Balancing Efficiency and Personal Touch in Recruitment: The Impact of AI on Applicant Tracking

It wasn’t long ago when job applicants were tracked in a manual fashion. The hiring managers of yesteryear used paper applications, resumes, cover letters, and traditional filing cabinets to organize candidate information for review. 

AI has emerged as a game-changer, empowering business owners, managers, and human resources specialists to sort through candidates with unparalleled efficiency. However, the “personal touch” of recruitment has not been lost in the shuffle. Those who make a concerted effort to balance the human element with AI’s efficiency find technology is mutually beneficial to hospitality businesses as well as job-seekers. 

Below, we provide a look at the role of AI in recruitment, detailing how this revolutionary technology helps streamline the job application process, pinpoints the best possible talent, and simplifies the coordination of interviews. Harri’s Carri Chat & Apply feature enhances this process, allowing for the personalization of questions and content in accordance with the professional role, brand, location, and more. 

Our technology functions as an invaluable real-time resource for candidates, automating more of the recruitment process than previously thought possible for mutual benefit. Without further ado, here’s a quick look at the expanding role of AI in recruitment.

The Role of AI in Recruitment

AI is making hiring easier, faster, and more efficient. Tech innovation has streamlined the application process, sorting through applications for keywords, filtering applicants, and even coordinating interviews without human interference. The right prompts and parameters empower AI to pinpoint specific candidates based on job history, education, skills, and other factors. 

It is even possible for AI to be programmed to interact with job-seekers to gather additional information, pose questions, answer questions, and schedule interviews. Such automated interview coordination reduces the human labor required by human resources specialists, business owners, and business managers.

AI automates tasks in the hiring process that previously chewed up a considerable amount of time. There is no sense in paying a salaried employee to screen resumes, source candidates, and schedule interviews when AI can do that work on behalf of the business, freeing up your managers’’ time to get back to other important tasks, such as developing their team. AI has advanced to the point that it uses machine learning along with advanced algorithms to efficiently analyze massive amounts of information for mutual benefit. 

AI quickly analyzes candidate resumes and cover letters to understand job-seeker qualifications. Such a feat is accomplished by rapidly processing large volumes of information, ultimately decreasing the amount of human capital invested in the candidate search and review processes. 

An added bonus is AI’s ability to analyze candidate qualifications while reducing the role of human bias, proving greater objectivity throughout the entirety of the recruiting process. 

The Impact of AI on Applicant Tracking

A customized applicant flow will differ for each business, but here is a basic outline of what one could look like in the hospitality industry.

Let’s consider the one-size-fits-all approach listed above, but revise it customized for your hospitality business. Candidate sourcing can stop being a spray-and-pray and, instead, be a more prioritized and automated list of job listing sites that have proven successful for your business. Use AI to help develop the listing first, so it is diverse, inclusive, and specific, yet precise enough to make it easily searchable for candidates, including keywords job seekers may look for.

When candidates respond, you could use AI to narrow down the process or an automated screening process online, including tests or a place to host online interviews. Everything goes into a database that each hiring manager can access instead of wasting time with emails and phone calls between managers and Human Resources. That online system can also include a communication module, allowing candidates to ask questions and set up interviews from open slots in a visible calendar. (One way to further simplify that part of the process is to host interviews one or two set days per week, which disrupts everyone’s schedules and productivity less.)

Communication throughout the entire workflow can really eat into everyone’s time, too, but this can also be customized. Create a database of templates for letters thanking those you don’t hire, offer letters, and other candidate requests. Having these presets means no one must create something on the fly or hope they’re using proper wording; they can be reused as often as necessary. Also, having your legal team or counsel review them first is always a good idea.

This entire process can be further customized per department, team, or location anywhere a business deems necessary. Some hotel locations, for example, have different hours or off-seasons than others, and some restaurants will require candidates to have particular training or experience, and piping those candidates through workflows customized solely for them means they get a better experience and hiring managers are able to focus on each individual role while hiring multiple candidates in varying departments at once. You can also have a unique onboarding system for every department.

