AI continues to make a transformative impact across the business world. The recent public release of ChatGPT also garnered a wide amount of publicity, especially among the general public. In fact, many tech pundits ranked the generative AI chatbot as the most popular software release in history.
Still, this important technology innovation requires businesses to analyze their current processes to see where AI adds value. For example, the FinTech world currently leverages machine learning to power customer service chatbots or perform automated securities trading. Generative AI remains poised to supercharge the process of content creation, including everything from documentation to images and videos.
Even the process of recruiting talented professionals benefits from the strategic application of AI. It automates a variety of repetitive tasks, letting HR professionals and recruiters focus on interacting with their top candidates. Let’s explore the impact of AI on the hiring process, especially in the life sciences and regulatory affairs sector.
We Cover The Pros and Cons of Leveraging AI to Help Your Organization Decide How to Best Implement It.:
How AI Has Changed the Hiring Process
It’s important to remember that AI in staffing is considered to be an emerging technology. Expect its ultimate impact to increase as more companies adopt it and experience the operational efficiencies gained by its use. Still, staffing agencies and HR departments currently reap significant benefits by using AI-powered tools today.
In short, AI is already making an impact on the process of staffing. AI-powered applicant tracking systems help filter out unqualified candidates, reducing time-consuming drudgery for overworked HR teams. These application suites even automate initial communication with candidates, allowing recruiters to focus on interacting with the best. While the biggest impacts of AI on staffing are yet to arrive, it still helps agencies and companies source talent more efficiently.
The Dos of Incorporating AI into Your Hiring Process
Understanding the various advantages and disadvantages helps your company make an informed decision on adopting AI in its staffing process. First off, let’s check out these best practices of an AI-powered hiring strategy. Leverage these ideas for a more successful implementation of this technology innovation.
Define Clear Objectives
Having a set of clear objectives for incorporating AI in your staffing process makes measuring the results easier. So before implementing a pilot project or full adoption, you need to define these targets. For example, identify a few specific recruitment goals for your team over a certain timeline.
Additionally, you need to take into account the unique requirements of life sciences and regulatory affairs positions. As noted earlier, modern AI-powered application tracking systems provide the ability to filter unqualified candidates. Take advantage of this feature to create a more manageable candidate pool for your recruiters or HR team.
Leverage AI-powered Job Posting
ChatGPT and similar generative AI tools help HR teams craft job descriptions able to attract talented life sciences candidates. Use this opportunity to sprinkle job listings with the hottest keywords and phrases used in regulatory affairs. Optimizing your descriptions in this manner ultimately results in a stronger candidate pool.
Additionally, various job boards already use AI algorithms to make it easier for candidates to find intriguing positions. Research which platforms currently leverage machine learning and make sure your organization posts open positions on them. Once again, using AI in this manner boosts the quality of candidates applying for life sciences jobs.
Implement AI-Based Résumé Screening
Once again, AI-powered résumé screening simply lets your recruiters and HR team work more efficiently. They no longer need to spend valuable time vetting the résumés of candidates without the skills and experience your organization needs. It lets them focus their efforts on only the top candidates, ensuring your company interviews and hires the best.
We already mentioned the unique skills and experience possessed by professionals in the life sciences and regulatory affairs. An AI-powered résumé screening tool offers the functionality to filter candidates by these unique capabilities. Taking advantage of these capabilities ultimately makes your organization’s staffing process more efficient.
Enhance Candidate Sourcing with AI
Finding talented and experienced professionals in the life sciences remains difficult for many organizations. This is especially the case when considering passive candidates that aren’t actively looking for a new position. Companies traditionally rely on employee referrals or advice from their professional network to find these candidates.
However, AI offers the potential to become a game-changer for this “holy grail” of recruiting. Machine learning algorithms provide the means to scrape and analyze data from social media and industry forums. It effectively curates this data to find qualified candidates, helping your recruiters become more effective. All told it’s an understated yet powerful advantage gained by using AI for staffing.
