The Rising Popularity of AI and getting your resume ready for it

If there is one thing that the past year has taught us about the recruitment industry, it is that the industry is changing fast. And as we all know, in order to be or stay successful, one absolutely must get with the times, and keep up with the pace of the technological advances that are taking the world by storm.

AI is one such advance that is all set to revolutionise the recruitment industry as we know it. Of course, looking at employment trends in the recent past, that is no surprise. The project-basis industry is growing steadily and not so slowly. What this means in immediate terms for the recruitment industry is this: recruiters will be expected to hire a lot more people in the coming year, and from here onwards, and what’s more, they will be asked by their respective corporations to do so in the same if not lesser budget.

What this means for recruiters in immediate terms

 It means that recruiters need to get creative and fast, in order to be successful in the task of talent acquisition.[x_pullquote type=”right”]According to Allison Schnidman, senior market research manager at LinkedIn, as the hiring volume increases, recruiters will need to get creative and automate their workforce. “Automation will increase the speed of screening candidates, minimize human bias, and help assess soft skills more precisely”, Schnidman proposes, and there is nothing but truth in those words.[/x_pullquote]There are many factors that make it the logical way ahead for recruiters all over the world. Perhaps that’s what could explain the steadily increasing popularity the phenomenon is receiving throughout the whole world. For one, the tackling of mundane tasks such as resume sifting and sourcing, can be taken over by the machines. They can do it better, faster, and more efficiently than most people would, allowing the now available people to focus on uniquely ‘human’ skills which cannot be tackled by algorithm-based technology, such as critical thinking, problem solving, and other creative aspects of the business.

Why you might not get selected for the right post for you

The same way recruiters till now have not been able to ensure that 100% of the right talent is identified and acquired; there exist certain rules and limitations for AI. However, this, just like with the human inspection of a large volume of resumes, is something that is largely dependent on the candidate and the way they format their resume. If there are any candidates that technically fit the bill for a particular role, but have not been identified as such by an AI tool, it is probably owing to poor formatting, or incorrect usage of keywords.

For example, typos and grammatical errors, which are at the top of the list of common mistakes made by candidates, are obviously going to cause an AI tool to reject the resume for the particular shortlist. And it is something that can easily be prevented by carefully proofreading one’s resume before submission.Another common mistake is the inappropriate inclusion and relevance of keywords. It is important to utilise keywords judicially, and carefully choose the ones that best describe one’s skills rather than arbitrarily including the ones mentioned in a particular job description.

• Proof Read Your Resume

It is absolutely vital to proof read your resume thoroughly and preferably with the assistance of a spelling and grammar checking tool. It would a real shame if you have all the necessary skills for a particular job you’ve applied for, but your resume fails to get noticed simply because of incorrect formatting or grammatical errors!

• Be clear, concise, and to the point

Don’t beat around the bush about everything that you have done in your professional career, making the language flowery and elaborate will definitely go against you. Using all the relevant keywords in the right places will get your resume into the right hands. Arbitrarily throwing them in also won’t work, for the AI cannot be fooled!

• Never be vague

It is essential that you put real, tangible, qualitative and quantitative tasks and accomplishments on your resume. Vague descriptions and buzzwords are often thrown in to attract attention to the resume, but in reality do the exact opposite. If it were a person reviewing your resume they would be put off by the unspecified jargon used to describe straightforward tasks, and to an AI tool it wouldn’t even register as relevant information!

• Put in effort, it shows when you do, and when you don’t

What previously plagued the recruitment industry was the case of recruiters finding that a lot of candidates have simply mass mailed their resumes to a hundred different jobs. It didn’t work in the past, because it made the recruiter feel the candidate was not particularly motivated in one specific direction, and it won’t work now, because the AI tools being employed are looking for very specific things in a resume. If the one sent in by you is so generic that it was also sent out to 99 other places, more likely than not, it will not have the necessary keywords or format required for that particular job.

Based in the City of London, Recruitment SMART is a HR tech startup on a mission to bring disruptive technology to the recruitment industry. They are developing Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning based sourcing solutions. Team includes veterans from both the recruitment and tech industries and has client globally in UK, US and APAC. Feel Free to Write to us at info@recruitmentsmart.com