When we speak of the hiring process, a refined recruitment process is not only efficient and productive for the organisation but also pleasant for candidates and hiring teams. HR professionals can spend a great deal of time screening resumes, which can become very tedious. Furthermore, most resumes submitted for job openings are highly generic and unqualified, and it’s easy to see why resume screening is a challenging part of the recruitment process.

Filling a job opening involves more than just repetitive, high-volume tasks. Assessing candidates and scheduling job interviews can also take up many recruiters’ time. HR teams that can’t keep up may lose out on the perfect job candidate to more efficient competitors.

Hiring With AI: How It Can Help

With an Applicant Tracking System (ATS), recruiters can save time and ensure that the best candidates advance through the hiring process. Additionally, Artificial intelligence (AI) can help overcome challenges and optimise the recruiting process.  The result is that recruiters can devote more time to other important aspects of their jobs, freeing up their valuable time.

Organisations benefit from AI to simplify the application, screening, decision-making, and hiring process. AI recruiting software can handle everything from auto-screening candidates to analysing job postings and scheduling interviews. It also helps create an unbiased environment essential for any organisation. This is where the Diversity, Equality & Inclusion (DEI) comes in, bringing forth the importance of inclusive recruitment.

How To Improve DEI Hiring Policy

Including diverse employees in organisations is the bare minimum to ensure a wholesome workplace. It isn’t simply about hiring different races or genders but about ensuring everyone applying for the open position has a fair and equal chance. Having an agile workforce with employees from different backgrounds and varied stories to tell can help the organisation bring forth a more diverse workforce that includes individuals from all cultures, ethnicities, and age groups. A no-bias system pushes for a hiring proxy that is more ethical in its values, and therefore, DEI has an important part to play.

To avoid pitfalls, scorecards also be utilised for hiring diversely. Clear metrics and measurements allow for assessing candidates’ suitability for the job item. The SMART model entails the following:

• Specific: Make goals specific to avoid confusion about what the team is attempting to accomplish
• Measurable: Each goal should be measurable so as to monitor the progress
• Achievable: All goals should be attainable or put another way, they should not be very convoluted so as to allow employees to give their best shot
• Relevant: Ensure your goals are realistic and aligned with your hiring objectives
• Time-bound: Your DEI initiatives should be continuous. However, the recruiting and hiring goals should be timely to achieve them within a specified period

The effectiveness of your DEI initiatives cannot be determined by measuring their progress. In spite of this, measuring these efforts can be challenging because DEI permeates every aspect of the business. Additionally, employers should consider other data, including insights from offboarding interviews, salary increases and promotions, and retention rates. To make things simpler for employers, AI provides numerous solutions for this aspect.

A brief overview of how AI is helping organisations achieve DEI goals:

• Demographics such as race, age, and gender are not considered by artificial intelligence tools 
• AI-enabled platforms help companies to identify issues and build models that reduce the problems of unconscious bias. This produces better results with deep insights into an ethical hiring process 
• HR professionals can understand how data is fed into AI-driven software from applicant tracking systems (ATS) and how their selection processes contribute to diversity in the workplace by adding analytics and visualisation 
• Unlike humans, AI algorithms do not have to reduce their pool of available candidates to make faster hiring decisions  
• AI technology can help organisations reach out to a more diverse candidate pool by analysing job descriptions 
• Recruiters can use AI tools to automate the time-consuming onboarding process for all candidates
• HR managers can also track employees’ skills and capabilities and predict their career advancement using AI technology, so they can know if they are reaching their full potential  

Summing Up

Every organisation needs DEI to achieve its goals and ensure employee well-being. With technological advancements, employers can set the stage for success and growth with a DEI strategy.   

No matter what dimension to increase diversity in, whether it is gender, ethnicity, age, neurodiversity, or socioeconomic status, AI is an effective tool. The recruitment process and DEI initiatives can be streamlined and improved, enhancing organisational stability, candidate experience, and businesses yielding more inclusive and optimised results.  

Note: We at Inc42 take our ethics very seriously. More information about it can be found here.