Before employing artificial intelligence (AI) to find job candidates, Southwest Airlines had no definitive way to track the success of the company's email and website hiring campaigns. The airline also couldn’t queue up potential applicants who’d logged into a job listings page and left before an applicable position had been posted.

Since it began using an AI-enabled hiring platform from tech firm Phenom, the airline now has “a warm pipeline of candidates” it can draw on whenever jobs opportunities arise, according to Kelby Tansey, manager for recruitment marketing at Southwest Airlines.

Tansey said the airline can now reach out to “passive” job candidates who came to Southwest but couldn’t find an open position at the time.

“We’ll drive them into certain pipelines within the Phenom platform so we can capture their resume, their skills, and note some of those candidates and then let them know when the job opens up,” Tansey said.

Nearly three in four organizations boosted their purchases of talent acquisition technology in 2022 and 70% plan to continue investing this year — even if a recession arrives — according to a survey by online job recruitment service Modern Hire.

Forrester Research Principal Analyst Betsy Summers said she's been getting more inquiries from clients about AI recruiting platforms.

“It has touched a nerve in the HR and recruiting world, promising to fix problems and frustrations that have been plaguing those teams — hard to decipher competency models, job descriptions that are vague or biased, increasing talent competition,” Summers said.

The questions Summers gets about recruitment platforms go beyond talent acquisition and include “skills-as-a-service” technology that has “a huge potential impact on how organizations plan their workforce, develop them, how and where they allocate work, and how they grow and retain workers.

“It could be a game changer,” Summers said.

A growing number of AI-based options

Along with Phenom's SaaS-based Intelligent Talent Experience platform, other leading providers of AI-based talent acquisition software and services include Eightfold, Beamery, and Seekout — all of which perform skills inference and candidate-job matching. Other notable vendors include Clovers (with its recent acquisition of Talvista), HireVue, Pymetrics (recently acquired by Harver), and iCIMS, according to Forrester Research.

AI-based recruitment platforms can find "more diverse talent pools, and [offer] a more accurate approach to qualifying candidates by matching skills rather than on a job title match or other signal,” said Forrester Principal Analyst Betsy Summers.

Some of the use cases for talent acquisition platforms are efficiency-oriented, since  they’re used for interview scheduling, managing the candidate application process, assisting recruiters with follow-ups, and managing the applicant pipeline. Other platforms also focus on bias mitigation such as adjusting language in job descriptions and candidate communications to be more inclusive. Still others include remote video capabilities that automate early interviews.

HireVue’s candidate interviewing software, for example, uses a natural language bot to conduct an interview and provide a transcript for hiring managers and recruiters. It also has a video component that records an interview, offering each would-be hire 30 seconds to prepare for each question, and up to three minutes to answer. The video is then sent to the hiring manager to view.

Talent acquisition software also often relies on “fits scoring,” which uses specific metrics to match a job candidate’s qualifications to a specific opening.

Saving time at SASR Worforce Solutions

Bradley Cooper, director of IT at staffing firm SASR Workforce Solutions, said each recruiter in his company is responsible for hiring at least 360 people annually for various clients. In October 2021, SASR went live with Phenom’s platform, which  immediately provided efficiencies — among them, automatically matching candidates to job openings before a recruiter even contacted an applicant.

“When you work at our volume, you need tools to help get the candidates to you in a timely manner,” Cooper said. “As soon as a job opportunity is available, we can make it known to the candidate, and that goes out to the job board Phenom has. Before that, it just wasn’t a good recruiter or candidate experience.”

As soon as a job candidate begins the application process, Phenom’s software begins building a profile of the person; if they’re a good fit for a SASR client, it feeds the candidate to a recruiter who can interview them, make an offer, and start the onboarding process. If the prospect is not yet ready to accept an offer, Phenom’s platform places them in a future candidate “talent community” or queue, allowing SASR to continue to contact them as opportunities come up.

SASR uses Phenom Hosted Apply, which provides a consistent experience for candidates, where they go from learning about a job to applying for it without having to leave the career site. Hosted Apply leverages API integrations Phenom made with third-party applicant tracking systems (ATS), and avoids the need for a candidate to get redirected to a separate ATS application process.

Phenom's platform also builds out a dynamic and static list of potential candidates. The former has candidates who are added or removed as they find work; the latter is a constant list of workers who can be accessed for seasonal or part-time positions. The lists can also be used to develop recruiting campaigns, Cooper said.

“Over time, as we add more candidates to the list, the AI will recognize the like candidates with the same skills and locations for opportunities, so that allows us to see the best fit upfront,” Cooper said. “The really cool part about having a dynamic list is it allows you to target them for a specific opportunity, or if we do a specific campaign, we can curate that messaging to them through email or SMS to hit the correct touchpoints.”

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