How Recruiters Can Use AI to Rapidly Source, Screen & Hire the Right Candidates

A recruiter’s job isn’t easy.

They must:

• Work with hiring managers to write realistic, engaging job descriptions
  
• Compete for attention in a tight labor market using limited resources
  
• Quickly source and review hundreds of candidate resumes
  
• Decide if a candidate should move on to the next phase
  
• Schedule interviews that fit into both candidates’ and hiring managers’ busy schedules

And that’s just the beginning of the entire hiring process. The most repetitive tasks? Sourcing and screening candidates for open roles. Sourcing and screening, especially at scale, present three primary challenges:

1. It’s time consuming

Candidate sourcing and screening are two of the most time-consuming activities for recruiters, according to research from Phenom’s internal customer database. With these repetitive tasks, there’s a lot of opportunity for optimization that can save recruiters time and identify best-fit candidates faster.

2. There’s room for error

When sourcing and screening this many candidates, a recruiter can’t move slowly. They’re required to make rapid decisions day in and day out. Rapid decision-making, while necessary here, allows for mistakes — meaning your dream candidate might accidentally get passed over by a stressed and rushed recruiter.

3. You might not find the right candidate

After all of this work, the recruiter still might not find a high-quality candidate for every open role. This can happen because of many reasons:

• The role isn’t defined enough
  
• The job description doesn’t clearly explain the role
  
• The sourcing process didn’t attract the right candidates
  
• The hiring manager changed their requirements midway through the process

Unfortunately, most existing tools aren’t built to handle this complex and ever-changing landscape.

But there is one tool designed to transform the entire sourcing and screening process: Phenom Artificial intelligence (AI). Phenom AI is engineered to automate much of the tedious work involved in finding applicants and screening resumes. Plus, it can actually help recruiters find qualified candidates in their talent pipeline.

At Phenom AI Day, attendees learned how Phenom’s artificial intelligence helps recruiters rapidly source, screen, and hire best-fit candidates. Couldn’t attend? Get highlights from our "Boosting Recruiter Productivity with AI" segment below, or stream the entire session here.

How Phenom AI Automates Time-consuming Sourcing and Screening

The goal of Phenom AI within the Recruiter Experience is to reduce time spent and ease the challenges of sourcing and screening by learning a company’s needs and automating major components of the hiring process. There are three primary tasks that Phenom AI performs:

1. Job parsing
2. Resume parsing
3. Fit scoring

Let’s take a look these in greater detail.

How Phenom AI Parses Jobs

First, what is parsing? It’s simply analyzing information and breaking it down into useful, relevant parts.

This is exactly what Phenom AI does to parse jobs. When a recruiter lists a new job, Phenom AI parses (or analyzes) sentences from the job listing.

It then extracts key skills from the job listing and ranks them by importance. The ranking of importance helps identify what skills are must-haves versus what skills are nice-to-have. This information is used later on when screening candidates and providing a Fit Score (more on this in a moment).

But how does Phenom AI avoid pulling in unnecessary or inaccurate information from the job listing?

There are three safeguards built into Phenom’s platform to prevent this:

1. Phenom AI ignores the background information about your company when job parsing. This ensures the AI doesn’t pull irrelevant terms from the listing.
   
2. Phenom AI is constantly learning. When a recruiter adds skills that are new to the AI, the AI learns what they are and increases parsing accuracy each day.
   
3. Recruiters can give feedback and update the skills and experience. For each available position, they can adjust the skills that Phenom AI parsed to ensure the best alignment with the job listing.

How Phenom AI Parses Resumes

Resume parsing is just like job parsing — but instead of parsing the job listing, the resume parser analyzes candidate resumes.

To ensure the best possible accuracy, Phenom chose to develop their own custom resume parser using deep learning modules. It has an impressive 99% success rate.

It analyzes a resume and detects:

• Language
• Syntax
• Structure, including font size, color, and position
• Candidate contact information

On top of that, it extracts key skills, job experience, candidate location, and titles. It then cross references all of this information against the info parsed from the job listing — which is later on used to assign a Fit Score to candidates.

While parsing this info, the AI also ensures that it ranks information by relevance and importance. For example, if a candidate has 10 years of work experience but recently changed careers, Phenom AI will place more emphasis on the recent job skills when applying a Fit Score to the candidate.

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Related: 3 Reasons to Use AI Resume Parsing in Candidate Screening (And How It Works)

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Phenom Fit Scores Help Illuminate Best-fit Applicants

As mentioned earlier, job parsing and resume parsing serve an important role. They pull key skills from the job listing and from candidates’ resumes. Then, Phenom AI checks to see how well the key skills from individual candidates’ resumes match the job listing.

From there, it applies a Fit Score to each applicant for every available role. Fit Scores save recruiters time by scoring every applicant and lead on the CRM. A higher Fit Scores represent a better qualified candidate for that position.

Phenom AI uses four major criteria to give candidates a Fit Score:

• Skills
• Title
• Experience
• Location

Phenom AI intelligently determines which of these matter most and applies a Fit Score accordingly. This is called a weighted Fit Score.

For example, if your team is hiring a frontline worker, location will be one of the most important factors that’s considered — meaning Phenom AI will apply higher Fit Scores to candidates who live near the job listing’s location.

On the other hand, if you’re hiring a knowledge worker, title and skills are likely more important than location. In this scenario, Phenom AI will give higher Fit Scores to resumes that closely match the skills and title parsed from the job listing.

Recruiters Remain a Key Part of The Fit Scoring Process

While Phenom AI automates most of this process, recruiters are still involved — also known as the human in the loop.

To increase accuracy, the recruiter can provide feedback throughout the process. A recruiter can update a job listing’s skills, title, experience, or location to more accurately hone the Fit Score. Phenom AI will then give better recommendations.

On top of that, the recruiter can also shortlist a candidate by adding their email address to identify them as an ideal candidate for a specific job listing.

Phenom AI uses this recruiter intervention to increase the AI’s accuracy. It automatically learns attributes from the candidates shortlisted by recruiters and improves its recommendations.

A Secondary Fit Score Model: The Supervised Fit Score

So far, we’ve talked about Phenom’s weighted Fit Score, which is designed to find best-fit candidates for open job positions using AI.

But Phenom AI also uses another Fit Score model — the Supervised Fit Score. Here’s how it works:

• If a candidate reaches the interviewing or post interview phase of the hiring process, Phenom AI marks them as a positive candidate.
  
• If a candidate is rejected without an interview, Phenom AI marks this applicant as a negative candidate.

Phenom uses this information to learn and apply more accurate Fit Scores to future candidates. Using a combination of weighted Fit Score and Supervised Fit Score, Phenom AI applies the most accurate Fit Score to candidates for every open position.

Since every company hires differently, Phenom AI is specifically designed to become smarter and apply more accurate Fit Scores the more your company uses it — learning your organization’s personal preferences and processes over time.

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Related: Getting The Most From AI Fit Scores, Candidate Discovery & More

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Save Time and Find Top Talent Faster with Phenom

Filling open roles with best-fit talent faster is the way to win today's battle for talent. Phenom AI saves your recruiting team time by automating some of the most laborious parts of the hiring process — sourcing and screening candidates — and quickly illuminates the most qualified talent.

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• 3 Reasons to Use AI Resume Parsing in Candidate Screening (And How It Works)
• Why Your AI Tech Is Biased — And What You Can Do About It