A thought leader in diversity recruitment training sheds light on AI best practices.
Human resources is a people-focused business—the clue is in the name—but recruiters have already found plenty of ways to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into their workflows and diversity efforts. And it’s not just HR professionals that see a benefit: the Capterra Job Seeker AI survey, which surveyed nearly 3,000 job seekers, revealed that 65% feel positive about the use of AI in recruiting.*
However, Jennifer Tardy[1], award winning founder, CEO, and diversity recruitment consultant, believes that recruiting and HR teams are still getting to grips with the opportunities and challenges that this fast-moving area of technology can offer.
“I get the perception that people are still on a learning curve with AI. And with the technology evolving so quickly, it's not just about learning AI; it’s learning about how AI can overlay their workflows.”
Jenn Tardy
Founder, CEO, and diversity recruitment consultant
Organizations must understand how AI can affect their internal operations and how candidates might perceive the use of AI when applying. We have combined Tardy’s insights with findings from our global survey of nearly 3,000 job seekers to help you understand how AI can make your recruitment processes more inclusive and productive.
Tip #1: Be transparent about the way you use AI in the recruitment process
“I don’t think that companies and recruiters are transparent enough about the use of AI during recruitment,” says Tardy. “And that’s because it’s such a quickly evolving area.”
Tardy questions whether employers are even aware of their obligations around AI transparency during recruitment, and what regulations might apply in a given situation. The technology is moving much faster in this area than legislators can keep up with, although laws are beginning to appear in California[2] and the European Union[3] governing the use of AI and what providers must disclose when using it.
But openness about AI has more benefits to employers than legal compliance. Capterra’s 2024 Job Seeker AI Survey found that nearly half of job seekers would be swayed by transparency around AI usage.*
This transparency needn’t be a burden for HR teams, says Tardy. She believes that disclosures should be made at “entry points” in a similar way to how brands share their policies around using demographic information. There should also be disclosures about whether providing such information is mandatory or voluntary for the applicant.
“Somewhere on the careers page would be appropriate," Tardy says. “And if you’re using AI internally for HR purposes, that should also be disclosed during onboarding.”
Employee onboarding using HR software (Source)
Busy HR teams use human resources software across their operations. Many products include the ability to create and manage multiple job postings, which help teams to make up-front disclosures about the use of AI across the hiring process. Onboarding is another common feature, so hiring organizations can also ensure that appropriate disclosures are provided once a candidate is hired, too.
Tip #2: Make sure your AI tools help and not hinder the recruitment process
“AI is helping to eliminate the need for a lot of the administrative tasks in recruiting,” says Tardy. “Time saving is the biggest benefit that we’re seeing.” And this, she says, frees up recruiters to focus on the parts of their role that require emotional intelligence and a more human touch.
Overusing AI, or getting it wrong, can be off putting to a significant proportion of applicants. Capterra research found that more than one-third of job seekers feel negative about employers using AI to source, evaluate, and rank job candidates. Job seekers are also more likely to turn down a job offer specifically because the interview and application process relied too much on AI.*
There is clearly a delicate balance to be struck here between good and bad use of AI. Indeed, Tardy highlights several areas where overreliance on AI tools to solve certain recruitment challenges actually has a negative effect.
“There is this idea that using AI can eliminate bias from your recruiting process. But there are two things about that I always caution employers on,” says Tardy.
“Eventually, candidates are going to have to meet a human, and so if you're focused on AI as a bias-elimination tool, and you don't bother training your employees, you're still going to run into the same issues.
“But the second part is that the people creating these AI tools have their own biases.”
Employers should therefore think hard about how AI is being used in the recruitment process, what challenges it is being brought in to solve, and its potential benefits and pitfalls. Only this holistic view—taking into account what AI can’t do as much as what it can do—can deliver results.
Tardy cites two examples of where emerging AI capabilities can help recruiters work more efficiently and deliver a great experience to candidates:
AI tools could previously scour resumes for keywords to see if candidates had skills or experience that matched job criteria. But today’s AI can build up a more complete profile of a person and provide suggestions for current—and future—job candidates.
Popular employers that receive a lot of applications may have been unable to respond to every job seeker in the past. But now AI can help deliver personalized responses, so applicants don’t feel like their resumes are being lost in a “black hole”.
Recruitment software that allows businesses to source, match, and place candidates with AI (Source)
Look to automate the appropriate parts of your recruitment process by setting up workflows in your recruiting software. AI features allow HR teams to profile candidates and handle some of the communication during the application process.
Tip #3: Leverage AI to create equity in the recruitment process
“We talk a lot in our training programs about gender neutral language, and specifically signaling,” says Tardy. “Think about who you are signaling to in your job description.” By this, she means which people are recruiters talking to—directly or indirectly—through the language and other subtle cues they use in a job posting.
Hiring organizations might not realize it, but the way they source and recruit employees may be excluding certain groups.
Employers and candidates alike recognise—and welcome—the potential of AI to make recruitment more equitable. Overall, they feel that AI could do a better job of evaluating applicants without bias, and that AI would improve their chances of getting hired.*
Tardy gives the example of AI tools that can help when writing job descriptions by spotting and eliminating the use of coded language that might attract certain candidates. This could be stereotypically masculine language like ‘ninja’ or ‘smash it,’ for example. “So as you create more gender neutral postings, you then broaden your pool and that's what AI is helping people to do,” says Tardy.
Tardy also urges readers to explore AI tools that strip out candidates’ personal details, creating ‘blind resumes’. The absence of people’s names, ages, home towns, school or college can remove some of the clues that might trigger biased decisions on the part of hiring organizations.
AI-generated recommendations in recruitment software (Source)
One of the major benefits of applicant tracking systems is the data that they provide to hiring organizations. This allows them to monitor the diversity of applicant groups and take action to make their vacancies as accessible as possible. Many systems include AI features to encourage blind recruitment techniques. When training your teams to use applicant tracking systems, ensure that you cover these areas—and ask the software vendor for help if you want to understand more about how they work.
Make AI your new recruitment assistant
AI features are now widely included in common HR, recruiting, and applicant tracking software products. But using them without consideration is off-putting to candidates and could land your company in regulatory trouble.
Tardy asks companies to consider the administrative and automation benefits of AI while understanding the human aspects of recruiting, and letting people—and their emotional intelligence—shine through.
Remember these three tips when considering how AI could fit into your recruitment workflows:
Be transparent: Wherever you use AI, make sure that applicants and employees know exactly how they will be interacting with it.
Know where AI does and doesn’t work: If you employ AI as part of a process, make sure you know its limitations and where it needs human help
Explore how AI can help with equity: AI can help recruiters address a wider talent pool and assess candidates more equitably, but it’s not without its own biases.
To learn more about automation in recruitment, check out this Capterra guide to robotic process automation:
What is RPO Recruiting, and Is It Right For Your Business? | Capterra
