The era of AI-enabled recruiting: The future is now

AI presents the biggest opportunity recruitment has ever seen. And it’s not some far off concept—world-class teams are gaining operational leverage from AI now. AI has the power to take the grind and guesswork out of the hiring process, giving recruiters the opportunity to focus on what they do best — building connections, influencing decisions, and making an outsized impact on organizations. Let's dive into why recruiting is especially well-placed to be positively impacted by AI and how recruiting teams are already taking advantage of this today.

Why AI matters in recruitment

I’m a big believer that hiring is the most impactful, highest-leverage activity in any organization. All success starts with who you bring into the organization to get that work done. It shapes everything from company culture to business outcomes. Yet, despite its importance, the hiring process often feels weighed down by inefficiency and guesswork. But AI is fundamentally changing this. Here are 4 unlocks AI enables and what they mean for recruitment.

AI unlocks unstructured data

Hiring conversations are full of human-to-human interactions. And human-to-human interactions are full of unstructured data. Up until recently, we haven’t been capturing this data because the incentive wasn’t there — what would we do with it? Turns out, we can do pretty much anything with it. 

There are very few workflows in any business that are as anchored to conversations or human interaction as recruiting. So recruiting is especially well-placed to benefit from the power of AI. Data can provide a full picture of a candidate, and AI unlocks this data and puts it into context for hiring teams.

AI scales expertise

No workflow in any business is as populated with non-experts as recruiting. I’m not talking about recruiters here, but everyone involved in the hiring process, like hiring managers, interviewers, and VP approvers. But AI enables teams to operate with expert precision, ensuring consistency and efficiency regardless of experience level. It elevates non-experts with tools that help them ask better questions and provide more valuable feedback. By surfacing patterns and capturing and retaining institutional knowledge, AI helps your team align decisions and scale best practices.

AI synthesizes data from multiple sources

There are typically six to ten people in a hiring team. And during the interview process, they all learn different things about the same candidate. AI bridges informational gaps by synthesizing stakeholder perspectives into a unified view. Through a shared understanding, AI reduces confusion and ensures hiring teams’ decisions are based on a complete representation of a candidate — not just fragmented opinions.

AI automates repetitive tasks

Hiring teams spend too much time on manual tasks and not enough time doing what they do best: cultivating connections. We typically hear recruiters say they spend about half their time on these undifferentiated tasks — things that someone or something else could do without making much difference to the overall outcome. So clearly, when AI gets involved and automates these tasks, it impacts recruiters’ overall processes pretty significantly.

The future is now 

The reality is this isn’t a far off future prediction to prepare for—it's actually happening now. We surveyed a population of recruiters and recruiting leaders to understand their view of the impact of AI already. 

93 percent of the recruiters and recruiting leaders we surveyed believe that AI skills are necessary here and now. And 74 percent of the folks that we surveyed believe that AI will be good for their job security. There tends to be a lot of fear mongering around AI in recruitment, but the reality is that this group is very conscious of the ways that their job and their life can be improved with AI.

AI is also having a major impact on how much work people are getting done. Recruiters that have adopted AI run 25 percent more interviews per week. That has really significant downstream impact on the speed with which you'll get folks in seats.  And they reported spending 41 percent less time on admin versus  the non-AI-enabled recruiters. 

I think AI is going to have a far greater impact than it's had so far, and I want to be part of making that happen. But we shouldn't underestimate the magnitude of impact that's already occurring in many cases.

Conversations are the new frontier unlocked by AI

Conversations are the new frontier of recruiting — they’re the biggest unlock for the industry and have the power to transform hiring decisions. Conversations are important in two ways: 1) they take up a ton of time across a very large group of people within an organization, and 2) they contain a large amount of data that — until now — went lost or forgotten. 

People are already leveraging AI to harness this data to gain operational leverage and do more with less. Let’s dive into some of them now. 

Getting better data out of every conversation 

Take the example of one of our customers, Cleo, a fast-growing AI fintech company. They had a problem many people will relate to: they were often getting sparsely populated scorecards from interviewers without enough information to actually make informed decisions. This was making things tough for recruiters.  How can you possibly improve your process if you don't know what's actually going on in the funnel?

After adopting Metaview, Cleo saw that the AI notes transformed their scorecards. Interviewers were submitting richly detailed scorecards with actual evidence from what the candidate said.  AI is exceptionally good at synthesizing this information and formatting it and structuring it in a way that is most useful to you and your organization. 

AI understands precise instructions

When you’re referring back to notes from an interview you don’t always just want a summary of what the candidate said, in the order they said it. Recruiting is more sophisticated than that. With Metaview, you can actually give the AI a menu of instructions to design detailed templates specifying exactly how you need candidate information organized.

AI helps you make informed decisions

AI can also have a massive impact in contributing to more informed decisions. Take debriefs as an example. They can often feel chaotic, with team members recalling details from memory or giving conflicting opinions about a candidate. Let’s say you’re in a debrief and there’s some uncertainty around a candidate’s motivations. You can ask Metaview’s AI Assistant to pull up any instance where the candidate mentioned motivations and refer back to the exact moment where they talked about this. 

By extracting this nugget of information through the AI, the hiring team now has access to an insight that otherwise would've been lost and can leverage it for more informed decisions. 

Embracing the AI revolution

AI is going to do amazing things for recruiting. And it’s not just the “future” of recruitment — it’s here today. The best recruiters already know this, have adopted it, and are reaping the benefits. 

Recruiters shouldn’t be afraid of AI, because there’s likely no process in which genuine human connection matters more. AI won’t take your job — it will make you much, much better at it by synthesizing all the unstructured data that these interactions produce.

If recruiters are not already leveraging this unstructured data, they will be soon. In a world in which you have access to everything a candidate has said to everyone on your team — it’s time to think about what you want to know.

Some of these things may not be on your list as “solvable problems” right now. But as you develop your intuition with AI, you’ll realize there are a ton of things that may be higher leverage problems to solve than those you’re currently working on. And we’re just getting started.