Technology in AI Recruitment: Transforming How Companies Hire RPO

Over the years, technology has become a powerful ally of businesses, automating administrative tasks, streamlining workflow, generating insights, and improving collaboration. In human resources and recruitment, technology — especially artificial intelligence (AI) — is the present and future. 

Thankfully, more companies are embracing AI. In fact, statistics found that AI is used every day by more than half of global firms (78%). Technology in AI recruitment is revolutionizing hiring, making the talent pipeline faster and more efficient while improving the quality of hires and the candidate experience.

This article explores in-depth technology in AI recruitment, including examples of AI-powered technologies as well as challenges and ethical considerations. 

The Evolution of Recruitment

Recruitment is not a new concept. From ancient China’s civil service examination and the guild system of the Middle Ages to the rise of temporary staffing agencies in World War II and online job boards in the 1990s, recruitment has existed since the dawn of mankind. 

Applicants in the 19th century, for example, could get jobs via a recruitment agency. During World War II, jobs were left open as employees fought in the war. Temporary staffing agencies emerged, supplying the needed labor for vacant positions. These agencies also provided jobs for soldiers post-World War II.

Then, enter the 1960s and 1970s. During this period, recruitment agencies had turned their focus to providing semi-permanent positions for job seekers. Apart from completing short-term tasks, employees in these positions also took over the jobs of absent or sick permanent employees. 

With the birth of the World Wide Web, recruitment and hiring have transformed into a technology-driven experience for both job seekers and employers. Online job boards have become a treasure trove of job listings, allowing candidates to apply for a role they’re qualified for with just a few clicks. 

Today, candidates can find (and apply for) jobs anywhere — from a company’s official website to social media platforms like LinkedIn. With the help of applicant tracking systems (ATS) and AI, recruitment has become more streamlined than ever before.

The Current State of Recruitment

Recruiting is more than finding people for a role. Nowadays, it has become a battleground for companies to attract the right candidates while navigating the complexities of a technology-driven hiring landscape. Below are the current trends in recruitment:

1. Remote Work Arrangements

Despite the normalcy of hybrid and in-office arrangements, there’s still a preference for remote work — and the numbers don’t lie. 

According to Zoom, some employees (36%) prefer that their next company offer a fully remote set-up. Buffer even found that it’s easier to cope with stress (65%) and do focused work (70%) when work is done remotely. On the employers’ side, though, over half of them (78%) said they are looking to fill remote job roles by hiring overseas workers. 

As such, there’s no denying how remote work has influenced recruitment. Both employers and job seekers have plenty of options. But for employers, though, they’re facing stiff competition from local and overseas remote workers. 

It’s already a given that remote workers want the bare minimum for a job: fair compensation, attractive benefits, and work-life benefits. While they do get the privilege of working from home or anywhere, remote workers also have every right to feel connected and engaged with their on-site colleagues. 

Hence, it’s important to create a workplace culture where every employee — remote or otherwise — is valued. After all, a great workplace culture is attractive to job seekers. Not to mention that how a company retains its remote workers can enhance its employer branding.

2. Employer Branding

Maintaining good employer branding is a standard. Employer branding is a strategy of making your organization stand out from the rest. It answers the question: What’s my company’s edge against other companies? 

Employer branding encompasses the following:

• Core values

• Mission and vision statements

• Work environment

• Employee and candidate experience

• Employer Value Proposition or EVP (Ex: Good career growth opportunities)

Essentially, it’s about promoting your company to attract would-be employees. Part of employer branding is also managing and influencing perceptions of your company among employees and job seekers. 

For example, you can request employees to write five-star reviews or share positive experiences working with your company. With these reviews and experiences, candidates will perceive your organization as a good place to work, and thus, will pique their interest.

In addition to attracting top-performing applicants, effective employer branding can also improve employee retention, enhance customer loyalty, and help maintain a good track record in your industry. 

3. Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics is the practice of analyzing historical data and using this information to anticipate future scenarios. If you’re hiring a marketing director, you can use predictive analytics to gather data from job search platforms and resumes to identify candidates that fit your job requirements and qualifications. From there, you can predict which individuals are more likely to perform well and contribute to your company.

Predictive analytics is also great for maintaining employee retention by gathering pertinent workforce data, including absenteeism, employee performance, employee satisfaction, and the like. Using the data gathered, you can uncover patterns and factors — such as poor management and burnout — that contribute to lower retention.

This way, you can take measures to enhance employee satisfaction and performance as well as build a positive workplace culture. 

4. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)

Employers and employees are no strangers to discrimination and violence. According to the US Workforce Diversity 2025 in Secondtalent’s article, 50.8% of women are in the workforce, followed by 38.7% of employees in minority races or ethnicities, 12.7% of persons with disabilities, and 7.1% of LGBTQ+ employees. 

