AI’s role, opportunities and challenges in Recruitment

Here at Morgan McKinley, we are working daily with companies that are forging ahead with the use of AI. It’s a rapidly evolving, dynamic situation, and employers want to recruit the talent that can make a difference.

One question we are often asked by our clients is, ‘How is AI affecting the recruiting industry itself?’ Sometimes we are asked if we see AI as an opportunity or a threat.

We challenge ourselves to innovate and accelerate. To always be working in the best, most efficient, and most effective ways for our clients. Can we get better results, faster? Can we optimise our processes? Can we maximise the value added by our humans, if we maximise the value added by our technology?

One way in which we monitor the use of AI is by talking to our global team of expert recruiters. How do they use AI, and why, and what results are they seeing? And how is this evolving?

The latest thoughts of our recruiters worldwide

In this article, we are sharing the results of our latest internal research to give you a perspective on how AI is at work in the talent arena.

AI tools, particularly ChatGPT, are being used by agency recruiters in their day-to-day jobs.

Only a small percentage of our recruiters say today that they rely on ChatGPT, but nearly 70% of the team globally say they find it useful.

So what are they using it for? Usage is most prevalent in the drafting of written content, like job advertisements. The tool is used to create/repeat structure in adverts based on the job specification. Consultants then use that as the basis, adding in their tweaks based on their knowledge of the role and company. Many clients don’t have job specifications, and AI can help quickly and effectively create first drafts. We can also use AI in areas like research about clients, both current and prospective. A common use for AI is to tidy up draft emails prior to sending.

Globally, the trend at the moment is that our recruiters in the Asia Pacific region are more likely to use ChatGPT often, or every day, than in the UK and Ireland - 38% vs. 22%.

Percentage of recruiters using ChatGPT 'often' or 'every day'

Overall, 2/3 of our recruiters globally believe that AI can help us be more successful, and half also believe it can help our clients.

Can AI tools help agency recruiters be more successful?

Can AI tools help our clients be more successful?

The overall sentiment, and this reflects the general current mood about AI, is that it’s about how humans use it to be more efficient and effective at certain tasks.

If recruiters write advertisements, job specs, and so on, these are obvious examples of time saving. It’s not uncontentious because if AI effectively re-writes a job spec, is it still an accurate description of the job? If AI makes up a job spec for a Management Accountant it will generally be along the right lines, but is it the actual job? This highlights the invaluable role that humans play in the process.

The recruiters are certain that opportunities exist for us to maximise the benefit of AI, e.g., in chatbots for screening large volumes of applications, and this is an area where we as a company are pushing forward with our R&D.

Screening and assessment

There is a lot of speculation that AI will play a role in screening applications and later in assessing candidates, e.g., through predictive data based models, or by analysing language, emotion, and sentiment. But those things will seem quite esoteric to people who are only just getting started with ChatGPT, so how quickly they might come about, or be truly engaged with, isn’t clear. For now, AI is not doing assessment and behavioural interviewing in the mainstream.

ED&I

Some proponents use ED&I as an argument for accelerating the use of AI, because they argue that AI does not have human biases and so can make recruitment bias free. The counterargument is that AI learns from what’s already out there, which may actually reinforce bias.

That’s a complicated debate, but there are ways we can definitely use AI to help ED&I. For example, if a client does want a CV stripped of identifiers, AI can help. Tools like Blarney and Included already exist to strip out biassed language in job adverts.

Workplace efficiency

Many uses of AI are not recruitment specific but just good business sense generally. There are already tools out there for helping us organise our diaries, for transcribing notes from briefing meetings, etc. (check out otter.ai or fireflies.ai). It’s really important that we as an organisation are tuned into developments there and use these tools (privacy and legality permitting) if they make us more successful on behalf of our candidates and clients.

Inquisitive and innovative for the future

Overall, we need to continue to challenge ourselves with AI tools. We continually invest in training and upskilling all our consultants, with several in-house courses available to educate on what’s available and how to use it, safely and professionally, to add value to the recruitment process.

We’ll re-do this research in 6 months to see how things have developed!