AI hiring uses digital platforms to automate recruitment tasks like candidate sources, resume screening, and interview scheduling.
There are serious benefits to AI hiring, including a larger talent pool to choose from when hiring and a more available recruitment team. However, there are downsides too, like the inability to consider culture match and issues of accuracy and reliability.
That’s why it’s important to use AI hiring tools as a way to improve your process, rather than completely replace it.
Key Takeaways
- AI hiring is the use of digital and online tools to aid and automate the recruitment and hiring process of your business.
- Benefits of AI hiring include a faster hiring process, reduced costs, lower employee turnover, and limited bias.
- AI hiring platforms cost between $2,000 and $9,000 per year, depending on the size of your business and the need for add-on services.
- There are disadvantages — you should avoid fully automating your entire recruitment process, given the lack of human evaluation abilities, candidate experience consideration, and potential security risks.
What Is AI Hiring?
AI hiring describes when businesses use online tools and other digitized resourced to streamline their recruitment process. These platforms are designed to remove the manual aspects of finding new employees, so your team can focus on big picture elements of growing your team.
AI hiring platforms can do a lot to reduce the tedium of your recruitment efforts, including screening resumes, finding prospective employees, scheduling interviews, and evaluating candidates.
Some popular AI hiring platforms include Greenhouse, Workable, Juicebox, and Humanly.
What Are the Benefits of AI in Recruitment?
The benefits of AI in recruitment include faster hiring processes, lower employee turnover, reduced costs, and limited bias, with statistics to prove that this technology actually makes a difference.
- Speeds up hiring process – AI hiring tools reduce the time-to-hire by up to 50%, according to 35% of business leaders.
- Lowers employee turnover – Using AI hiring tools improves employee retention, with an average 17% less turnover in the first month.
- Reduces costs – Businesses that use AI hiring tools report an average 30% reduction in cost-per-hire.
- Limits bias – 72% of businesses report using AI to conduct bias audits on a regular basis.
AI hiring can improve your business’ hiring process, as long as you can find a way to make it work for your particular employee base.
How Much Does AI Hiring Software Cost?
AI hiring platforms typically cost between $2,000 and $9,000 per year, or $150 to $750 per month.
Some AI hiring platforms provide publicly available pricing, like Workable starting at $299 per month, while others do not, like Humanly and Greenbox, offering only custom pricing for users.
Additionally, AI hiring platforms offer specific add-ons that cost extra. Workable, for example, provides video interview functionality, but only on its more expensive plans, while it remains a $99 per month add-on for the basic Workable pricing plans.
How Many Businesses Are Using AI To Hire?
According to research, 99% of Fortune 500 companies are using AI to hire employees. That means that if you aren’t taking advantage of the technology to ease your recruitment process, you’re falling behind.
There are plenty of companies outside of the Fortune 500 that are also using AI to hire employees, and we talked to a few of them to see how they use it to make recruitment easier.
Tapos Kumar, founder, Finance Ideas
“In many of the startups and small businesses I work with, AI isn’t replacing hiring decisions outright. Instead, it is shifting how companies assess the cost of a wrong hire.
Looking ahead, I expect AI in hiring to evolve less around automation and more around financial accountability, which means helping companies justify why a hire makes sense.”
Barbara Robinson, marketing manager, WeatherSolve Structures
“40%. That is how much we cut candidate screening time after integrating TalentFlow. We did not pocket that time as efficiency. We reinvested every hour directly into longer, more honest conversations with our finalists.
Turnover among new hires has dropped noticeably since we stopped rushing the human side of the process and that number alone tells us we made the right call.”
Steven Bahbah, founder and managing director, Service First Plumbing
“Let me be straight about this — we are a plumbing and gas company, not a tech company, and I never want to lose sight of that. HireVue is a tool we use, the same way we use dispatch software or job management systems. It helps us run better but it does not run us.
What I’ve learned after 30 years in this trade is that no algorithm replaces the gut feel you get from a face-to-face conversation with a candidate. AI handles the volume, our foremen make the final call, and that balance is what keeps our standards where they need to be.”
What Are the Risks of Fully Automating Recruitment?
The benefits of automating your entire recruitment process may be enticing, but the possible pitfalls of the technology warrant additional consideration to avoid corrupting your employment pool.
In fact, there are some notable disadvantages to AI hiring that should be considered before automating too much of your process.
- Human evaluation – AI-powered platforms are unable to evaluate the more human aspects of recruitment, like personality and culture match, leading to poor candidates making it past screening.
- Candidate experience – Prospective employees find AI-powered recruiting tools impersonal, which may turn them off from the position or your company.
- Technical difficulties – AI hiring platforms are still technology, which means they can experience glitches and errors that may impact your prospective talent pool.
- Biased algorithms – AI algorithms can exacerbate recruitment bias because they are dependent on the data and logic provided by human programmers.
- Security risks – AI hiring involves the housing of sensitive candidate and employee data, which can put your company at risk from a security standpoint.
In order to ensure that these risks don’t impede your hiring process, there are a few things you should do, including regularly auditing your candidates for diversity and removing unnecessary data that may lead to bias.
More importantly, you need to have a human involved at some level of the process to ensure the system is working how you want it to.
Verdict: Is AI Hiring Right for Your Business?
With a staggering majority of companies employing AI to recruit and hire workers, you should absolutely be taking advantage of the technology to make the process easier. You can reduce manual tasks, like resume screening, interview scheduling, and candidate vetting, making more time for important decisions that require the human touch.
Still, it’s important to be cautious about how much of the process you automate. Platforms are only as good as the humans programming them, which is why you want to be sure to check for bias and security risks before committing too substantially.