In executive leadership positions, however, only 6.4% and 4.7% of women and people of color are CEOs in Fortune 500 companies, respectively. From a lack of female representation in leadership to the underrepresentation of the LGBTQ+ community, DEI has become of significant importance in modern recruitment.

DEI in recruitment involves hiring talent from diverse groups and avoiding racial, gender, or religious bias — not hiring underqualified candidates to meet diversity quotas. Companies dedicated to DEI write gender-sensitive job descriptions, source candidates in women- or LGBTQ+-friendly platforms, and conduct diversity training. 

They exert effort in hiring ideal candidates from minority groups, ensuring that these professionals not only excel in their respective roles, but also introduce new perspectives and reduce potential blind spots at work.

5. Artificial Intelligence (AI)

AI is no longer a product of science fiction. As this technology seeps into the very fibers of our daily lives, AI has now become a vital asset in every industry and business function. In recruitment and human resources, AI shows promise. 

For example, companies can leverage AI recruiting to minimize hiring biases, find and match with qualified candidates, scan resumes at scale, assist in hiring decisions, and many more.

Artificial intelligence will continue to evolve, and is here to stay in the future. The least organizations can do is to stay ahead of developments in AI technology and future-proof their workforce with AI skills.  

Why Businesses Are Opting for Technology In AI Recruitment

Technology in AI recruitment is no longer an extra add-on, but a must-have in today’s hiring landscape. 

Applicants deserve smooth recruitment processes that leave them with a positive first impression of your company. Here’s why businesses are leveraging AI-powered technologies in recruitment: 

1. Helps In Making Objective Hiring Decisions

Whether explicit or implicit bias, recruitment and hiring often involve biases. Recruitment, after all, is handled by humans. As humans, we all have our biases. 

A recruiter may form a negative perception of a candidate because of their appearance or accent, or make negative assumptions or stereotypes about an applicant’s race. In some cases, a recruiter may deem a candidate “unqualified” for a role because of a belief that men or women are better in a certain field.

Refusing to hire someone because of their appearance, gender, or race means your company is losing out on potential talent. Hence, you might end up settling for an employee who’s less qualified and competent for the role. 

However, AI-powered recruitment can minimize hiring biases — but only when the AI is trained on diverse data and regularly audited for biases. This enables recruiters to make more informed hiring decisions based on a candidate’s skill sets and qualifications. 

2. Supports Skill-Based Hiring

Traditionally, a candidate’s education and work experience influence a recruiter’s hiring decision. If a candidate has a bachelor’s degree or certification and has met the required number of work experience, the recruiter would consider them for the role. 

With skills-based hiring, recruiters will focus more on the candidate’s skills. For example, a self-taught writer, designer, social media manager, or programmer can be considered for a role even if they don’t have formal training or education. So long as they have the skills, they’re less likely to be passed over.

Traditional resume screening tend to overlook highly skilled applicants in favor of those with good educational and professional backgrounds. Consequently, this can lead to hiring underperforming and ill-fitted employees. Not only do bad hires contribute to poor productivity, but they also cost the company an average of $17,000 USD. 

Thanks to AI-driven recruitment, employers can efficiently find candidates of high caliber. This reduces their reliance on manual resume screening. While manual screening helps in catching nuances and assessing attention to detail skills (think, grammatical errors in resumes), it is a tedious and lengthy process, as applications are evaluated one at a time. Manual screening is also more prone to human biases.

Technology in AI recruitment makes it easier for employers to review resumes and match candidates based on skill relevance. In fact, in terms of skills matching and resume parsing capabilities, AI-powered tools have achieved an accuracy rate of 89% and 94%, respectively.  

Although AI can surface potentially skilled applicants, it can also holistically assess a candidate’s application. This helps recruiters shortlist candidates without having to go through piles of resumes.

3. Assists In Verifying A Candidate’s Skills

Anyone can say they’re great at a particular skill — until their lack thereof shows in low-quality outputs and poor performance. As mentioned, traditional screening methods only factor in an applicant’s credentials, including their years of experience. 

However, just because a candidate has racked up years of work experience doesn’t mean they’re the most competent at work. Or just because they self-rate their proficiency in a tool as “10/10” doesn’t mean they’re good at it. 

Technology in AI recruitment innovates skills verification through simulations and assessments, enabling recruiters to gain a full picture of an applicant’s competence in a particular skill. It also sheds light on a candidate’s soft skills, including critical thinking and problem-solving.  

Therefore, AI enhances hiring accuracy, leaving no room for guessing games while avoiding employees who overinflate their skills but bring nothing to the table. 

