Impact of AI on Staffing industry ( Series – 2/10) – AI sourcing

In our first blog article, we covered overview of  how  AI will impact and influence different aspect and elements of  staffing and Talent management  industry.

This blog post will emphasize on the first step of Talent management process, which is  Sourcing !

Talent Sourcing

As we say, a good start is winning half the battle!

The staffing industry has one critical task which involves sourcing relevant candidates for job requisitions.

At a high level, this entails scouring from various job portals – LinkedIn, social media, Google and Job Boards like Dice, Career Builder etc.   Sourcing is enabled by Boolean search techniques that help curate the right pool of candidates.  Precise sourcing technique is of paramount importance, as subsequent steps hinge on this foundation.  As we had mentioned in earlier post that inaccuracies at this stage can lead to disaster and a considerable waste of time for all stakeholders involved in the hiring process. Essentially, a poor start in staffing and recruiting, marked by poor sourcing techniques, can lead to failure in securing top-tier talent. It is here that AI can significantly enhance the efficiency and precision of the search technique.

It is here that AI can significantly enhance the efficiency and precision of the search technique.

By leveraging its data analysis capabilities, AI not only accelerates candidate sourcing but also ensures that the candidates presented are more closely aligned with the job requirements. This leads to a more efficient, effective, and successful candidate selection process.

  • AI Sourcing Overview
  • Benefits of AI sourcing
  • Using AI sourcing
  • Overview of AI sourcing Tools

 

Let’s dive a little deeper and explore each area

AI Sourcing Overview

In short, AI sourcing is the use of artificial intelligence to help find, screen and engage talent. AI sourcing tools search the internet for potential candidates, using parameters like job titles, skills, keywords and location to find the best matches for your open positions.

Once the pool of candidates has been narrowed down, AI tools typically help you to contact potential candidates in a partly automated way.

AI sourcing tools are becoming increasingly popular in the recruiting world because they take a lot of the legwork and guesswork out of finding candidates.

Manually searching for qualified candidates can be extremely time-consuming, and often results in recruiters only being able to reach out to a small number of people.

With AI sourcing, on the other hand, you can quickly and easily identify a large pool of qualified candidates, which gives you a much better chance of finding the right person for the job.

Additionally, because AI tools can automate many of the manual tasks associated with recruiting, such as building searches, screening applicants and sending messages, they free up the recruiter’s time to focus on the work where they can make good use of their brain and interpersonal skills, like talking to candidates.

Benefits of AI sourcing

There are a few reasons why AI sourcing is becoming more important for recruiters.

First, recruiting is becoming increasingly competitive. With more demand than supply of quality talent, recruiters need to find smarter and more efficient ways to source candidates. Recruiting methods that used to work don’t work anymore. Candidates respond differently to outreach. Expectations in terms of candidate experience, speed and job offering are higher than ever. You need to be able to reach and convince the 0.0001% that is best suited for the job that you have to offer.

Second, the rise of social media has made it easier for candidates to research open positions and apply. This has led to an increase in unqualified candidates applying for jobs, which causes job boards to become increasingly saturated and job posts less effective. In order to find the best candidates, recruiters need to be able to source them pro-actively from a variety of different places. AI-powered sourcing can help by scraping the internet for data on potential candidates and delivering it directly to recruiters. This allows recruiters to search in a more targeted way and reach passive candidates who they may not have otherwise found.

Finally, with the remote trend the talent market has become a global market where the entire world has become the available talent pool. Making data even more important to narrow down candidates to a shortlist. With an ever-growing pool of candidates to choose from, resume screening has become a time-consuming process that often yields subpar results. With AI the pre-screening can be done more effectively so a smaller and more accurate selection of candidates is left for the recruiter to review.

AI sourcing is a growing trend in the recruiting industry that shows no signs of slowing down. As the global talent pool becomes more competitive and people are more easily connected to each other, it’s increasingly important for recruiters to find efficient ways to source qualified candidates.

 

Using AI sourcing

There are a couple of things to take into consideration before you start implementing AI sourcing in your daily recruiting activities.

AI sourcing brings a lot op opportunities but also has limitations. The human brain is still unprecedented in its ability to see relevant patterns and make decisions regarding who is the right person for a job. When you know how to use AI sourcing as a tool next to your human brain and your own abilities, only then you can fully leverage the power of AI sourcing.

Understand the basics of AI sourcing
AI sourcing uses artificial intelligence algorithms to interpret a very big set of data. The amount of data points that an average AI tool can process in seconds is hitting the billions.

AI is often used as if it is this magic abstract concept that will bring you success without any effort. But most AI algorithms are actually based on a lot of already existing technologies.

AI sourcing therefore cannot be regarded as one concept or goal and should always be translated to how it is going to be used by the end user, the recruiter.

Most of the algorithms base their intelligence on a big database of profiles. Every profile has underlying data points like job titles, locations, keywords and other parameters like job switching patterns. AI sourcing tools make interpretations of this data and score every underlying data point. The profiles with the highest total score are ranked on top.

 

AI sourcing Tools

This is one area where innovation is thriving and many start ups are working to make nifty AI tools which can help sourcing tremendously.

In upcoming blog posts, we will be covering few leading AI sourcing tools in the current market.  Stay tuned !