AI in procurement and supply chain recruitment. Would you use it?

Using AI in procurement and supply chain recruitment

AI (artificial intelligence) is the new craze taking old of the business and consumer world and is disrupting all sectors from procurement and supply chain to medicine, transportation and software.

The world of recruiting hasn’t been discounted from this either. It has been predicted by numerous sources that AI is to transform the recruiter role by automating and streamlining low-value, time-consuming tasks.

Since the introduction of the ATS (Applicant tracking system) system for procurement and supply chain recruiters their jobs have become more efficient and left them more time to do what they do best, recruiting! AI for Procurement and supply chain recruitment is the application of artificial intelligence such as learning or problem-solving exhibited by machines to the recruitment function. AI uses techniques such as machine learning, natural language processing, and sentiment analysis to learn, troubleshoot, and problem-solving.

Technology has become faster and more cost-effective enabling us to collect and analyse huge quantities of data, talent acquisition leaders are increasingly asking their recruiting teams to demonstrate their KPIs such as new hires’ performance and turnover.

The growing popularity in AI has uncovered some exciting opportunities, and recruiters who understand how to best leverage AI recruiting technology stand to reap the rewards. Benefits of using AI within procurement and supply chain recruitment include:

Adding intelligence to your candidate CV search

AI software is now designed so that it integrates with your existing ATS and represents the next generation of ATS functionality. AI allows recruiters to conduct intelligent searching by leveraging existing resume data within the existing ATS system.

So, what do we mean by intelligent searching? This goes beyond keyword searches and Boolean searches by enriching CV data with information from the candidate’s public digital footprint.

Using natural language processing, a CV enricher can scrape a candidate’s public social media profiles and online work portfolio to create a preliminary profile of their skills set and personality traits and match them against the job requirements. Effectively creating a new online CV relevant to the job criteria. Giving the candidate a better chance of being selected for a job role than a generic keyword search through their CV.

Improving the candidate experience

Today’s candidates want and expect continuous feedback, often immediately.

The majority of candidates have a negative impression of an organisation if they don’t hear back after submitting an application. AI in the form of chatbots promises to improve the candidate experience. But how?

AI Recruiter chatbots use natural language processing to interact with candidates in real time by asking qualification questions related to job requirements and providing feedback and next-step suggestions.

The automation of repetitive, time-consuming tasks such as answering FAQs about a procurement or supply chain job, an AI chatbot can ensure the candidate experience isn’t suffering from a lack of communication on the recruiter’s end.

Automating the recruiting workflow through AI will ironically allow recruiters to become more “human” by freeing up their time to more deeply explore candidates’ needs and desires and determine fit.

Reducing unconscious bias during the process

AI can reduce unconscious bias during the recruitment process by ignoring demographic information on a candidate’s CV and/ or profile such as DOB, gender, and race.

AI is trained to find patterns in previous behaviour; however, so any human bias that may already be in your recruiting process can be learned by AI.

To avoid replicating human bias that may already exist, make sure any AI software you use has taken steps to remove clear patterns of potential bias (e.g., only hiring graduates from a specific university).

Speeding up the searching process

While the average time to hire a permanent procurement and supply chain professional is 27 days, the best candidates are off the market within an average of 10 days. The current procurement and supply chain recruitment market is candidate-driven and very unlikely to change in the near future.

A procurement and supply chain recruiter who can speed up their hiring process using AI automation tools will win the war for talent and speed up their hiring process, ensuring they don’t miss an opportunity or a candidate.

Manually screening CV’s is one of the most time-consuming and tedious parts of the recruiting within procurement and supply chain or any sector for that matter. Some roles receive more than 250 applications, automating resume screening represents huge savings in a recruiter’s time.

Powered by machine learning, intelligent CV screening is the ability to apply the knowledge the software learns about existing employees’ experience, skills, and qualifications from their CV’s to automatically screen, shortlist, and grade new procurement and supply chain candidates.

Pivoting recruiting into a talent advisor role

By using AI to do the low-level administrative tasks, it will enable procurement and supply chain recruiters to pivot into a more strategic talent advisor role.

These talent advisory functions include partnering with hiring managers and talent acquisition leaders to map out proactive hiring initiatives based on future growth and revenue rather than reactive back-filling.

AI technology allows recruiters to collect data over time, which they can use to close the loop with hiring managers by measuring crucial recruiting KPIs such as quality of hire.

As with everything, AI has its pros and cons but whether we like it or not it is slowly creeping into our lives and into our job roles. So once we have adopted AI into our lives whats next?