Use of AI in Candidate Screening for Hiring Top Talents

Recruitment is a very time-consuming and tedious job. Right from the preparation of the job description to onboarding a new employee, hiring is a big process. Candidate screening, especially, is extremely mundane and tiring for recruiters.

It also involves a lot of minute precautions, which if not taken, can result in hiring the wrong candidate and thus, can cost big time for the employer.

However, new innovative ideas keep emerging from time to time to solve our problems. Recruitment too, has been changing a lot since the Great Recession of the late 2000s.

And today, with technology assisting recruiters, the candidate screening process is becoming fast, accurate, efficient, and unbiased. The latest AI technology can even help reduce human errors by keeping you from missing the right candidate or shortlisting an undeserving one.

According to LinkedIn, 35% to 40% of companies today have incorporated some or the other kind of AI recruitment tool in their hiring process and more than 73% of them are planning to invest in AI very soon. So, it ought to be a futuristic hiring practice.

How is the AI Transforming Candidate Screening Process?

It would be unfair to say that AI is just helping solve the recruitment process. It is actually transforming it into an extremely efficient process by optimizing it using fewer resources. The traditional recruitment process is human-driven and thus it has its own set of disadvantages.

Firstly, the judgment was purely subjective and was often governed by a lot of unconscious emotions and biases. For example, out of a heap of CVs for a particular job, a recruiter would usually prefer candidates who belong to his region, have qualifications similar to the recruiter, or belong to a certain community.

Secondly, candidate screening is a highly time-extensive job. The recruiter has to go through each CV before they can shortlist them. For volume hiring, these can last up to a few days, if not weeks. 

Moreover, even after several days of hard work, there are still chances of leaving out a good candidate or shortlisting the wrong one due to a missing or incorrectly placed keyword.

👉 Read more: Problems with Resume Screening - What You Should Do Instead?

However, with AI at your service, all these problems just vanish. The human-induced biases are completely wiped out, efficiency goes to the next level, and the time taken in screening hundreds of CVs gets reduced to just a few minutes, optimizing the whole hiring process.

How Does AI Help in Screening Candidates?

Most automation tools and recruiters look for keywords related to the job requirements in the CVs of the candidates. Though most applicants understand the process and prepare their CVs in a similar manner.

Screening Candidate's Skills

Using tool like WeCP AI Copilot recruiter can create pre-employment assessments and assignments and send to their candidates before the interview to check whether they actually possess the skills and experience that they have mentioned in their resumes.

Such an evaluation helps shortlist only quality candidates in the candidate screening process. By using this, recruiters are not only saving time to create assessments and screen candidates but also increase the quality of hire by multiple folds.

Want to know how? Check out this video:

Video Interviewing

Moreover, when shortlisting candidates through a video interview, AI can easily read between the lines. A recruiter generally conducts a video interview to understand candidate’s and their aspirations better through their answers. AI can add to this comprehension by observing the minute details of a candidate’s personality through their body language and non-verbal cues.

It can also eliminate unconscious biases by concealing names and other personally identifiable information from CVs, disabling the recruiters to create any biases. Additionally, the use of AI in screening reduces subjective judging by recruiters, making it more accurate and efficient.

Benefits of Using AI in Candidate Screening

All the major problems that recruiters face during the candidate screening process - excessive time consumption, unconscious biasing, repetition of monotonous tasks, etc. can be avoided by using AI in candidate screening.

Improved Candidate Quality

The key objective of any recruitment process is hiring the right candidate for the job. Therefore, no matter how convenient the process becomes with the help of technology, it ought to give better results in terms of efficiency.

And, AI doesn’t disappoint here. To start with, you can ask for AI assistance in writing an immaculate job description to attract just the right kind of candidates to apply for the job.

Next, AI can help promote your vacancy on portals like LinkedIn to target the right audience for the job. Using AI to promote each of your jobs can also help build the employer’s brand in a certain way. This is more beneficial for big companies where a lot of recruiters post jobs for a single employer.

Further, after sourcing job applicants, AI can help screen candidates extremely fast and pull out a talented pool using pre-screening questionnaires, video interviews, and reliable background verification techniques.

A skill assessment test during the candidate screening process does wonders in improving the quality of applicants who make it to the next step of the recruitment process. Such an evaluation can help you rank the candidates based on their performance and you don’t have to worry about the authenticity of the skills and experience that they have mentioned.

Faster Screening

AI can bring down hundreds of man-hours that recruiters normally spend to screen CVs to literally a few minutes through its automation features. A technique called natural language processing or NLP can help AI quickly read and screen CVs for keywords, skills, and experiences that an employer wants for the job.

Moreover, with chatbots in place, interview scheduling has become an automated job, reducing manual efforts in coordinating the timings of the stakeholders. In addition to this, AI can perform instant background checks, making screening faster and more authentic.

Enhanced Candidate Experience

Artificial intelligence proves to be a great boon, not only for you but for the candidates as well. Chatbots and auto-emailing features can help with scheduling interviews, saving both candidates’ as well as your time.

Moreover, when candidates need to ask questions regarding the recruitment process or track their status of candidature, chatbots can help them do so without the need for any recruiter, making it a seamless and automated task.

In their small ways, each of these elements contributes to shaping the employer’s brand in the market. And, we cannot emphasize enough the fact that employer branding is as important for an applicant today, as the job itself.

Conclusion

AI is doing wonders not only in the candidate screening process but also in the whole recruitment process. It saves a lot of resources for the employer and improves the efficiency and accuracy of the hiring in return.

WeCP offers its AI Copilot to help you through the candidate screening process. It can produce a pre-screening questionnaire or skill assessment test for your applicants. The AI Copilot can also generate a cumulative report of the performances of all the candidates.

As a result, it can provide valuable insights into the candidates’ scores and the overall profiles to help you in decision-making.

All in all, WeCP offers a great AI recruitment solution that can seamlessly integrate with your current recruitment process and uplift its efficiency to a great extent.