4. Streamlines the Interview Experience

Whether it’s scheduling interviews or sending reminders, the interview experience relies on manual processes. However, in this day and age, efficiency is key. Let’s take interview scheduling as an example. Normally, this is done by coordinating schedules between the applicant and the recruiter or hiring manager. 

Unfortunately, manual coordination is inefficient. If your company needs to interview a large volume of candidates, finding the perfect interview schedule becomes a game of avoiding overlaps with other applicants and endless back-and-forth between the candidate and the recruiter. 

Technology in AI recruitment automates the interview experience. Can’t find the perfect schedule? AI can do that for you in a jiffy by analyzing everyone’s calendar, potentially avoiding conflicts in schedule while giving you more free time for high-value recruitment tasks. In addition, AI can generate tailored interview questions and provide transcripts of interviews for further review. These benefits reduce manual load and enhance hiring decisions.

5. Optimizes Employee Onboarding

If there’s anything we associate with onboarding, it’s paperwork. While it’s a rite of passage for qualified candidates, manual processes can slow down recruiters. And if things are slow on the recruitment side, employees can have a negative perception of your company’s onboarding process — and you wouldn’t want to be the receiving end of a negative review.

This is where technology in AI recruitment comes in. AI can simplify document collection. By having AI take over this task, it reduces the likelihood of errors or oversights. AI can also thoroughly assess a candidate’s professional background and skills, allowing it to tailor their onboarding experience by providing them with the appropriate learning materials and resources. 

To avoid awkward first meetings, AI can match a new hire with a mentor or colleague that fits their personality, interests, or career needs. In essence, an AI-powered onboarding experience provides the benefit of streamlining tedious tasks and making fresh faces feel welcomed at work.

Examples of Tools and Technology In AI Recruitment

AI recruitment is about using AI-powered tools and technologies to your advantage without losing the inherent human touch of hiring. Below are a few examples:

1. Generative AI

Generative AI, or Gen AI, is a type of artificial intelligence that can generate audio, visual, or written content from a prompt within seconds. Hence, users can produce any content at scale and streamline the content creation process. Generative AI can be used not just in the arts, but also in recruitment.

With Gen AI, you can create unique job interview questions, craft engaging job descriptions, or write tailored professional emails. However, Gen AI is only as good as the user’s prompt and the data it is trained on. 

To maximize the technology and get good results, recruiters must be specific and provide context and examples as they write their prompt. Another technique is to train the AI in your brand and employer voice, so it generates on-brand job descriptions or any recruitment content. This saves your recruitment team hours of their time.

2. Recruiting Chatbots

Chatbots are the kings of customer support. While they usually operate according to predefined rules and scripts, some chatbots can handle complex queries and learn from them. The appeal of chatbots is their ability to provide instant answers to questions. In recruitment — where time is of the essence — recruiting chatbots are a lifesaver.

If an applicant has a question about the role or the application process, they can simply ask the company’s chatbot, and they’ll receive an answer in no time. This way, candidates don’t have to think that the recruiter has ignored or has not received their application. Another beauty of recruiting chatbots is their round-the-clock support. This allows applicants to access support on and outside business days. 

3. AI Sourcing Tools

Referrals, job or career fairs, networking events, and print job ads — these are traditional candidate sourcing methods that, while effective, can lengthen the sourcing process. AI sourcing, however, puts a modern spin on candidate sourcing. 

AI sourcing tools can scour LinkedIn, online job boards, and any platform and database possible to recommend the best matches for a role based on the criteria (pre-determined or customized) you set. 

With a curated shortlist of candidates, recruiters can identify potentially highly skilled, best-fit applicants and move forward with the initial screening. Thanks to AI-powered sourcing and talent acquisition, the process shifts from quantity to the quality of hires — enabling recruiters to fill roles with top applicants and not settle for mediocre hires.

4. AI Video Interviews

Job interviews are done in-person or virtually. In interviews, recruiters and hiring managers ask questions that delve deeper into a candidate’s work experience, knowledge, skills, and personality. Job interviews are inherently human activities, as the nuances of human behavior and body language can only be discerned by skilled recruiters and hiring managers. 

While personal job interviews are here to stay, AI video interviews — or asynchronous interviews — are slowly making their way into recruitment. Here’s how an AI-driven video interview typically works:

1. The AI presents a question to the candidate. This question can only be answered within the time limit.

2. Facing the camera, the applicant records their answer to the question to the best of their ability before the time ends. 

3. Finally, the recruiter views and listens to the recordings, with the AI transcribing and analyzing the answers and assessing the candidate’s body language and language patterns. This is all thanks to Natural Language Processing (NLP) and sentiment analysis.

