Artificial intelligence is set to change the way the recruitment industry and organisations search for and acquire talent, according to international recruitment firm Hays.

Alistair Cox, CEO of Hays, says that automated technology can help with recruitment as automated data can “analyse the mountains of data that exist within an organisation and the wider job market, translating it into easily digestible formats.”

Cox outlined three key areas of recruitment that AI will revolutionise:

AI will bring more efficient and fairer candidate screening. “One simple job ad can elicit tens of thousands of responses, many of which may be wholly inappropriate applications, yet all must be screened in order to find the real stars,” Cox said. He added that with the aid of AI, time consuming areas of recruitment, such as CV screening, drafting job descriptions and communicating with candidates, could instead take seconds.

AI will ensure a better candidate fit. Cox added that the main cause of an unsuccessful hire is a poor cultural fit between the employee and the organisation. AI has the potential to overcome this. Online job boards already use algorithms to match their community of job seekers with available roles.  “It remains incredibly difficult for any machine to analyse the soft skills that remain so crucial to modern business. I’m yet to see an algorithm that can read things like humour, temperament or enthusiasm as effectively as a person can,” Cox said. “And let’s not forget that ultimately human oversight is still required to compile criteria – I certainly wouldn’t want a machine deciding the persona of my business, and I don’t think it would do a particularly good job yet.”

AI will help safeguard future talent pipelines. “AI has the potential to improve employee retention and development,” Cox said. “An organisation’s talent flow is essentially another data spread that a computer can analyse to spot upcoming trends, either assessing when future revenue growth will require additional staff, or analysing calendar patterns to identify which time of year employees are most likely to depart, for example.”

“Today people do business with people and I hope that never changes,” Cox said. “Despite the excitement and fears around the rise of AI, talent management largely remains a contact sport, where gut feeling, grounded in thousands of tiny facets of human experience which are never captured as data, plays just as strong a role as hard data.”