Artificial Intelligence, commonly referred to as ‘AI’, is one technological innovation that’s taking most major industries by storm at present. Talent acquisition is no different!
In one recent survey, nearly 35% of hiring managers and talent experts said that artificial intelligence is the #1 trend influencing how companies hire today. Senior HR experts are overwhelmingly in agreement that this state-of-the-art tech solution has the ability to improve talent attraction and retention by a whopping 96%.
Having said that, a vast majority of even the most established Fortune 500 companies are lagging behind when it comes to their use of AI in attracting, engaging, and hiring talent. In fact, as many as 91% scored poorly in this area according to Phenom’s 2022 State of Candidate Experience Report.
Leveraging artificial intelligence to find candidates that are the right fit for your company shouldn’t be difficult – and if you choose the right frameworks, it isn’t.
To make things easier for you, we’ve compiled case studies from four different organizations that are successfully leveraging AI in recruitment to find top talent and fill open positions faster.
1) Enhancing Candidate Engagement – Magellan Health
Candidate engagement is one of the most important aspects of any successful recruitment strategy today.
CareerPlug’s 2021 Candidate Experience Report found that 58% of the job seekers surveyed declined an offer because of a poor experience. On the flip side, as many as 80% of surveyed candidates said that a positive experience influenced their decision to accept a company’s job offer.
These numbers only further strengthen the fact that furnishing a good candidate experience is paramount for organizations that want to attract and retain the best candidates in the current job market.
Magellan Health is one company that realized this and decided to optimize their recruiting strategy to improve candidate engagement and conversion in measurable ways. The 10,000+ employee healthcare leader adopted an AI-backed recruitment platform that significantly enhanced its potential recruits’ overall candidate experience by:
- Easy career site navigation,
- Highly tailored job recommendations, and
- A customer relationship management (CRM) platform that connects quality candidates to recruiters quickly.
“Why do we care about AI?,” says Heidi Chapeau, former Recruitment Marketing Director for Magellan Health, in one recent interview with Phenom. “Because it delivers candidates an exceptional experience. A poor experience can really damage your brand if a candidate hits your site and they don’t know how to move forward.”
Since implementing AI in their recruitment marketing strategy, the company has seen:
- An overall increase in the number of completed applications and clicks on the “Apply” option,
- An exceptionally high conversion rate of applications (86%),
- An almost doubled average site visit time (from 3 to 6 minutes), and
- A whopping 81% of candidates rated the site 4 out of 5.
2) Delivering Personalization at Scale – Stanford Healthcare
Personalization has become the talk of the town within the recruitment niche these days.
Talent acquisition leaders from various big and small companies are now thinking of and implementing innovative ways to tailor experiences to the needs of every single candidate.
But not everybody gets personalization right!
“The recruiting world is awash with bad emails from lazy recruiters who treat them like a spam machine. Those generic templates lie dormant in junk files, and busy candidates become allergic to clear mass-communications,” writes Lars Schmidt, Co-Founder of HR Open Source, in one of his recent articles for Forbes.
You see, it’s difficult to land the best candidates without furnishing tailored experiences.
But there’s one organization in particular that has aced personalization within its recruitment strategy and is seeing considerable positive results with it – Stanford Healthcare.
The healthcare giant set out to achieve highly personalized hiring experiences with its artificially intelligent chatbot, which has simplified and streamlined the candidate journey to a point where it allows job seekers to complete the application process at their convenience – and even through their cell phones if need be.
How?
Here are some of the things the chatbot does to personalize the candidates’ experience:
- Provides relevant job matches: The chatbot takes candidates through a few questions, then suggests positions that best fit their skills and experience.
- Makes applying easy: If a job candidate can’t complete the application process in one go, the bot allows them to pick up where they left off at any time.
- Communicates through the CRM: When the bot captures candidate details and the positions they’re interested in, that information gets passed along to the CRM where recruiters can pick up communication from there.
- Answers and forwards FAQs: Any question asked by a candidate also gets sent to recruiters so they can follow up with that candidate personally.