What’s great about an AI-powered interview is that its goal is not to replace human judgment, but to augment it by providing data on the candidate. This helps recruiters make hiring decisions that are grounded in objectivity rather than personal biases. 

Challenges and Ethical Considerations in Using Technology In AI Recruitment

Technology is great, but it comes packaged with some challenges and ethical considerations. Here are some things to consider:

1. Risk of Exacerbating Discrimination

AI was invented by humans for humans. But unfortunately, it is a double-edged sword; while AI can reduce hiring biases, it can also exacerbate them. Training your AI on samples consisting mostly of white men may make the AI favor white male applicants over white women and black men. 

Likewise, if your AI is trained to associate gender with specific occupations, it can disregard candidates who are otherwise qualified for the role. For example, an AI can disqualify women from tech roles because it was taught to associate these roles with men. 

Rather than furthering DEI, you’ll risk reinforcing gender and racial biases in the workplace. That’s why AI auditing is important. By regularly auditing AI algorithms and training them on diverse datasets, you can ensure that your hiring practices are inclusive to all applicants and compliant with employment laws.  

2. Data Privacy and Security Concerns

AI is a voracious consumer of data. Naturally, recruitment is a treasure trove of sensitive information. From email addresses to resumes, AI tools collect and store this data. 

If companies are not careful, one data breach could put employee and candidate data at risk of theft and fraud. Collecting data or using data for training AI without the person’s knowledge or consent signals a breach of trust, leading to complaints, privacy and legal issues, and loss of reputation. 

3. Overreliance on AI Tools

AI is not meant to replace humans; it’s designed to augment human labor. However, one mistake people make when using AI is treating its suggestions and decisions as “correct,” even if its outputs are fundamentally incorrect. Ideally, AI should serve as a guide — not as an end-all, be-all decision-maker.

This spells bad news in recruitment. As mentioned, AI is trained using data. If biased data is used to train AI, it can influence AI to prefer certain demographics over others. This amplifies gender, racial, or age discrimination. 

Of course, we can’t deny that AI is smart. But companies must remember that it’s not gifted with emotional intelligence or human judgment. Recruiters who chronically depend on AI can risk deteriorating their discernment and critical thinking skills — which is concerning as recruitment involves strategic decision-making.

Best Practices In Using Technology In AI Recruitment

Technology and AI can’t account for the complexities of human behavior and interpersonal dynamics. On the bright side, being aware of the ethical issues is just the first step in using technology in AI recruitment strategically. For your reference, here are a couple of best practices:

1. Enhance AI Literacy

AI literacy is no longer a trending buzzword, but a powerful skill every person must have in their arsenal. Companies seek AI-literate candidates, but are their employees AI-literate themselves? It’s not enough that your recruiters and HR professionals are proficient in the latest AI tools. They have to understand how AI works and maximize its capabilities while also acknowledging its limitations.

To boost AI literacy, consider providing training programs, introductory courses, or hands-on workshops on AI. Recruiters can also work under a mentor who’ll guide them on furthering their skills and knowledge of AI. 

Use this opportunity to dispel myths on AI and help recruiters adjust their workflow. Most importantly, remind them that AI-generated content and data are still subject to human scrutiny and review.

2. Balance AI and Human Labor

It’s recommended to leave AI for time-consuming and routine tasks, such as candidate sourcing, resume screening, interview scheduling, data gathering, and transcription. Human recruiters, on the other hand, should still be responsible for nuanced, high-value recruitment tasks.

3. Audit AI Algorithms

Biases in AI algorithms happen due to historical, measurement, and sampling biases. If recruiters are not careful, AI biases can show in gender or racial discrimination. Auditing AI can enhance fairness and yield objective results, which helps avoid hiring discrimination and lawsuits.

4. Work With An AI RPO Company

For starters, a recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) company is a third-party vendor that handles your company’s recruitment processes. But if you’re looking to leverage AI capabilities while remaining ethical, it’s best to partner with an AI RPO provider. 

AI-driven RPO companies specialize in AI recruitment. They know the AI recruitment tools of the trade and empower your company with smarter hiring solutions, helping you reduce costs and close hard-to-fill jobs. 

Ethically Leverage Technology In AI Recruitment With RPO for AI

Technology drives businesses forward; it’s the engine of success and growth. But as AI takes over industries by storm, it becomes even more crucial to take AI ethics seriously. 

At RPO for AI, our RPO services include the integration of our in-house AI technologies into your recruitment pipeline, so you can make smarter decisions and meet your recruitment goals. Our ethical AI technologies are inclusive as they are effective in sourcing AI global talent. 

Reap the benefits of technology in AI recruitment today. Contact RPO for AI to start finding high-quality AI talent for your business.