The Top 11 Best AI Recruiting Tools - 2023

The best AI recruiting tools allow HR and talent acquisition teams to supercharge their efforts through smart and automated workflows that eliminate tedious tasks, and let recruiting teams focus on the most strategic parts of their recruitment process.

Here at SSR, we like to think of AI like an exo-skeleton that allows humans to be smarter, and more efficient.  We strongly believe that AI actually replacing human beings is decades or more off.  So, there’s really no need to be afraid of this new technology, it’s basically just slightly smarter software that can automate more of the tasks you most likely don’t want to do.

Please also read the pitfalls below this section as there are several important caveats to these use cases and dangers that HR and recruiting teams need to be aware of!

Here are a few of the use cases that AI recruiting tools can help with:

• Screening: The best AI recruiting tools help with screening candidates, however they do this in different ways depending on the vendor (see below bullets).  Typically when we think of AI interviews, we think of chatbots that will ask a series of questions to the candidate.  Here, the AI is used to interpret what the candidate is providing as answers (and questions they may have), in order to properly vet the potential employee, as well as answer questions they may have about the role.
• Video Interviews:  Video interview platforms are starting to leverage AI to take a first stab at understanding key characteristics of a candidate.  First, these platforms can understand the responses job seekers give to a given question, and analyze how that fits with your hiring criteria.  There are also technologies that will determine how extroverted, confident, etc a job seeker is.
• Tech Screening: Automated tech assessments are a great way to screen engineers, especially those that may not have the resume you’re looking for but may be interesting hires.  These platforms use AI to figure out the quality of a given candidate’s answers to understand their facility with different languages, and key stills like pair programming or test driven development.
• Sourcing:  AI is great for talent sourcing and has been employed in this use case for a while now.  The basic idea is that artificial intelligence can interpret a job req, find relevant folks through different databases (your ATS/CRM, or the open web), and then return a qualified list of potential applicants.  This technology can even automate your sourcing and start multi-stage outreach through text and email.
• Scheduling: Scheduling candidates is always a pain, especially when juggling multiple internal calendars for an on-site.  The right interview scheduling software gives candidates a better experience (no dropped balls, female candidates don’t interview with all men, etc), and saves your recruiting team a lot of headaches.
• ATS Re-Engagement: Your ATS is full of high quality applicants who were silver medalists, applied too late, or weren’t a fit for a specific role at a given point in time but would be great for a new req.  A human would take a very long time to wade through thousands or millions of records, and most applicant tracking systems aren’t great at re-discovering old records.  AI can look at your open req, and search your database for relevant past applicants to re-engage.
• Referrals: AI recruiting tools are also great for supercharging referrals.  This use case is similar to the ATS re-engagement one, but the database is your employees’ networks vs the ATS.  The AI looks at your req, looks at your employees’ networks, and then makes suggestions on who your employees should refer to your recruiting team.  This can all happen without a recruiter lifting a finger.
• Career Site Conversion: Most of the people who go to your career site don’t apply for a job.  A chatbot on your career site allows job seekers to ask questions about benefits, open roles, etc.  This leads to higher conversions into your ATS of quality candidates.

Like any new technology, ai recruiting tools also have their downsides and dangers.  It’s important to remember AI is an exo-skeleton for human beings, not a replacement.  So, we don’t have to be worried about losing our jobs, but we also have to be mindful that we are still in the people business and human to human interaction is still so important.

• Candidate Experience: At the end of the day, we all want to be treated with respect.  This desire is magnified during the stress of the hiring process.  Do not replace every candidate touch point with automation.  Job seekers are smart enough to realize they aren’t getting any TLC, and will be turned off.  Spend time with potential candidates to understand how they’re experiencing the various stages of your hiring process and when you’ve gone too far.
• Set Expectations: We are all used to dealing with machines and AI whether that’s through google searches or an automated response to a simple question from a service rep bot.  And, for the most part, we’re fine with this experience.  But, we need to know we can access a human when needed, and we need to know how a process will evolve.  I’m ok entering my information to see if I pre-qualify for a credit card.  But, if things get more complicated and there’s no human, I’m officially having a bad experience.
• Training the AI: AI is trained on a data set to determine outcomes.  You need to have this data set, or your vendor needs a dataset relevant to your company, in order to get value.  Sometimes this training takes a long time.  Be aware of what this process will be like for your use case and company. For example, if the training is for a Natural Language Processing engine, this can be done automatically but is often still guided by humans reviewing data sets and making sure the engine identifies them where it makes sense. This would certainly take more time, and also raises the question of how your candidate data is being handled.
• AI Bias: If you give the AI a dataset that discriminates against women, you’re going to have a recruitment process that now discriminates against women.  This is actually more common than you may imagine, as the new apple card found out.  Always have humans sanity check the outcomes of AI based decisions, especially as you start to role out new tech.
• Humans Needed: Treat the outputs of AI recruiting tools as suggestions.  If your sourcing tool gives your five candidates, it’s likely that at least one of them will not be a great fit.  Humans need to be the final decision maker in many cases when it comes to talent acquisition teams leveraging AI.