The Human Element in AI-Driven Recruitment

The human element of modern recruiting that is becoming more AI-driven is found in the personal touch of a hiring manager or other company representative. The use of AI combined with the oversight and wisdom of an experienced hiring manager, business owner, or business manager really does amount to a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. 

The bottom line is AI is programmed, meaning it excels at uncovering candidates who present information with specific keywords and key phrases. AI also performs quantitative assessments. However, AI lacks an understanding of the human condition. Such an understanding is only possible with an actual human being. 

As an example, the visual analysis of candidates’ body language, tonality, volume, and other subtleties during interviews can be accurately studied and interpreted by a human hiring manager yet AI would fail at such analysis.

Conversational AI: Bridging the Gap Between Efficiency and Personal Touch

The challenge lies in bringing out the best in both technology and humanity. Bridge the gap between AI’s efficiency in reviewing candidates and the personal touch of an actual human being and you’ll find the two complement each other, paving a path toward the timely hire of difference-making employees. 

Conversational AI is essential to maintaining the personal touch in recruitment. As an example, Carrihas been carefully programmed to collect and analyze candidate information with the use of conversations that parallel those between hiring managers and job seekers. 

Review the results of Carri’s conversational AI dialogue with applicants and you’ll find the questions posed by the AI chat assistant are relevant, informative, and helpful in pinpointing the best candidate for your organization’s open roles.

Carri’s conversational AI chatbot makes each application count, helping your business acquire qualified candidates through unbiased interactions. This is your opportunity to hire more efficiently, liberating your managers to focus on problem-solving that technology cannot overcome. Carri humanizes the stages of the applicant journey, empowering job-seekers to text, message, and scan numerous channels for an improved application experience. The tech manages communications and the entirety of the application process through SMS text messages, online chats directly from your Careers page, and additional communication tools. 

Carri isn’t merely any old conversational AI chatbot. This conversational AI technology provides candidates with informative messages, eliminating the burdensome and dreaded friction involved with adding new talent. The best part is Carri is effective for businesses of all sizes, providing utility as enterprises scale. This is your opportunity to sequence messages to streamline the application process, pinpoint the optimal talent for interviews, and tailor the screening process for your organization’s unique needs. 

Carri even goes as far as communicating pertinent information about your business, your company’s benefits, and the culture with selected candidates in real-time. The icing on the cake is Carri’s ability to book interviews with job-seekers on your behalf. Once the interviews are over, our tech makes it easy to seamlessly onboard new additions all through a single consolidated app.

The end result of the use of a conversational AI chatbot at hospitality businesses looking to add new employees is the following:

  • Faster time to hire
  • Higher application completion rates
  • An enticing employer-branded experience
  • The economically efficient onboarding of high-quality candidates who aren’t inclined to ghost your organization

The Future of Hospitality Hiring Begins with Harri

Harri helps businesses like yours find the best possible talent for open roles. Our AI-driven platform, combined with the personal touch of a human resources manager or other trustworthy employees, constitutes a balanced and prudent approach to hiring. 

Our HCM platform is designed for the hospitality industry’s frontlines. Our technology helps restaurants, hotels, and other businesses throughout the United States and the United Kingdom overcome barriers to talent acquisition. This feat is accomplished through precise AI-driven applicant tracking software, onboarding, scheduling, heightened engagement, and more. 

We serve more than 20,000 hotels and restaurants spanning four million hospitality industry employees across the globe. Businesses ranging from Buffalo Wild Wings to Blaze Pizza, the Radisson Hotel Group, Jersey Mike’s, and Cava place their trust in our tech tools. Our technology is also effective for businesses in the retail and healthcare spaces.

If you own or manage a restaurant, hotel, or other business, reach out to us today to request a demo. 

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