A large number of organizations are using AI to find and hire the right talent for various roles. As we approach the two-year mark of the beginning of the pandemic, the job market has seen its ups and downs, and the recruiting sector is no different. With the country beginning to open back up again, the demand for talent is on the rise, with businesses advertising new jobs that need to be filled – around 10.4 million. Labor report statistics and everyday business stories emphasize that there are more jobs available than there are people looking for them.
As a result, both in-house recruitment teams and external recruiters are searching for volume hiring strategies to meet the challenge of filling many positions at once. This article will discuss how recruitment teams can overcome these challenges with the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) tools, as well as a use case focusing on the hiring of social media managers.
AI to Hire: Preparation is of the Essence
Believe it or not, AI can help with the high volume of hiring even before the job is posted. Your team is likely hiring for many roles, with different requirements and salaries, all at the same time. As such, it’s essential that recruiters do not lose sight of the nuances of each individual role or job title. This includes assessing what the job demands from candidates and what competitive pay is likely to motivate the right people to apply once they’ve seen the job posting. Additionally, there’s an expectation that’s needed to be set between all parties when looking at the job market today. Being aligned with the hiring manager and understanding the market is key.
By leveraging an AI tool, your team can gain access to thousands of job descriptions so you can find commonalties and see how job descriptions have changed since the pandemic began. Not only do such tools allow you to customize job responsibilities, as well as hard skills and soft skills included in detailed job profiles, but they also remove unconscious bias and exclusion. This gives potential candidates a solid understanding of what they’ll be doing and how they might fit into the role so that they can decide ahead of time if the position will work for them.
In today’s job market, using old or borrowed job descriptions will not work. The practice can lead to inaccuracies in salary compensation and ultimately hiring the wrong candidates; this, in turn, could lead to further recruiting if they’re forced to be terminated from the job.
Pinpointing Salary
Market-rate competitive compensation will be the only way to attract workers if there is any local competition (or remote, if applicable), especially for a volume hiring situation. Alternatively, hiring managers are now looking beyond their respective regions for talent, allowing them to pay below-market rates for the same employee. This strategy can also allow you to hire someone with more experience for a fraction of the amount.
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Pinpointing the salary answer for a job requires an assessment that includes the combination of education, experience, location, industry, business size and current applicant supply. Without AI, this can be time-consuming and frustrating for one job title, let alone several in a volume hiring situation. This step is essential and gives recruiters an edge in ensuring the right amount will be perceived as fair or above average by the targeted candidates, without causing the employer to overpay for the role.
AI can clearly contribute to the salary answer. Finding an AI-driven talent intelligence solution that can take all these considerations into account can help recruiters determine the right salaries quickly and accurately.
Finding the Right Candidate Management Tools
Technology is a game-changer for the volume hiring process. No matter the size of your business, hiring teams can benefit from tools that streamline and accelerate the recruitment funnel and provide valuable data along the way.
AI can help immensely for matching applicants to relevant skills and traits, helping sort through hundreds or thousands of resumes almost as fast as they come in and passing only the select few “matches” to recruiters for follow-up. In addition to huge time savings, AI screening removes the possible unconscious bias that a person might introduce into the labor-intensive process of reviewing applications. AI can also help at almost every step in the recruiting process, including:
- The ability to easily post jobs to multiple job boards;
- Automatic notifications of shortlisted candidates to recruiters; and
- Providing recruiters with user-friendly interfaces and reporting for desktop and mobile.
If the applicant vetting rules are not set thoughtfully, good candidates may get rejected, leaving you with too small of a candidate set. If your applicant volume is high but the resulting AI-proposed shortlisted candidate list is smaller than needed, take the time to review some of the rejected applicants to see if this could be the case. For example, you wouldn’t want to disqualify a holiday retail work prospect for gaps in their employment if you see that they typically only work during the holidays, which is when you need them.
Use Case: Social Media Manager
A good example of how AI can be leveraged in recruiting is the Social Media Manager occupation. The job is essential in today’s talent market, especially in a technology and the social media-driven world; yet in bigger markets like San Francisco, there’s almost a $15K gap in pay in median salary compensation.
It is important to understand the salary a position should command, what locations offer the best compensation and what the outlook for the role will be in five years. In the Dallas area, for instance, recruiters and talent acquisition professionals would expect to offer the recommended base salary of $46,916 – or in the range of $44,570 and $49,262, depending on the industry, company size and revenue.
The city from this comparison set with the lowest recommended base salary for the Social Media Manager job title is Atlanta, at $43,997. Recruiting within this metro area would be the most cost-effective of those compared. The highest market-rate pay is currently in Raleigh at $59,452.
What’s in Store for 2022:
This illustration shows how, because social media roles lend themselves to online remote work, talent can be recruited and hired wherever skilled and compatible prospects are available.
Implementing AI
For help with managing and hiring candidates, an integrated candidate management system is a must. AI-based features can add intelligence to these applications that not only save recruiters a tremendous amount of time and effort – but also help to reduce unintended bias and improve candidate communications, interview progress tracking and reporting. As former IBM CEO Ginni Rommety once said, “Some people call this artificial intelligence, but the reality is this technology will enhance us. So instead of artificial intelligence, I think we’ll augment our intelligence.”
[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]
