Integrating artificial intelligence into your interview process isn’t just about harnessing technology — it’s about creating a more efficient, inclusive, and insightful hiring experience. By blending technological innovation with the indispensable human touch, your company can improve its talent acquisition process.
Start a conversation at your company to explore how AI can become your competitive advantage in recruitment. Effectively integrating AI into interviews requires strategic planning and knowing its implications. Here’s how your company can harness AI effectively during the interview process.
1. Define the Role of AI
AI-powered tools can transform interviews by automating repetitive tasks and providing deeper insights into candidates. If your company hasn’t started using AI in recruitment, now is the time to explore its potential. If you build an ethical, human-centered strategy that combines AI’s capabilities with your expertise, it can have a big impact on your hiring process.
- Application screening: This technology can surface qualified candidates and personalize outreach to candidates. AI can help match cognitive and emotional traits to jobs. Several companies assess resumes and video interviews using AI and machine-learning models. (Research vendors to determine which ones offer features that match your needs.)
- Interview scheduling: AI tools can coordinate calendars and manage candidate availability for interviews, minimizing delays.
- Pre-interview analysis: Advanced systems can screen candidates, conduct initial assessments, and provide immediate responses to applicant queries, all while maintaining a conversational tone that puts candidates at ease. While AI can save countless hours of administrative work, it still must be combined with a human touch in final interviewing and decision-making.
- Question generation: Craft custom interview questions designed to assess role-specific competencies.
- Post-interview analysis: AI systems can analyze recordings of interviews to identify recurring themes, competencies, and even gaps. These analyses provide HR professionals with data-driven insights to make more informed hiring decisions.
- Interview support: During live interviews, AI-powered tools can assist recruiters by summarizing key aspects of the candidate’s responses in real time, enabling interviewers to focus more on engaging with candidates than on taking extensive notes.
- Interview question generators: Effective tools allow users to set the difficulty or complexity of questions, enabling hiring managers to evaluate candidates across entry-level, midlevel, and senior-level positions with precision.
2. Choose the Right AI Tools
Selecting tools that align with your organization’s needs is critical. HR professionals adding AI into interviewing processes should look for platforms with transparency, security, and ethical AI practices.
HR is most commonly using AI for recruitment and hiring, learning and development, and performance management.
These are a few tools and features that might help your company’s productivity:
- Video interviewing platforms: Reach out to HR networks for firsthand feedback. SHRMConnect is an online forum where SHRM members may post questions, respond to posts, create surveys, and interact with members. Here are a couple of examples of organizations benefiting from conversational AI and recruitment process automation.
- Scheduling assistants: Advanced tools feature automatic coordination across calendars, allowing HR teams to align interview schedules with the availability of candidates, hiring managers, and other stakeholders. Many scheduling tools offer product demos or limited free trials. Prioritize engaging with vendors to explore their tools’ functionality and assess how well they along with your scheduling needs.
- AI-powered analytics: AI not only supports evaluating candidates but also provides feedback to interviewers. It can:
- Monitor whether job-related competencies are being consistently addressed in each interview session.
- Highlight gaps in questioning or areas that may need improvement.
- Offer suggestions to minimize unstructured or overly subjective interview approaches.
SHRM offers a lengthy vendor directory organized by category that can help you locate AI-powered tools for hiring, including interviews.
3. Balance AI with Human Intelligence
While AI automates and enhances certain aspects of hiring, it should not replace the vital human element in interviews. Final hiring decisions should involve human judgment to ensure they accurately consider subtle, qualitative factors related to cultural fit and interpersonal skills. Here’s how to strike the right balance:
- Review and validate AI-generated recommendations: Consider whether the conclusions the tool reached match those of people in the interview room, and if not, question why. Maintain accountability for final hiring decisions.
- Interact in a personal way: The interview itself should remain a human-led process in order to build rapport and assess cultural fit.
- Ask behavioral and situational questions: Interviewing in person allows hiring managers to assess nonverbal cues such as body language, facial expressions, and overall composure, which provide valuable context to a candidate’s responses.
- Provide communication: Give updates to candidates with empathy and personalization — even if they are being sent by an AI tool — ensuring candidates feel valued.