Here at SSR, we always think that an ROI analysis is necessary for every type of new HR software purchase, and AI recruiting is no different.  That said, the ROI from AI recruiting tools can be calculated in several different ways depending on the use case you’re using this software for.

So, we’d recommend checking out our HRTech ROI calculators (all are free to download) and pick the one that relates to what you’re trying to accomplish – decrease time to fill, cost per hire, time spent sourcing, etc.

Like most HR and SaaS software, AI recruiting tools are priced per user or per number of actions; in this case, job requisitions or postings. To find out more about structures and how to optimize for this, we teamed up with Bob Pulver, who's been an HR tech consultant for a number of years. On the question of pricing, Bob mentioned that companies should feel free to suggest an alternative pricing structure to vendors, one better-suited to their needs.

"With recruiting software, the value is created the minute you have a candidate that you can reach out to, why not have them charge for that instead?" According to Bob,  some people in tech are willing to do that. In such a pricing structure, your entire team has access to the tool, but could be limited by a pool of candidate contact credits. This can save HR teams a lot of money, while still being fair and mindful of the software vendor's costs. As Bob explained, "if you have a team of recruiters and they charge you hundred per seat, you're very quickly into six figure territory."

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As put to us by one of the experts we consulted for this buyer guide, " The diversity of companies listed under AI Recruiting makes it very hard for the buyer to understand what pain points each solution is solving for and at what stage of the hiring funnel". Those are the words and wisdom of Bennett Sung, marketing consultant for several early stage HR software companies. What Bennett is referring to is the wide variety of use cases that happen with AI recruitment software. While, let’s say SeekOut and Paradox don’t share the same use cases, they are frequently lumped together under the same umbrella of AI recruiting.

Hence, it can become confusing to vet companies. As with any software purchase, the best thing for you to do is to be aware of the greatest challenges you need to solve, give them an order of priorities if they’re several, and let that guide every request for a demo and the actual conversations.

To give you some examples, here are some of the typical channels you can solve with AI recruiting tools: 

• Filling open positions takes too long: Certain features of AI software like chatbots can help with automating the pre-screening process, screen resumes, and in some cases, even scheduling interviews. Apart from saving thousands of dollars in man hours, this can also result in a faster and more efficient hiring process, where positions get filled quicker. ‍
• The quality of hire is still sub par: Through intelligent screening of thousands of candidates, you can start your search right by setting up the appropriate tags and requirements. Then, you can focus on a pool of candidates that already seem like a great fit for the job.
• There might be a bias problem in our recruiting process: Some AI recruiting tools can eliminate human bias by only showing certain information about candidates before key hiring decisions are made.

HR and recruiting teams need to go into demos prepared to get the information they need.  Part of that preparation is making sure you have the right questions lined up for any AI vendor. As in other parts of this buyer guide, we teamed with Bob Pulver, HR Tech consultant at Cognitive Path, to put together some of these questions. Here are a few specific questions you should ask on demos with vendors that relate to AI recruiting tools:

• How is your data set trained?  Where does the data come from? How long does this take?
• How do candidates interact with this tool?
• How do recruiters interact with this tool?
• How accurate is your AI? What metrics do you look at to measure this accuracy?
• What unique insights has your AI discovered?
• What is your sweet spot in terms of company size?
• Do you have outside funding? Where is this funding going?
• Are you investing in CS? What does the implementation process look like for a company like mine?

What is AI recruiting software?

AI recruiting software are platforms or tools that use artificial intelligence to automate certain parts of the talent acquisition process.

How is AI used in recruitment?

AI is used in every aspect of the recruitment pipeline, including the following: 

• Screening: Using chatbots to automatically answer candidate questions
• Video Interviews:  Analyzing video interview responses to see how they fit into hiring criteria
• Tech Screening: Using AI to figure out the quality of a given candidate’s answers
• Sourcing:  Scanning talent databases for candidates relevant to job reqs
• Scheduling: Automatically aligning candidate and hiring team schedules for available connection
• ATS Re-Engagement: Checking your ATS for former candidates who would be a good fit for a new role
• Referrals: Combing through employee networks for relevant candidates
  

How is AI changing talent sourcing and recruiting?

AI is changing talent sourcing and recruiting by automating the processes, saving hiring teams lots of time while also engaging a wider pool of talent. It acts as an exo-skeleton that allows human resources teams to be smarter and more efficient. 

Why use AI recruiting platforms?

You can use AI recruiting platforms to save your organization time and money. As AI becomes more integrated with HR tech, it will be increasingly difficult to operate without it as well.

The best AI recruiting software allows your talent acquisition team to become way more efficient.  This is especially important given the war for talent, and the high cost of adding full time employees to your recruiting team.

Without a doubt, AI will become a larger and larger part of your company’s business as a whole, and the recruiting function in particular.  So, it makes sense to start utilizing artificial intelligence now in the use cases that matter to you the most.

Our suggestion is to pick one use case that is most pressing (scheduling, sourcing, screening, etc), and then to talk with a few vendors that you can partner with.

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