Streamline The Interview Process with AI
Many top candidates remain on the market for only a few weeks at the most. Because of this, companies need to streamline their hiring process, especially the number of interviews. Thankfully, chatbots powered by generative AI manage any initial candidate engagement in an automated fashion.
Additionally, AI analytical tools provide valuable insights into candidates for interviews conducted over video. If you regularly find it difficult to decide between two equally qualified candidates, these AI-derived opinions offer an extra voice. Expect to make a more informed hiring decision as a result.
Personalizing Candidate Experience
Providing an exceptional candidate experience plays a key role in having your company’s job offers accepted. As highlighted above, AI provides the ability to handle initial candidate communication which saves time for your HR team. You are also able to use this approach to personalize the candidate experience for each applicant.
Leveraging state-of-the-art technology in this manner creates a positive impression of your organization to candidates. It also illustrates your commitment to innovation, which makes it easier to attract top-shelf life sciences professionals.
The Don’ts of Incorporating AI into Your Hiring Process
After exploring the significant advantages life sciences organizations gain from AI-powered staffing, let’s look at a few potential concerns. Use this information to learn what things to avoid when adopting AI to enhance your hiring process.
Avoid Bias in AI Algorithms
Unconscious bias adversely affects the staffing processes of many businesses even without the influence of AI. This situation effectively hampers their efforts to employ a diverse workforce. Ultimately, you want to ensure both fairness and inclusivity any time you make a new hire.
Unfortunately, bias also remains an issue when incorporating AI as part of your regulatory affairs staffing process. If using a third-party staffing application that includes AI, make sure the algorithms and machine learning models used by the tool remove bias. Closely vet each application’s approach to model training to ensure your hiring efforts remain bias free.
Don’t Fully Rely on AI for Decision-Making
Many employees across the business spectrum worry about AI replacing their jobs. However, in nearly all use cases, AI serves more in an assistant role, helping workers boost their productivity. This same concept applies to using machine learning to make your staffing process more efficient.
Ultimately, any hiring decision needs to include input from both AI and humans working together collaboratively. Adopting this approach lets your organization take full advantage of AI to improve your quality of hire. In fact, this same collaborative model applies in any staffing-related function that uses machine learning.
Avoid Overlooking Data Privacy and Security
Whenever using AI as part of your staffing process, ensuring data privacy and information security still remains critical. This includes full compliance with any relevant data protection regulations, especially the GDPR. If using a third-party AI-assisted ATS, ensure the vendor also follows best practices related to data privacy and cybersecurity.
Adopting a strong SecOps and privacy footprint ensures your organization safeguards all candidate data collected by AI systems. You never want to suffer a hacking incident that results in this data being exposed on the Dark Web. It’s likely to cause significant embarrassment (or worse) to any organization in the life sciences or regulatory affairs.
Don’t Neglect the Human Touch
We previously mentioned how AI must be considered as an assistant to your HR team, not a replacement. After all, the human touch remains critical in convincing a top-shelf life science candidate to accept your company’s offer. As such, it’s important your staffing process never neglects human interaction with candidates.
This strategy ensures you provide a personalized touch during candidate interactions made by your recruiters and HR team. It also facilitates incorporating empathy and emotional intelligence throughout the staffing process. Expect to maintain positive relationships with your candidate pool as a result.
Lean On the Experts for Your Life Sciences Regulatory Affairs Hiring Needs
After understanding the advantages gained from an AI-assisted staffing strategy, worrying about a lack of AI experience becomes natural. After all, how do you train a machine learning model to eliminate hiring bias? In this situation, partnering with experts in this emerging technology area makes perfect sense.
Adopting a discerning approach when vetting different vendors of AI-powered staffing tools is a must. However, many life sciences staffing agencies already use these modern applicant tracking systems and recruiting software. Partnering with one lets your organization reap the full benefits of an AI hiring process without any previous experience.
Contact Our Recruiters Today!
When searching for an exceptional regulatory affairs staffing agency, look no further than Shepherd Regulatory Search. We boast experience in modern recruiting tools, including those powered by AI. Connect with us to discuss how we can help you achieve your hiring goals this year and beyond.