Agentic AI: HR’s Next Frontier
Very soon, a recruiting AI agent will be able to source candidates based on specific qualifications, engage in candidate outreach, schedule interviews, assess candidates, and present finalists for consideration, industry analyst and thought leader Josh Bersin said at the 2024 HR Technology Conference in Las Vegas.
The emergence of agentic AI — an evolution from AI-powered chatbots that answer questions and generate text to AI agents that take actions based on those exchanges — will lead to the technology being increasingly integrated across HR systems, Bersin said.
These AI agents will actively handle more complex recruitment tasks, including scheduling interviews, engaging with candidates throughout the process, and even summarizing feedback post-interview. Organizations that adopt these technologies early will not only improve hiring efficiency but also access better talent faster.
4. Train Your Recruiting Team
Training is essential to making sure your hiring team has the knowledge to use AI responsibly and effectively. That training should include:
- Familiarizing your team with the capabilities and limitations of selected tools.
- Establishing guidelines that align with your organization’s values to ensure responsible AI usage. Some examples related to interviewing include:
- Assign dedicated recruiters to oversee AI-powered interviews and intervene when necessary.
- Review AI outputs manually before making hiring decisions.
- Offer multiple interview formats, such as phone, in-person, or text-based interviews, as alternatives to AI or video-based assessments.
- Proactively ask candidates about their access needs before the interview process begins.
- Designate a champion who is accountable for the responsible development and use of AI for each use case. For the technology to be successful, employers must be thoughtful about its use.
Pro Tip: Offer personalized, self-directed learning journeys that empower employees to upskill and reskill. Prioritize digital literacy and AI-related skills across your organization.
5. Ensure Compliance and Fairness
AI use in hiring is subject to regulatory scrutiny. Bias is a significant concern with AI hiring tools, especially if they are trained on historical data that may reflect existing biases.
HR needs to take a proactive role in ensuring both internally developed AI tools and any AI used in vendor systems for employment decisions are regularly audited by qualified third-party auditors for bias.
Those audits, along with input data analysis, are crucial to ensure impartial and compliant results. Input data refers to all the information gathered during the hiring process, including candidate resumes, application forms, interview notes, assessment results, and behavioral evaluations. It may also include external data such as labor market trends, industry benchmarks, and demographic information.
When properly analyzed, this data provides HR teams with a structured, evidence-based approach to selecting candidates, improving the objectivity of decision-making and reducing biases.
Keep these priorities in mind to avoid causing systemic inequalities:
- Monitor the algorithms: Regularly review AI systems to check for unintended biases. A third-party auditor can review your company-specific outputs from the tools’ programmatic algorithms and their conversational AI for bias. Because AI bias auditing is a relatively new practice with few established norms, experts say it’s vital that HR leaders verify that the tech vendors they partner with are using credible auditors with the proper expertise to conduct any AI bias audits.
- Data security: Protect candidate data by partnering with vendors that meet robust security standards. Ask questions about whether company information that goes into the tool is used to improve it, meaning it could be shared with other users.
- Inclusive AI: Use diverse datasets for training AI tools to avoid reinforcing stereotypes. If you’re training an AI tool for resume screening, ensure the training data includes resumes from individuals across different cultural backgrounds, education levels, and experiences.
- Provide accommodations: AI systems should be designed and implemented with inclusivity in mind. Offer accommodations for candidates with disabilities and ensure the tools you use comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
For example, provide alternative assessment formats if AI analysis relies on visual or auditory data.
6. Measure Success and Continuously Improve
You should track your AI implementation’s performance and refine processes to achieve better outcomes. Here are important metrics to track:
- Time to hire: Evaluate if AI has accelerated your hiring process.
- Candidate quality: Assess whether AI-assisted tools are improving hiring outcomes.
- Candidate satisfaction: Gather feedback from applicants to identify areas for improvement.
- HR team feedback: Ensure your team finds the tools efficient and user-friendly.
Pro Tip: Your existing human resource information system may have the capability to match current employees’ skills with internal job openings. This can help increase internal mobility and therefore employee satisfaction — not to mention helping bridge your skills gaps.
7. Build Trust Through Transparency
Proactively communicate with candidates about how AI is used in your hiring process. Be clear about what AI does and does not do during your hiring process.
Transparency builds trust and reassures candidates that AI supports the process while your organization maintains fairness and respect for their individuality. Though AI can be helpful in screening applications and scheduling interviews, emphasize that it does not make final hiring decisions.
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