In a span of just six months, Stanford Healthcare’s AI chatbot managed to garner a quarter of a million interactions. It also drove 11,000+ candidate leads, nearly 35,000 unique visits, and a whopping 12,000+ apply clicks.
The result: more conversions! (that was a no-brainer, we know)
But there’s more – by using insights from the chatbot, the HR team at the company was able to proactively address issues that typically would have resulted in emails and calls from confused candidates.
As a result, support tickets in the recruiter queue have considerably dropped from an average of 50 per week down to just one or two.
3) Furnishing a Streamlined Hiring Experience – Mercy Clinics
As HR leaders, we all know that recruitment is as much an experience for the candidates as it is for the hiring teams.
Various studies and published articles have talked about how furnishing a highly streamlined hiring experience can help companies significantly mitigate their time-to-hire and cost-per-hire, and further increase their chances of finding and attracting the best candidates.
One organization that managed to effectively streamline their hiring process to attract more candidates is Mercy Clinics.
According to Kayla Drady – who oversees nurse recruitment across the company’s 40 acute care, managed, and specialty hospitals – sourcing experienced nurses was a prime concern that hinged on furnishing a better, more streamlined hiring process.
With a little over 5,000 open positions, Mercy Clinics was seeing limited applicants, experiencing increased recruiter load, and had a lengthy application process.
To give their candidates the same white-glove experience they give their patients, they needed to add an AI recruiting platform and other AI-powered tools to their strategy. They turned to:
- An intelligent career site with a conversational chatbot to capture leads, automate personalized job searches, schedule interviews, and answers FAQs
- An AI-powered CRM to seamlessly identify and connect with active and passive candidates
- Events and university recruiting functionality to secure early talent from virtual or on-site campus activities
- Campaigns with SMS and quick-apply features to automate yet personalize communication
- Comprehensive analytics to track all data
“Re-engagement through the CRM is a great avenue for finding more applicants without spending more money,” says Drady. “And with this technology, it only takes the hiring team one minute to schedule an interview, as opposed to five days previously.”
So far since implementing the AI platform, Drady’s team has seen:
- 10% increase in nursing hires and 14% increase in hires overall
- Increased recruiter productivity
- Increased number of applicants
- Decreased time to apply
- Decreased time to schedule interviews
4) Strengthening the Employer Brand – Brother International Corporation
It’s no secret that effective employer branding can take any company a long way in attracting the top talent within its niche.
According to Glassdoor, 75% of active job seekers are likely to apply to an opening if the company actively manages its employer brand.
Artificial intelligence technology is revolutionizing the employer branding side of recruitment too!
Here’s a case study you can refer to:
Brothers International Corporation needed a better, more refined way to market their brand, and attract talent in the process of doing so. So the HR team and C-Suite at the company set out to use AI to strengthen their brand.
What they needed – and quickly – was a career website that could showcase the authenticity of their employer brand, host a conversational chatbot that would serve as the company’s first touchpoint for candidates seeking more information about the company, and personalize job recommendations to candidates.
After their new, improved career site was up and running, they adopted a new CRM that could screen passive candidates and capture qualified leads. They relied on AI-powered talent analytics that applied data insights automatically to optimize apply options for candidates.
Without this AI platform, the company’s recruiters “wouldn’t be capturing any leads from the chatbot, similar job subscriptions, or partial applications. This type of efficiency is extremely helpful, especially for our higher volume positions in sales and marketing,” says Anthony Prudente, former Senior Specialist of Recruitment Marketing & Social at Brother.
Just after 3 weeks of their career site rebrand and launch of the new AI recruiting tools, Brother International Corporation achieved:
- 140% increase in completed applications,
- 45% increase in total page views,
- 40% increase in job seekers,
- 15% increase in returning job seekers, and
- 25% decrease in time to fill.
Adopting AI in recruitment is truly a win-win strategy for both HR leaders and candidates!
To learn more about other effective ways in which you can think about optimizing your recruitment strategy and hiring the right candidates within no time, get in touch with our healthcare IT recruiters at BenchPoint today!