According to a 2018 LinkedIn report, talent professionals and hiring managers globally say AI is a “bold disruptor” and is improving their hiring practices across the board. Artificial Intelligence today is shaping the recruitment game more than ever–meaning businesses who have yet to embrace AI recruiting are falling behind. This quickly-advancing technology fully automates candidate search, engagement, and diversity boosting. In turn, it raises recruiter productivity, speeds up time to fill positions, lowers costs per hire, and builds a pool of top talent. 

In other words, if you’re not using it—you’re losing candidates to people who are. In a talent market that’s more competitive than ever, falling behind the times can have a serious impact on your organization. 

Here are 5 ways avoiding AI recruitment technology can hurt your recruitment game. 

Traditional Methods Are Slower, Losing You Top Talent

According to an Indeed report, top candidates expect to be hired 14 days after applying. A  study of candidate behavior also reveals that 66% of job applicants wait less than two weeks before moving on–and the best candidates are off the market in less than ten days. 

According to The Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM), the average time to fill a position is 42 days across industries. When the best candidates disappear in less than a fourth of that time, there’s simply no way to leave a slot open that long and attract the best talent. 

Part of the reason your positions may be staying open for so long is that you’re using slower, inefficient traditional methods while your competitors are embracing new technology and hiring much faster. Some tasks that they are likely automating in order to turn up candidates faster include: 

• Uploading a job description and sharing it on different platforms like social media, career portals, and newspapers. 
• Collecting resumes and screening them.  
• Shortlisting relevant candidates and finding passive job seekers.  
• Contacting relevant applicants across platforms. 

These processes take up countless hours and bog down recruitment before you even manage to get in touch with a candidate—let alone bring in several for interviews. By automating search and engagement, companies are able to get ahold of the best talent and bring them aboard in a matter of days. 

It’s Harder to Find Diverse Candidates Without AI’s Targeted Searches

The traditional method of finding and recruiting employees is, unfortunately, both flawed and limiting. This is doubly true for finding diverse candidates: underrepresented talent tend to construct online profiles that are harder to find by common search terms, and are less likely to apply for jobs if they don’t meet 100% of requirements. 

On the recruiter’s end, unconscious bias often creeps in when you only use names and photos to find diverse profiles. For example, hiring managers favor men more than women in job applications. This is seen in a Stanford University study, where hiring managers deliberately ignored women’s resumes.  

Lack of diversity in your team robs you of the opportunity to work with a strong, more creative, and more productive workforce. 

AI technology can actually predict candidate demographics and tweak your searches to include more diversity. Avoiding these benefits can hurt not only your recruiting game but  your employer brand. Candidates today are more interested in working with companies that match their values, such as equity and equal opportunity. Similarly, many investors look for companies putting in their best effort to level the playing field in their workforces. Therefore, avoiding the AI tech that will exponentially raise your employee diversity is losing you the best talent both in terms of highly qualified diverse candidates and in terms of optics.

You Can Only Contact a Few Potential Candidates At a Time By Yourself

Even if you do manage to find enough qualified and diverse candidates using Boolean search, reaching out to all of them takes up more time than most recruiters have. If you’re sending individual messages one by one, there’s really only so many candidates you can actually reach out to. 

That means you’ll want to reach out to only the candidates with the best chance of responding and fitting the role. Which, let’s be honest, requires not a small amount of guesswork. 

An AI, however, automates the engagement process and can send messages to thousands of candidates on your behalf. Not only that, it can predict which contact information is out of date, send follow-up messages to candidates who don’t respond, and figure out who is most likely to consider a career change. When candidates indicate interest, they will be pushed back into your ATS at no time-cost to you whatsoever. 

Even if you’re not concerned with your individual engagement speed, it’s a good idea to think about the consequences of falling behind on new technology. That is to say, most candidates you reach out to have probably been contacted by a number of other companies who are using AI to get ahead. Getting the best talent to come aboard will be doubly difficult if other recruiters are reaching out to ever candidate you do and more, before you have the chance to see them.

Missing Out on Top Passive Talent

According to an Appollo Technical study, 70% of the global workforce is passive talent. Though they’re not actively job-hunting, they possess skills and experience that can benefit your company. But knowing who to reach out to can be tricky. 

An AI recruiting system can optimize the passive talent you contact. It does this by predicting which candidates are most likely to leave their current jobs based a number of factors such as past behavior and current interests. Thanks to its superior engagement capabilities, it can also reach out to hundreds of passive profiles which saves you the time you’d normally think twice about taking to contact someone who already has a job. 

In addition to clearing up the worries about wasting resources on passive talent, using AI to engage passive candidates can also get you out ahead of your competitors. Rather than competing for a few available candidates who are already fielding offers, piquing someone’s interest before they’re even on the market can secure you a candidate who isn’t even in the pool yet.

High Employee Turnover

According to a survey by Jobvite, 28% of new employees quit within the first three months. Employee turnover happens for a number of reasons, but a bad candidate experience seems to be significant on the list. Making application and onboarding processes a positive experience is one of many jobs HR departments and hiring teams are tasked with, so it’s important to be sure they have the time and resources to do it well. 

When teams have to spend such a large chunk of their time and energy on sourcing, searching, and engaging, it directly cuts into time that could be spent improving those processes so that new hires have a positive experience. It also takes away from the time and mental energy a recruiter has to suss out during an interview or screening whether a candidate will really fit in and stay long-term. 

High employee turnover is costly and affects the company’s productivity. The best way to prevent it is to hire the right talent and make sure new hires have a positive experience when they start. Finding the right people and the time to attend to them becomes significantly more possible with the use of AI sourcing. An AI platform can search and optimize candidates to find the best matches and bring them directly to the ATS, freeing up countless hours of a recruiter’s time for employee onboarding and retention. 

Wrapping Up 

At the end of the day, it’s not easy to stay ahead of the game without also staying up to date on technology. AI and machine learning are quickly becoming an essential in recruitment—without them, it will become harder and harder to secure top talent when every other company is using them. And that’s not a bad thing—AI platforms, such as the one Talenya offers, will save you more time and resources than you ever thought possible, and will find you more qualified and diverse candidates than ever before.