AI Resume Screening: Hacking the Recruitment Process

As someone involved in the hiring process for your organisation, it can often feel like you finish one recruitment process just to instantly start another – and that’s if you’re lucky enough that they don’t overlap! The candidate screening process, in particular, is extremely time-consuming as it takes hours to read through all of the CVs. Just like that, your job gets swallowed by recruitment, leaving you no time to complete your other crucial tasks. But there is one hack that is frankly underutilised – AI resume screening software. 

What Is AI in Resume Screening?

AI is the secret ingredient needed to simplify hiring processes. Companies that use it enjoy many benefits, including faster time to hire and saving both time and money. 

Artificial intelligence has revolutionised how we read and understand resumes and candidate information. Using advanced machine learning algorithms, resume parsers sort candidate data into categories for easier reading and comparison with the job description. This simplifies many workflows associated with hiring.

AI screening tools are useful at each stage of the recruitment process, including:

• The Search Phase – Easily discover top talent.
• Candidate Screening – Figure out which applicants are the most suitable for the role.
• Shortlist – As you create a shortlist for an interview, AI resume screening tools can help you easily compare candidates against the job description and decide who progresses to the interview stage.

Why Use AI Resume Screening?

As business owners, innovators, and decision-makers, we’re always looking to get a leg up on the competition. Utilising the machine learning algorithms of AI can certainly help you to gain an almost unfair advantage over your competitors. Here’s how:

Shorten Time To Hire

If you could create a shorter recruitment process that resulted in a high quality of hire, wouldn’t you do it? By adding AI resume screening to your recruitment software, you can quickly scour through candidate information to find the best applicants for each role. This shaves hours off the resume screening process, enabling you to hire faster than ever before!

Save Money

Less time spent per new hire = less money spent! Time is money, so if you can save hours of your staff's time, each recruitment process comes in at a much lower cost. Your team could then spend their time completing more value-adding activities – meaning that your profits could even go up as well!

Increase Staff Satisfaction

One of the most significant advantages of automated resume screening is that it frees up your staff so that they are not chained to their desks, bored rigid as they pore over resumes. This results in happier staff who are more satisfied in their jobs.

Deliver a Better Candidate Experience

When you’re trying to find good staff, offering an excellent candidate experience is half the battle. The ones who are truly worth your time are at risk of getting snapped up by someone else if your processes take too long. Overly complex applications that ask candidates to re-enter information that’s already on their CVs can also prevent some of the best people from applying in the first place. The fewer roadblocks you put up, the more fantastic candidates you can find – that’s why candidate experience is paramount to any hiring process.

Produce Better Hiring Outcomes

Finding qualified candidates amongst a stack of unsuitable applicants is a massive challenge for any recruiter. But AI technology makes screening resumes to find the best applicants easier than ever! With less time spent reading unsuitable resumes, you can focus more of your attention on interviewing potential candidates and discovering who will be the best fit for the role. The result? Better hiring outcomes; staff that stay in the position for longer and are more productive.

Reduce Bias

A key concern during any hiring process is that unconscious bias can play a factor even though we’re not aware of it. A resume parser can make blind screening processes simple to facilitate. Blind recruitment involves taking the identifying details off a candidate’s application that may hint at their age, gender, religion, and so forth. That way, you can be sure that you’re hiring on talent alone without the interference of these other factors.

Types Of Resume Screening Tools

There are four main types of resume parsers:

1. Keywords – These parsers are a type of AI tool that searches for keywords, patterns, and phrases in a CV. These parsers are not always the most accurate as they just search for a term that might not be in the right context. For example, if the keyword is ‘Communication’, this term might come up under skills, job title, or even the title of a person’s degree.
2. Grammar – A grammar-based parser attempts to add context to a CV by searching for words and phrases according to set grammatical rules. It tries to understand the meaning of each sentence in addition to looking for a specific term. The quality of grammar-based parsing software really depends on the grammatical rules that were manually entered when it was created.
3. Statistics – Yes, statistics can play a part in analysing resume data. Numerical models are used to comb the information presented to recognise the structures within the text, such as job titles or addresses.
4. AI Focus – Parsers featuring an AI focus use machine learning algorithms to learn how to read certain types of text more accurately over time. They can learn from their mistakes and, therefore, become truly reliable sources of information. This one is the type of resume parser you need if you want to hack the recruitment process!

The AI Resume Screening Process

Are you ready to transform your recruitment process, leaving your competitors in awe of how you can constantly find fantastic staff so quickly? Here’s how you can do it:

1. Find Your Product – Easier said than done! Finding the right AI resume screening tool for your business can be a huge hurdle to overcome. We suggest trying out some online first before you commit to anything. Affinda offers a free online tool that allows you to upload numerous resumes so you can see the product in action.
2. Connect With Your ATS – Any good resume parser will connect seamlessly with your applicant tracking system (ATS). You’ll just need a developer to set it all up for you, and then you can get all candidate data to flow through to your ATS for easy comparison.
3. Resume Upload – Once you’ve chosen your software and completed the set-up phase, it’s time to start uploading resumes! As candidates apply for roles, their CVs will be directed through the parser before the data finally lands in your ATS.
4. Screening – Finally, you can now screen the candidates using the data extracted from their CVs. This information will be filtered into categories such as job title, years of experience, education, and more!

Talent acquisition suddenly just became a whole lot easier! You can now enjoy seamless recruitment processes that don’t cause a headache either for the recruiters or candidates for each job opening that crops up.

What’s The Best AI Resume Screening Software?

Affinda offers one of the best options on the market when you’re looking for a resume-screening tool. We are known for having a product that’s similar to or better than our competitors but at a much lower price point. We are committed to making AI technology accessible to any type of business, and that’s why we have chosen to maintain a competitive pricing model.

We are also famous for our stellar customer service. Our tech-minded customer care team is readily available to answer any questions about our products. So, whether you need information on how to integrate our resume parser with your ATS, how our AI works, or how our products can suit your unique use case, we’d love to help! 

Affinda’s Top Features

Affinda has been specifically developed to solve many top recruitment challenges, including fit-for-purpose parsing and understanding the semantics behind ambiguous text.

Tailored to Your Needs

Thanks to the fact that our machine learning algorithm picks up on its own mistakes and uses these to improve in accuracy over time, the more you use the tool, the better it reads the types of resumes that you receive. So, even if you’re in a niche industry, our software is sure to work for you!

Utilises Natural Language Processing

As discussed earlier, many types of resume parsers are based on adhering to rules and searching for keywords; but Affinda is different. Our technology takes the ambiguity out of language by using natural language processing to understand the meaning behind the words on the page. 

Natural language processing (NLP) is a specific type of AI that enables the software to essentially understand how humans speak. Recently, the type of AI technology used at Affinda passed a test showing it can actually understand text even better than humans! This has been a work in progress for quite some time, and even now, we are still committed to continually improving our product even further as new research and developments surface.

Ready to try our AI resume screening tool? Give us a call today and book a free demo.