How will AI impact Talent Acquisition

How will AI impact TA?

Here were my main takeaways from Bill Boorman keynotes on the impact of AI on Talent Acquisition and Recruitment.

We’ve got a huge opportunity to save time on repetitive tasks and high volume applications and let people teams focus on what they know best… Human connection.

So we can reinvent the candidate experience and have more time to focus on areas like diversity and early careers.

⛓ Early Career talent is moving up the value chain

Some say that organisations can use AI to remove some of the more menial repetitive tasks that has largely been done by early career hires so we don’t need to employ them anymore…

PwC on the other hand are using AI to reduce workload but instead of reducing early career hiring they’re using this as an opportunity to instead give junior staff members the chance to work on much more high impact projects far earlier in their career journey increasing the early career ROI.

👾 Even in an AI-first future Talent Acquisition won’t disappear

As more tasks shift to AI, Talent Acquisition will play a role in selecting, onboarding and coordinating AI agents across the business, just like hiring a team.

We’ll need to become AI Managers understanding how to prompt well, police, check and train AI.

👩🏿‍💻 Candidates want to be assessed by AI

Because AI has the capability to be transparent and give honest fast feedback.

People are sick of being rejected at final stages based on things that could have been decided at the start of the process.

But we should be clear to candidates about when and how AI is being used to assess them.

📉 TA Teams are down 40% post-Covid

But application volumes having dropped. Candidate contempt is growing not because of bad recruiters, but because of broken processes and stretched teams.

📈 73% of candidates are already using AI in applications

But employers aren’t telling them how to use it well.

Organisations need to decide acceptable use of AI in their application process and communicate that to candidates.

AI is going to tell them exactly what to say to pass your application process so the focus needs to be on identifying and verifying skills.

👀 Be rigorous when selecting recruitment tech using AI

They’re all going to say their AI is inclusive but what data has been used to train it?

How does it make selection decisions?

What outcomes and evidence is there to prove bias has been reduced not increased?

🖤 Human connection early on is becoming even more crucial

In the new world of AI meeting candidates face to face at careers events early on to build trust and create human connections way before they’ve even thought about applying will become essential.

Young professionals want 3-4 points of engagement before applying.

🤯 Eventually jobs may find people rather than the other way around

Rather than submitting hundreds of slightly different applications I think candidates are likely to focus on building online profiles and portfolios which are then assessed by AI with selected candidates invited to interview.

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