Ethical implementation of AI can enhance the candidate experience and power recruiter efficiencies while maintaining regulatory compliance and ensuring fairness.
By Maggie Mancini
The application and widespread adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) has reshaped the hiring process. Organizations are investing in the technology, looking to realize its potential benefits—including enhanced quality of hires, improved time-to-hire, and streamlined communication that can enable quick, data-driven talent acquisition.
“AI has the potential to empower talent acquisition teams to work smarter and more efficiently,” says Rick Betori, president of PeopleScout. Taking repetitive, mundane tasks off recruiters’ plates allows them to focus on more strategic aspects of the hiring process, such as building relationships with candidates and assessing cultural fit.”
He explains that optimizing talent acquisition teams enables resources to be allocated more efficiently, reducing overall costs. Some talent acquisition tasks—like resume screening, candidate sourcing, interview scheduling, job description drafting, market data collection, and predictive analytics—are a particularly great fit for AI, Betori says.
There are plenty of other potential benefits of integrating AI technologies into a company’s talent acquisition process, Betori says. These include:
- improving quality of hire by analyzing vast amounts of data in seconds;
- reducing turnover by making data-informed hiring decisions; and
- enhancing the candidate experience by providing immediate answers to questions and concerns.
Still, human oversight of automation technology is essential to ensuring that any company’s hiring process is fair and ethical, Betori says.
For example, AI adoption in recruitment can help organizations advance their diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) goals. But it can also potentially hinder those efforts as well. While AI-enabled data analytics can help identify diversity gaps and inform DEIB targets, over-reliance on historical data may reinforce those gaps, Betori says.
“While we’ve seen AI improve the hiring process by mitigating unconscious bias through the use of objective criteria and standardized assessments to evaluate candidates, if AI models are trained on biased or incomplete data sets, they can unintentionally perpetuate inequality,” Betori says. “To effectively leverage AI to achieve DEIB goals, organizations must rigorously test AI systems for bias before and during implementation and regularly audit the impact AI adoption has had on diversity metrics, so that adjustments can be made if needed.”
Use of AI tools in DEIB efforts—as well as with all other components of a company’s talent acquisition strategy—should be used to supplement human judgment and expertise, not replace it.
“While AI offers tremendous potential, there are also some key challenges,” Betori says. “Those we discuss with our clients most frequently include data quality and privacy, compliance, lack of transparency, integration with existing systems, and finding the right balance between technology and the human touch.”
Thoughtful implementation of AI in recruiting is critical to its success, Betori says, explaining that ethical implications are at the heart of the concerns he hears from HR and TA leaders about AI. Still, there are several strategies HR leaders can leverage to integrate AI into the talent acquisition process.
- Document ethical guidelines for the organization’s AI adoption. This framework, Betori says, should align with the company’s values and comply with legal requirements within each region where the organization is recruiting.
- Collaborate with technology and legal teams to ensure ethical use of AI. “These experts can help determine not only what data is being collected and how it is being used, but also how that information will be communicated to candidates and what, if any, consent is required,” Betori says. These teams can also help establish an auditing plan and identify key metrics of success and indicators of concern.
- Design AI tools with hiring teams and candidates in mind. “All staff should be equipped with the knowledge and skills they need to effectively use AI, and the candidate experience should be central to your strategy, ensuring tools are user-friendly, accessible, and allow for two-way feedback between candidates and recruiters,” Betori explains.
- Remember that human oversight remains crucial to keeping the hiring process fair and ethical. “AI should not make decisions on behalf of your talent acquisition team,” Betori says. “While AI is an excellent tool for automating tasks, it lacks context, empathy, morals, and common sense.” TA leaders are incredibly important to the hiring process, and their oversight is critical in ensuring the interests of candidates and the company are protected.
