Historically, the Human Resources industry has been fraught with time-intensive tasks of identifying the top candidates, coordinating their screening, interview process, hiring and finally the onboarding process. Potentially, the most transformational way to find the talent match is to leverage on new technologies. The role of technology is increasing across the recruiting phases - using data to find, source and select candidates more efficiently and taking a data-driven approach to hiring.

The technology has reinvented and radically altered the processes and systems. The availability of online recruiting tools has led to an enormous increase in candidate applications, thus creating inefficiencies in the hiring process.

This business challenge made organizations across various industries heavily reply on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). Recruiters now have the time to engage and build relationships with eligible candidates rather than just studying huge volumes of resumes. AI opens up limitless possibilities leading the change in recruiting from data-driven to intelligence driven.

While deployment of advanced AI in recruiting is happening globally, adoption is at a different pace in different industries. Bruhat Insights Global launched a nation-wide study over 250 organizations to understand the adoption level of AI across HR functions - Talent Acquisition (TA), Talent Management, Leadership Development and Compensation & Benefits. In this article, we will look at the adoption levels of organizations in the TA space.

It was found that the ITES/BPO industry is fast adopting AI in their Talent Acquisition functions. It was no surprise. The ITES/BPO organizations sensed the lack of sufficient data and insights for decision making in their respective hiring processes. Therefore, they implemented AI to leverage on Big Data for candidate application processing. At these organizations, process efficiency was one of the main reasons for implementing of AI in their HR systems, other than having an edge over competition. Interestingly, the Education and Staffing industry has also implemented AI to ease their recruitment processes. Many of the organizations from other industries such as BFSI and Manufacturing that were found to have implemented AI in TA space were able to successfully predict candidates' behavior particularly in offer management saving a lot of recruiters' time and efforts.

The study also found that in companies where AI is implemented, the CEOs have taken ownership and revolutionized their recruiting systems! These mature organizations use chatbots, video interviews and some have gone a few steps further and leverage on cognitive assessments for hiring candidates.

Interestingly, the HR Heads in organizations that were late to adopt AI found it difficult, though were well supported by TA Heads for replacing the traditional systems to ensure process efficiency. These organizations are not concerned about their inability to provide personalized services but are concerned with the decisions management might make if the data is incorrect.

Talent Acquisition is a high-touch activity and AI is significantly reducing the operational burden by automating the low-level tasks and providing information for decision makers. The recruiters can use the talent acquisition data for increasing retention, evaluating skill gaps and building better offers - both for internal and external candidates, creating the road map for Talent Management.

The study BigSights was unveiled last month with interesting understandings and perceptiveness towards Artificial Intelligence in the space of HR. Presented above was one such interesting insight. We will try to cover many more such interesting findings in our forthcoming issues of Hirebold. Meanwhile, you can download the entire report HERE!