For talent acquisition teams all over the world, 2022 will be a year of hair-on-fire busy to recruit, hire, and retain their employees.

As we wrote in our previous post, talent teams are working overtime to turn back the rising tide of candidate resentment. They’ll also be scrambling to replace the millions of precious people their organizations have lost in the past year. Those who leverage AI-based recruiting technologies will have a definite advantage on both fronts, especially when it comes to handling the many repetitive, time-consuming tasks that make up talent attraction, hiring, and onboarding.

These technologies—which include resume screening software, chatbots and conversational AI, online assessments, video interviewing solutions, candidate survey systems, and recruitment marketing software, to name just a few—not only make recruiting easier on overworked and overwhelmed talent teams but they also create a more streamlined, responsive, and positive experience for candidates. Some of our key sponsors offer technologies like these including Paradox, Modern Hire, Phenom, Sense, and many others.

Where AI Tech Is Making Its Mark

Talent Board’s latest 2021 candidate experience benchmark research reveals that top companies (those with the highest-rated candidate experiences) are more likely than their competitors to have implemented some form of AI-based technology to improve their sourcing capabilities, their communication with candidates, and their ability to support recruiters and hiring managers in their respective roles. Indeed, all of the Top 10 CandE-winning organizations in North America this year utilize AI-based recruiting technology to some degree.

More specifically:

• The top companies in North America with the highest-rated candidate experiences use these technologies 15% more often than the average for all companies. In APAC, this percentage jumps to 20%, and in EMEA it falls to 6%.
• We’ve seen a 40% increase in the global utilization of chatbots since 2019.
• In North America, 42% of companies are using chatbots, while the remainder state they are considering implementing them. 60% of companies in Latin America use chatbots. In EMEA and APAC, these percentages are 38% and 35%, respectively.

Our research also shows that some AI-based tech is more popular than others.

• Gaining in popularity in the U.S. were:
• AI-based video interviewing/assessment, which rose from 48% in 2020 to 58% in 2021.
• Measuring and predicting employee job-changing behavior, which rose from 33% to 37%.
• Prequalifying individuals from collective candidate databases, which rose from 46% to 48%.

Even with the above popularity, the vast array of exploding smart recruiting tech can be overwhelming to recruiting teams. One of the most surprising insights that came out of Talent Board’s recent research with Phenom is that significant numbers of recruiters say they still don’t have access to helpful recruiting technologies at critical points of their work. And then there are those who struggle to utilize them even when they have access.

Nearly half (45%) don’t have software providing them with real-time feedback from hiring managers about candidates, and 38% don’t have access to AI-generated insights about candidates—a powerful tool that speeds up the evaluation and dispositioning of candidates, which is increasingly crucial in today’s tight labor market. Without these kinds of tools, companies are simply going to lose great candidates to nimbler, recruiting-tech-friendly competitors.

In our next post, we’ll explore Key Takeaway #3 from our 2021 benchmark research report with a similar theme, “Recruiting Automation Continues to Increase.”

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