do. And AI frees us up to do it:
- Spending more time sourcing and discovering more talent and higher quality talent. Our hiring managers believe we are “hunting” for talent. Now, with AI tools, we finally have the capacity to do it!
- We can focus our talent lens on internal teams to better understand how to begin upgrading talent for our hiring managers and not just fill open holes.
- We can start re-recruiting the talent already working for us and become their internal career agent, helping them reach their career goals without leaving our organization.
- We will be able to align ourselves with hiring managers and become the talent advisors we have been saying we are. We will embed ourselves with their teams to truly understand the skills that are lacking and execute a plan to gather those.
AI tools in recruiting aren’t taking jobs away from recruiters. AI allows us as recruiters to evolve into the role we’ve wanted for decades but never had the capacity to reach. Too many talent acquisition professionals want to keep quiet about the AI they are using because they don’t want hiring managers or anyone else to think their jobs just got easier. But recruiting isn’t easy — and AI doesn’t really make it easier. It makes certain parts of the hiring process more efficient.
But finding great talent is still difficult. Choosing who to hire is still difficult. And that’s why recruiters need as much time as possible to do it.
So the next time you’re concerned about letting AI take credit for things like screening and scheduling, let it. You have more important things to do. And your hiring managers will love you for it.
Sincerely,
Tim
