Dive Brief:

• Recruiters are looking to technology and artificial intelligence to support their efforts, SHRM reports. Shon Burton, co-founder and CEO of HiringSolved, said his company has developed RAI, a 'Siri-like' AI assistant that acts as a candidate sourcing and contact buddy.
• Burton says that after analyzing data for five years, RAI is capable of searching out suitable candidates for jobs, conversing with them and scheduling them for live interviews with a human recruiter. The focus of this new chatbot is to handle cumbersome recruitment tasks. Burton anticipates a commercial rollout in April.
• As to whether RAI will ever replace human recruiters, Burton said, "It may in the long term because it will eventually make recruiting an easier task which requires less human time." But, he adds, "I suspect in the near future, we will find many areas where we prefer humans over machines.

Dive Insight:

There has been a lot of talk about how AI can fit into the recruitment world. Solutions like RAI will support human recruiters over the next few years, but as we've seen with other machine learning tools, the technology still has a long way to go to be perfect.

Recruiters will still need to be able to supply their applicant tracking systems with a fresh crop of candidates, and therefore networking and relationship management will still be the nature of the game. While RAI can potentially make life easier for recruiters, it also has the potential to make recruitment less personal. Therefore, recruiters must use it carefully to net any positive results.