Recruiter vs. Candidate: The labor market’s AI power struggle

Analysts say it’s an employer's market right now, but it just doesn’t feel that way. Based on the conversations we’re having with talent acquisition teams across our 3,000 customers, it’s harder than ever to find the right candidate. AI is in many ways making recruiting more challenging, but we also think it’s part of the solution.

There’s a surging number of applicants per role and each resume is somehow perfectly crafted to the job description, thanks to AI-powered mass applications. To keep up, talent acquisition teams need to compete in an AI arms race with candidates. Here’s how they can leverage purpose-built AI to hire smarter and faster.

#1: AI resume review

Define criteria based on the job’s requirements and then use AI to automatically evaluate and screen resumes at scale. Third-party data enrichment and AI copy detection can filter out fraud and candidates that are mass applying with AI tools. 

This approach gives all candidates an opportunity, rather than just the ones whose resumes you review before your eyes glaze over.

#2: Agentic phone screening

Whereas AI-powered resume screening can filter for alleged experience, agentic phone screens can verify experience and screen for baseline interpersonal skills.

Interview questions can be customized, with transcripts and evaluation criteria that help to prioritize the best candidates. Thanks to AI, you can scale the number of opportunities candidates have, unbounded by your personal availability.

#3: AI-generated assessments 

To verify technical skills, employers have long relied on technical assessments and take-home projects. The challenge has always been that recruiters are nontechnical so building these projects requires support from hiring managers who are already overburdened with their core day-to-day responsibilities.

Now recruiters can use AI to simply transform job descriptions into draft assessments. Hiring managers can then quickly and easily review and optimize assessments as needed, accelerating the overall process.

#4: Assess AI skills

AI isn’t just an incredible force multiplier for recruiters – it’s important for all functions to gain mastery of AI to increase productivity. For technical roles, hiring teams should deploy take-home projects in an AI-native IDE to evaluate prompt engineering skills.

#5: AI proctoring

Of course, any candidate evaluation process is only as valuable as it is trustworthy. Again, fighting AI with AI is the key. For screening low integrity candidate pools, AI-based webcam proctoring can be enabled so that recruiters can ensure the integrity of their assessments at scale by checking if the candidate is off-screen, using another device, or has a helper in view.

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We’re still at the beginning of a new era for talent acquisition. Candidates are taking advantage of every capability at their disposal. It’s time for recruiters to join the arms race.

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