How to use AI for sourcing candidates in 2024

Artificial intelligence is continuing to grow and evolve at a rapid pace, indicating that it's here to stay. Finding ways to embrace this technology in your company's hiring practices can help your recruiting team spend less time tediously scanning different sources for potential candidates and more time landing those perfect candidates for open roles.

One way to integrate AI into your recruiting and hiring processes is by applying it to the way your company sources candidates. No more wading through the seemingly endless talent pool to try and find the diamonds in the rough — AI can easily navigate these waters and give you a short list of top talent so your company can reel in those potential candidates and convert them into employees. In fact, using AI for sourcing candidates made our Top 9 Applications AI can be used in recruiting, in our AI in Hiring 2024 Trends, Insights, & Predictions white paper.

What does it mean to source candidates with AI?

Each AI platform has a slightly different angle to the sourcing process, but they all work toward the same goal: to help you find the perfect people to fill your company's vacancies. Sourcing candidates with AI involves using technology to analyze hundreds of websites, job boards, and other sources to procure names of individuals that align with a specific profile.

Traditionally, this process was a tedious and time-consuming task performed by hiring teams. AI candidate sourcing automates all the steps the hiring team used to do. This results in much more timely candidate list generation and ultimately expedites the hiring process.

How to use AI to source candidates

A benefit of AI candidate sourcing is that you can choose to integrate AI as much or as little as you like into your hiring strategy. The company and hiring team will still have the final say on who to bring into the circle, meaning that while AI technology is powerful, it's not going to take control over the process. It's simply an extremely valuable tool to help real people make real-world decisions.

Here are some steps you can follow to help you bring this technology into your process of sourcing candidates:

Analyze your current candidate sourcing process

Before you start handing off parts of your current hiring process to AI, it's helpful to first analyze the process as it currently sits. This can help you streamline, improve, or remove elements that no longer serve the hiring strategy.

Determine how much you want to automate

After trimming your hiring process, you can then decide what tasks you can and want to automate. Some tasks you might consider automating when it comes to candidate sourcing include:

Searching through various job hosting platforms for candidates: Rather than manually going through and finding potential candidates, AI can crawl through different job hosting platforms, pulling information on potential candidates.
Creating a list of potential candidates with their contact information: In your instructions, you might be able to specify how many candidates you want to review; this way you don't have hundreds of candidates to still review. For example, you might be able to review the top 10 or 20 candidates, giving you a quick list to review.
Ranking candidates based on pre-determined factors: In the detailed form you submit when first starting to use AI candidate sourcing, you outline different ideal qualifications for candidates. This data might even allow AI to rank candidates, giving you a quick rundown of how each individual fits into the potential role.

Research different AI technology

As AI technology becomes a larger part of the HR technology market, businesses are starting to have a vast selection of AI tools to choose from. Consider choosing tech from a company that lets you pick and choose the features you want without paying for ones that you don't. For example, CareerBuilder has search and match AI technology that delivers more relevant candidates for your hiring team to review.

Integrate AI into the candidate sourcing process

Once you've found the right tools and processes to automate, it's time to start integrating AI into your process. This includes training your teams, determining which key performance indicator metrics to analyze, and running tests.

Reanalyze and adjust as needed

As with any process, setting aside time to analyze and adjust your hiring strategy is the key to success. This can help you determine how AI is helping the candidate sourcing process along and gives you the chance to make any adjustments to the process.

"AI candidate sourcing automates all the steps the hiring team used to do. This results in much more timely candidate list generation and ultimately expedites the hiring process."

Benefits of using AI to source candidates

Using AI doesn't just reap the benefit of hopping on the technology train — there are several key reasons to integrate this evolving technology into your hiring practices. Here are some of the benefits you and your hiring team get to enjoy once you start using AI sourcing:

Expedited hiring process: What used to take hours and sometimes days for your team to complete now takes mere minutes. AI automates this process using detailed guidelines to generate quality lists of potential candidates, drastically speeding up the hiring process.
Improved employee morale: Without the tedious requirement to manually search for potential candidates, members of a hiring team can focus their efforts on other tasks. Your company can now use the hiring team to its full potential. Also, employees may feel increased satisfaction in their work, which can have a positive impact on their work performance.
Reduced expenses: When a position in your company is vacant, other people have to pick up the slack, which can increase employee payroll expenses and other administrative overhead costs. Since AI candidate sourcing expedites the time-to-hire average of a company, it also reduces all other expenses associated with drawn-out hiring processes.
Enhanced candidate experience: Candidates typically like efficiency and communication when interacting with potential employers. Using AI to source candidates helps keep your hiring and recruiting processes efficient, allowing hiring teams to focus on the communication aspect of recruiting. This has an overall positive effect on the candidate's experience.

The benefits of technology are constantly increasing as it continues to evolve. As AI continues to learn and grow, companies are likely to source and vet candidates even faster, enabling you to land top talent fast. Using AI alleviates you from the worry that your competition swiped top-tier candidates from under your nose.

Tips to optimize your AI talent sourcing

As with any hiring strategy and candidate sourcing practices, there are many tips to consider to get the most out of your new process. Here are some things to keep in mind as you're incorporating AI into your company:

Remember that you control integration levels

As your hiring team and company control the level of AI integration, you have all the control when it comes to automating talent-sourcing processes. If your team likes the human element of reaching out, you can limit AI to just generating candidate lists. If your team wants to fully automate talent sourcing to include the first contact between the company and the candidate, you can do that, too.

Retain the human element

As you pick and choose what to automate and hand over to AI, make sure to keep the human element in the recruiting and hiring process. Not only can this enhance the candidate's experience with your company, but it also gives your hiring team the chance to catch anything that AI might have missed. Roles are dynamic, meaning that the hiring process needs to be dynamic as well, and that means retaining the human element.

AI technology is here to stay. Talent sourcing is a great example of an area where AI can streamline the hiring process, as this technology can wade through the various job hosting platforms and find candidates that check all the right boxes. Integrating this into your team's hiring strategy can reduce hiring times. It can also boost employee morale because hiring teams can spend less time on tedious tasks and more time on tasks that bring them joy and fulfillment.

Looking for more ways to utilize AI in your hiring? Check out our AI in Hiring white paper.