How to use AI to hire the best tech talent

Discover the benefits of using AI in hiring and the best tools to cut time and access the best tech talent.

Artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t just good news for candidates. When you use it in the right way, it can drastically enhance talent acquisition for employers too.

But with so many AI hiring tools and best practices on the market, it’s easy to fall down a rabbit hole and waste valuable time determining which ones are the best options for you.

With this in mind, we’ve created a quick guide to help you cut through the noise and make more informed decisions. Let’s explore.

Why using AI for hiring is catching on

The reasons for using AI for hiring come down to a couple of simple reasons – time and money. According to Indeed, the average time-to-hire in the UK is 36 days.

While this time only just eclipses the typical 1-month notice period, it can still have a detrimental effect on productivity, client relationships and work culture.

AI provides new possibilities, especially when it comes to talent acquisition in the highly competitive tech market. It can be used to:

• Reduce bias in hiring.
• Automate the onboarding process.
• Improve employee engagement.
• Analyse large amounts of data to find tech candidates suited to your role.

However, to achieve some of these outcomes and ultimately save yourself a lot of time and money, you need the right tools for the job.

Some of the best AI hiring tools to try in 2024

Turing

If you’re on the hunt for a software developer, Turing is one of the best AI hiring tools on the market. This intuitive platform utilises machine learning and natural language to crawl job boards and candidate CVs to find the best talent for your specific requirements.

The pros of Turing:

• You can tap into a global talent pool of pre-vetted developers.
• You only pay for results.

The cons of Turing:

• It’s limited to hiring software developers.
• It’s expensive.
• You don’t have a specialist recruiter to vouch for the candidate from a human perspective, so the quality of talent can vary.

ChatGPT

This free-to-use AI tool has taken the world by storm in 2023. Simply add a prompt and you could have it writing job adverts for you in a matter of seconds. ChatGPT is also handy for developing onboarding materials, offer letters and filtering through hundreds of CVs.

The pros of ChatGPT

• It takes a matter of seconds to write a job advert/description or sift through CVs.
• It’s free to use.
• It can filter through thousands.

The cons of ChatGPT

• It lacks the human touch. And trying to get it to write in the same tone as your business can be a painstaking process.
• It’s regenerative, essentially taking information from the internet to generate content. Nobody likes a copycat, so you’ll still have to proof and edit the text to avoid any issues of plagiarism.
• It uses American English and lacks emotion. Again, you’ll need to edit.

Textio

Unconscious bias is a real issue in the hiring process. Whether we’re talking about affinity, confirmation, attribution or the Halo or Horns effect, it’s vital to ensure you’re not hiring someone for the wrong reasons.

Cue, Textio. This AI hiring tool highlights any prejudiced language in your content. Using a scoring system, you’ll receive various suggestions on how to make your content more inclusive and engaging. Think of it as your own personal teacher or tutor but without all the boring textbooks.

The pros of Textio

• You can connect with a broader range of tech candidates by optimising your content.
• You can show the world that your company cares about making everything inclusive.

The cons of Textio

• Like all good things, there’s a cost.
• You still have to write your own content.

Fetcher

Fancy receiving a curated batch of talented candidates in your inbox? If the answer is yes, then Fetcher could be right up your street.

Thanks to its AI-powered sourcing algorithm, you can say goodbye to manual sourcing and hello to qualified recruiting pipelines. It’s a brilliant way to save time and cut straight to the talent.

The pros of Fetcher

• Receive curated lists of top candidates via email based on your preferences for a specific role.
• You can provide feedback on individual candidate profiles to enable it to refine the next list you receive.

The cons of Fetcher

• It takes some time and a bit of elbow grease to provide feedback on each batch of candidates to optimise the algorithm.
• If you’re part of a larger organisation with a team of people that source talent, Fetcher might be redundant.

Pymetrics

Pymetrics is redefining hiring and talent management by using data-driven behavioural insights and AI to create a fairer and more efficient hiring process across the talent lifecycle.

After getting existing employees to complete a series of games, the platform will build a persona of individuals who excel in certain roles. You can also get candidates to take similar tests to assess their compatibility with your desired profile.

The pros of Pymetrics

• Evaluate the entire talent lifecycle to measure everyone’s true potential.
• Define what you regard as “top talent” to make your next recruitment push easier.

The cons of Pymetrics

• Some argue that games don’t truly assess all aspects of a candidate.
• You may already know what top talent looks like or have the right people in the right roles.

Don’t underestimate the importance of the human touch

AI hiring tools are a great starting point to streamline the hiring process and access the best tech talent. But it’s worth noting that there are some limitations.

AI technology isn’t advanced enough yet to replace human decision-making and can’t help you pick up on behaviours and body language. So, if you’re putting all your eggs into the AI basket, you may want to slow your roll.

For more top hiring tips from real humans, check out the rest of our blog.