How to Streamline Recruiting with AI

AI is transforming recruiting. Which tools are right for you?

TalentWell

8/30/20243 min read

Recruiters — especially those in the tech industry — are facing enormous challenges. Every job post leads to an influx of hundreds of unqualified candidates, often squeezing out the great talent that’s trying to be heard above the noise. And too often, many excellent passive candidates aren’t actively looking for work and simply don’t see your job descriptions. This leaves you with the tedious chore of searching social media platforms and resume databases to try to find qualified candidates.

To make matters worse, once you do find candidates you want to target, now it’s your turn to try to be heard above the noise. People are being inundated with emails and messages about jobs, often from scammers posing as recruiters.

So how do you find the right talent, and once you find them, how do you reach them?

Welcome to the Dawn of AI Talent Sourcing

Artificial intelligence (AI) holds a lot of promise for making hiring processes like talent sourcing much more efficient. Let’s take a look at two key use cases where AI tools can make the biggest difference in streamlining the recruitment process.

Talent Search

First of all, AI makes searching vastly easier. Today’s AI recruiting tools leverage conversational search (also called “natural language search”), which allows you to have a conversation with the AI co-pilot about the role you’re trying to fill. ChatGPT is a great example of a tool that uses conversational search: you enter your request using the same language as you would with a human, and it returns the results.

The best AI recruiting tools embrace this approach. You enter a prompt with the job requirements, such as “Please find me software engineers in San Francisco with Java and Ruby skills and 5+ years experience.” You can then refine the results further by entering something like, “Only show me candidates who have generative AI experience.”

Even better, more sophisticated AI recruiting apps use predictive analytics to suggest refinements, such as, “Do you want to focus on any generative AI skills in particular, such as natural language processing, computer vision, or text generation?” This conversational approach makes it simple for you to narrow the search and get useful suggestions instead of having to guess all the right keywords on the first try.

Outreach to Candidates

Once you’ve found your potential candidates, AI recruitment tools can automate and scale your outreach process by automatically creating outbound messages. For example, most solutions can create an email template for you, and the better ones will tailor it to each candidate, inserting their name and relevant job history and the skills that make the candidate a good fit. This automated personalization increases the likelihood that a candidate will take notice.

Recruiters sometimes even include a video message in their emails. Often this is just a short, pre-recorded video about the position. Videos can make a big difference in the candidate experience.

But to really get noticed, savvy recruiters use TalentWell because it automatically generates a personalized video message for each candidate. You set up your avatar once by simply recording a video of yourself speaking on any topic. TalentWell uses this avatar to create a customized video for each candidate — automatically. This approach helps candidates make an instant connection with the recruiter and can dramatically increase response rates.

What Features Should I Look For in AI Recruiting Tools?

Conversational search is great. But if the talent pool is limited, you’re still going to get limited results. As mentioned earlier, a lot of the best talent isn’t actively searching and is hard to find. This is especially true with finding technical candidates like software engineers.

Look for recruitment automation solutions that go beyond the typical resume database searches and can find hidden talent. For example, TalentWell uses machine learning and scours all corners of the internet to find top talent, and then collates their information into rich profiles that help you find exactly who you’re looking for. It also allows you to upload your own candidates, so you can take advantage of the personalized outreach capabilities even for candidates who aren’t in the main talent pool.

Additionally, make sure the outreach tools are really going to help you get noticed and will scale well. If you’re only looking at a handful of candidates for one job, you can probably afford to take the time to write custom emails and record a personalized video for each one. But to maximize efficiency, use AI to create your outbound messages for you.

The best approach is to try the tool for yourself. Many AI talent acquisition platforms offer free trials, but others are free forever without the need to ever enter a credit card unless you want to try their premium features.

Summary

AI is transforming many areas of our lives. And in the case of AI for recruiting, it’s definitely for the better. By using it to find the best candidates, including hidden talent, and create customized outreach at scale, recruiters can save a great deal of time and effort and get much better results.