Harish Nair (left) and Stan Peake spoke about how AI is transforming the recruitment at Innovation Week YYC. — Photo by Jennifer Friesen,
“Oh my God, you’re a woman.”
This phrase, shared by Stan Peake during Innovation Week YYC at Platform Calgary, illustrated a glaring example of bias in recruitment — a problem that persists despite advancements in workplace practices.
The line was said to a Chief Operating Officer Peake knows who has a “kickass resume” and a ton of relevant experience. She was in the late stages of recruitment for a new role and was told she was the number one candidate for the job. But, in the final video interview, she opened up her Zoom call and was met with those words from the executive team.
“Could you imagine that in 2024?” he asked the room. “That is part of bias that shouldn’t exist.”
Peake, an AI and sales coach, joined Harish Nair, founder of EngageAI, to discuss how artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the recruitment landscape by addressing inefficiencies, reducing bias, and fostering diversity.
Recruitment’s persistent challenges
The hiring process today is broken for both employers and candidates, marked by inefficiency, high costs, and inconsistencies.
Peake and Nair shared some numbers to help drive this point home. On average, job seekers submit over 100 applications to land one interview. For hiring managers, this means reviewing 300 to 400 applications per posted job. This is a timeconsuming task that contributes to an average timetohire of 36 days.
The result is a significant cost, with hiring expenses often exceeding $4,000 per position.
Even with these investments, quality is inconsistent. A staggering 78% of resumes are misaligned with the roles they are submitted for, creating additional hurdles for recruiters. Compounding these challenges is the prevalence of unconscious bias: 42% of recruiters acknowledge that bias impacts hiring decisions and hinders workplace diversity.
These challenges affect both employers and job seekers, leading to frustration and lost opportunities on both sides.
How AI is changing recruitment
By automating repetitive tasks such as resume screening and candidate matching, AI significantly reduces the time and resources required to evaluate applicants. For example, AI can rapidly analyze hundreds of resumes to spotlight top candidates, which cuts costs and speeds up hiring.
“If you’re using AI in recruitment, you can save up to 30% of manual processes,” said Peake. “That’s huge … the time that your managers and maybe even founders are spending, you might be able to reallocate that [to] growth initiatives.”
Another advantage of AI is its scalability. It can manage massive volumes of applications and pinpoint candidates whose qualifications match the job requirements. This ensures that highpotential candidates don’t slip through the cracks due to human fatigue or error during the screening process.
Nair explained that AI improves the candidate experience by redirecting unselected applicants to more suitable openings, rather than outright rejecting them.
The potential for AI to mitigate unconscious bias could offer a breakthrough in recruitment. By focusing solely on qualifications and experience, AI can reduce the influence of factors like gender, ethnicity, or names that can trigger bias.
However, human oversight remains essential to ensure ethical implementation and to avoid algorithms that simply reinforce bias. Amazon learned this lesson the hard way when it became clear that its AI resume assessment tool was reinforcing gender bias because it was trained using past resumes that were predominantly male.
Technology serves as an enabler, but final decisions must be made with an understanding of cultural and contextual nuances that AI cannot fully capture.
The future of hiring
The inefficiencies of traditional hiring methods — lengthy timelines, high costs, and inconsistent results — are driving companies to explore AIdriven solutions. With its ability to streamline processes, enhance candidate experiences, and promote diversity, AI is becoming a cornerstone of modern recruitment strategies.
An employee’s experience starts during recruitment. “If someone has a terrible onboarding experience, they’re starting with a bad taste in their mouth,” said Peake. “[It] doesn’t matter how good your company culture is after that, you don’t want someone starting on the wrong foot.”
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