“AI has a big role to play in making hiring simpler and faster,” said Indeed General Manager for Employer Raj Mukherjee during a co-presentation with Indeed General Manager for Job Seeker Maggie Hulce at Indeed FutureWorks 2023.
In fact, AI has been a core pillar of Indeed’s product offerings for years: “What we hear from job seekers and employers is that they welcome any help to make the process better, as long as they stay in the driver’s seat and with a human making the final hiring decision,” Mukherjee said.
Hulce explained that Indeed has access to behavioural signals, messaging language and millions of candidate interviews. It’s a lot of data: More than 300 terabytes of data is generated per day on Indeed, based on the 30 million jobs posted and 350 million job seekers who visit the site every month.
“All the signals we are collecting from both sides feed our matching engine,” Mukherjee said, “which continuously improves as job seekers and employers share more information with us.”
In the session, Hulce and Mukherjee explained how these new developments enable Indeed to be the ultimate matchmaker; they also sketched out exciting innovations planned for the near future.
No more applicant ghosting
“Employers tell us every day how frustrated they feel about candidates ghosting them at all stages of the process,” Mukherjee explained. But it’s a two-way street: Hulce added that 75% of job seekers said that not hearing back from a prospective employer after submitting an application is worse than not hearing back from a potential partner after a first date.
“To help solve this, we continue to add more ways to enable faster connections on Indeed, using AI to speed up the process,” Hulce said, adding that candidates who receive a reach-out within four hours of their application are 95% more likely to lead to a hire versus those who don’t receive a reach-out until a week later.
To enhance Indeed’s role as the ultimate matchmaker, the company plans on incorporating even more AI technologies in the coming months to connect employers with quality matches faster. This includes updates to the Matched Candidate Dashboard, which instantly ranks the hundreds of thousands of resumes uploaded to Indeed for employers to find the perfect match. From there, employers can “send an invitation instantly without ever having to leave the candidate dashboard,” Mukherjee said.
The system will now also produce an AI-generated summary for each candidate. “Our new Candidate Highlights help cut through the noise by providing high-level guidance on what stands out about a candidate’s experience,” Mukherjee said.
And if an employer wants to know more? They can use Indeed’s new AI-powered Smart Message feature to instantly write a personalised reach-out, such as asking about gaps in a candidate’s qualifications. Smart Message also allows an employer to select the tone of the message. If a hiring manager “wants something shorter and more casual, a new, shorter message is auto-generated,” Hulce said. All that’s needed is a final edit before you send it off.
“When you reach out to matched candidates, they are 17 times – yes, you heard me right, 17 times – more likely to apply to a job than if they just found the job on their own,” Mukherjee said. “It feels nice to be wanted!”
What’s next? Smart Sourcing
Indeed’s next AI-powered product offering is called Smart Sourcing, which will be available in spring 2024. “We’re going to take the best of Resume Search and the best of Matched Candidates and bring them together into one cohesive experience,” Mukherjee said.
This is how it works: Rather than manually conducting a search for criteria they want in a resume, the employer can toggle between their posted roles in a drop-down menu. They then get all the benefits of the Matched Candidates dashboard – resume ranking, Candidate Highlights and Smart Messaging – with no need for Boolean queries to find the right resume. Simply switch to the job for which you need a candidate, and the AI-recommended matches pop up instantly. “In one click” employers can invite the perfect candidate to apply, Hulce said.
What’s more, Indeed’s generative AI-based job description tool has already been used by 800,000 Indeed clients to create more than 2 million jobs. All an employer has to do is input some key details, and Indeed AI will do the rest. “Writing a job description normally takes hours. In this case, within minutes, you get a comprehensive job description tailored to attract the best candidates for the position,” Mukherjee said.
The future of hiring is human – but AI can help make it better
Indeed AI is only getting better. In just six months of beta testing, job descriptions created with Indeed AI saw a 16% increase in applications. In the future, Indeed will piggyback this offering with an automatically generated job score, which instantly gives employers metric-based feedback on how likely their listing is to generate leads. Once a description is completed, Indeed AI highlights sections that may need improvement – like specifying benefits and pay – to make the posting more competitive.
“Our vision for the future combines the best of Indeed matching and connections with the thing many have been asking for: making collaboration easier for you and your colleagues,” Mukherjee said.
“You’ve also told us, no one does hiring alone,” Hulce added. “You have a team of people you collaborate with to make hiring decisions.”
“So our future vision includes a reimagined Employer App that helps you stay connected no matter where or how you work,” Hulce explained. “Everything in one place. Everyone you work with. Everywhere you work. AI can and will make hiring way simpler and faster, but together we can ensure the ‘human’ is always at the heart of hiring.”
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