AI Talent Recruitment Technologies: The 2024 Roadmap

AI trends that will impact talent acquisition over the next five years

 
Over recent months, we've immersed ourselves in the world of AI in HR, traveling to GITEX, following the latest AI announcements and experimenting with the technology ourselves. Out of this we have summarized all of this work into one article and overlaid our experience to let you know the practical AI trends that will impact talent acquisition over the next five years.

Navigating the Hype Versus Reality

There is a lot of hype surrounding AI and so the first challenge is to separate the speculative, headline-grabbing hype that we will likely never experience from the practical areas of application from those tools that we can see disrupting the recruiting industry.

After surveying the landscape and finding what works, we answer the question: where has AI been employed in the HR and talent acquisition pipeline? A summarized overview delineates the current landscape:

The Disruptive Technology: LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have disrupted the recruitment landscape. From allowing people to tailor their CVs to job descriptions to crafting high-quality cover letters, the new world of AI has reached the masses.

For the organization there are many low-hanging fruits with LLMs, such as CV screening, using prompts like the following:
 
[Paste in CV and Job Description here]

Screening CVs against job descriptions is powerful but it relies on one major assumption: your job description is good. In computer science, we have a saying “Garbage In, Garbage Out”. If the job description is not good, then you cannot expect good CVs and especially not good assessment of CVs. So let’s use the same tool to create job descriptions like with the following prompt:
 

GPTs: The Custom Advisor for Everyone

In November 2023, OpenAI announced the launch of GPTs, which “are custom versions of ChatGPT that you can create for a specific purpose”.

Over time recruitment teams have built Robotic Process Automation (RPA) tools to automate many typical recruitment tasks (e.g. sharing CVs, uploading and requesting data, etc), however, this generation of GPTs will take RPA capabilities to the next level by overlaying AI on top of them. GPTs can be given “extra knowledge, and picking what it can do, like searching the web, making images or analyzing data.” This opens up a world of possibilities, with each recruiter able to configure their own GPT to solve their most pressing task.

For example, GPTs could be created to provide information about salary bands in different locations for different job types around the world. You could create your own chatbot and ask it questions like, what is the current wage for a drilling foreman with five years of experience in Venezuela? GPTs could help write a personalized offer to each suitable candidate by emphasizing what they could value most based on their CV and experience instead of just relying on the wage to get the deal over the line.

What Else?

In recruitment, the vast majority of tools we are seeing are built on natural language processing. In addition to the LLM use cases above, we are seeing more and more virtual interview tools being used, and these tools are becoming more complex and realistic, allowing natural conversations between candidates and the AI tool. Whilst carrying out the interview, these tools are analyzing people’s personalities, estimating their work ethic and trying to understand the person’s cultural fit with the organization.

We see a true revolution in these communication technologies whether they are chatbots, AI virtual interview tools, virtual assistants, etc. They will become the norm for companies moving forward.

Will AI Replace the Human Recruiter?

In a recently published article in August 2023 in the International Journal for Multidisciplinary Research, researchers from the Eastern Institute for Integrated Learning in Management in Kolkata asked the question whether human recruiters will disappear because of AI. They note that “ChatGPT also threatens to jeopardize the existence of the recruiter”. Although the situation seems dire, the authors show that the overwhelming evidence is in favor of humans remaining masters of recruitment and AI tools remaining that, human decision aids to help with making decisions.

The key conclusion that we need to draw from this research is that recruiters are here to stay. AI just makes us more efficient. There are limits to what it can do, at the end of the day someone still needs to tell it what to do, and that someone will still be a human being for the foreseeable future.

Author Bio

Dr. Evan Shellshear is the Managing Director and Group CEO of Ubidy, and an expert in artificial intelligence with a Ph.D. in Game Theory from the Nobel Prize-winning University of Bielefeld in Germany. He has almost two decades of international experience in the development and design of AI tools for a variety of industries having worked with the world's top companies on all aspects of advanced analytical solutions from optimization to machine learning in applications from HR to oil and gas, and robotics to supply chain. He is also the author of the Amazon best-seller, Innovation Tools.