In early 2024, the market value of AI recruitment technology is $661.5 million and is expected to grow to $1.1 billion by 2030. However, it’s hard to know exactly which AI technologies will succeed; that’s why we turn to survey data to find how our plans stack up to others. Recruitment statistics on AI span a wide breadth of results that can only be accounted for by drilling deeper into the survey methodology. In this post, we’ll look at several surveys and their results to piece together a picture of AI use in recruitment today.

LinkedIn on Generative AI

LinkedIn’s annual survey is a significant endeavor. For the Future of Recruiting 2024, they surveyed 1,453 recruiting professionals in management seniority roles or higher and 498 hiring managers. The survey was conducted in six languages across 23 countries between October and November 2023 and the report was released on March 7, 2024. The global version of the report is available in 8 languages and 11 regional versions can be downloaded. In addition to AI, the report covers skills, Gen Z, and more.

• Overall, the LinkedIn survey found that 62% of talent acquisition professionals say they are optimistic about AI’s impact on recruitment, yet only 27% of talent professionals say that they’re using or experimenting with generative AI. The results across countries vary as follows:
  • 6% of talent professionals in the UK and France surveyed by LinkedIn report that they’re actively using generative AI.
  • 5% of talent professionals in Germany, Austria and Switzerland surveyed stated that they’re actively using AI.
• Survey respondents named the following top three benefits of generative AI in recruiting:
  • 57% said it makes it faster/easier to write job descriptions
  • 45% said it helps automate tasks to spend on more fulfilling work
  • 42% said it removes daily mundane tasks.

• At the same time that recruiting teams are discovering how to use AI for their own work, their organizations are navigating how to incorporate the use of AI in jobs. Here are the top three ways TA professionals are integrating generative AI skills into their workforce:
  • 24% are partnering with leaders to understand generative AI potential to transform jobs before taking action
  • 23% are partnering with department heads to discuss how generative AI will transform jobs
  • 22% are updating job descriptions to reflect usage of generative AI in the role.
• The number of recruiters who added AI skills to their profiles jumped 14% in 2023.
• In recruiting, the use of generative AI emphasizes the need for soft skills to communicate with candidates and hiring managers alike. Here are the top three soft skills survey respondents said will become more important for recruiters over the next 5 years:
  • Communication (77%)
  • Relationship building (72%)
  • Adaptability (63%).

Takeaway

Despite the availability of generative AI tools, just a quarter of those surveyed are using it for recruiting. When drilling down by country, the use of generative AI in European countries is surprisingly small, at 6%. Those in countries that are using it more heavily (likely the United States) will pave the way for others by developing the playbooks for its use in talent acquisition and its potential to transform jobs overall.

Mercer on AI Adoption

Mercer is a professional services firm that consults on employee-related topics such as talent management, retirement, transformation, and mergers & acquisitions. In February 2024 they released the report Strategic AI adoption in talent acquisition today: Overcoming barriers and unveiling future possibilities. Mercer surveyed 477 HR and TA leaders across a range of industries. The report authors summed up the findings as follows:

Despite its tremendous potential, the results generated from our field data revealed that AI adoption within the TA function is not as pronounced and advanced as some recent reports might suggest.

The list below offers stats from the report.

• 42% of those surveyed do not currently and do not plan to use AI as part of their TA practice.
• Here are the top three ways companies are using AI in talent acquisition:
  
  • 40% use it to source and engage talent for pipeline purposes (employer-centric matching)
  • 28% use it to analyze internal TA or recruitment data
  • 28% use it to create social posts.
• Just 8% of companies are using AI-first recruiting, with the total initial recruitment process (application through scheduling interviews deployed through AI).
• The report identified the following three barriers to using AI-based tools in talent acquisition:
  • Lack of systems integration: 47% 
  • Lack of understanding about the efficacy of tools: 38%
  • Lack of knowledge of recruiting tools: 36%

Mercer also released the Global Talent Trends Study 2024, which surveyed 12,200+ global C-suite executives, HR leaders, employees, and investors. Among the C-suite executives surveyed, AI lands at number five on the following list of priorities for the 2024 people agenda.

1. Enhancing the EX/EVP to attract and retain top talent 
2. Investing more in benefits to improve physical/mental health
3. Improving workforce planning to better inform buy/build/borrow strategies
4. Improving our HR/People analytics capabilities 
5. Redesigning work to incorporate AI and automation

Takeaway

HR and talent acquisition have big problems to solve. Talent retention and attraction, employee wellness, workforce planning, and people analytics are more important than AI as companies look toward the remainder of 2024. Those using AI are primarily using it for candidate matching, with no other dominant use. The lack of systems integration and knowledge about AI tools will only be solved with technological development, peer success stories, and educational resources. At the first stages of its hype cycle, AI is important, but not overtaking the things that people need most: a sense of purpose, psychological and physical health, and skills growth.

Oliver Wyman Forum on Generative AI at Work

 

The Oliver Wyman Forum is a think tank that surveys tens of thousands of people annually worldwide. The January 2024 report, How Generative AI Is Transforming Business And Society: The Good, The Bad, And Everything In Between, contains the results from two generative AI-specific surveys conducted in June and November 2023 from a collective sample of roughly 25,000 respondents across 16 countries. 

The authors of the report take a clear-headed, humanistic view of the potential and pitfalls of generative AI in the workplace.

With the transformative power of generative AI poised to redefine the employee experience of work and the very essence of work itself, the need for organizations to lead with empathy and foresight has never been more urgent.

At 99 pages, the report is a hefty read. Here are some highlights from the data.

• 69% of CEOs see broad benefits from generative AI across the organization, yet 70% of non-CEO executive teams don’t believe their organization is ready to adopt generative AI responsibly.
• 50% of CEOs report they are already integrating generative AI into products and services, yet 84% of AI-using employees may have already leaked company data to public generative AI tools.
• While 96% of employees said they believe AI can help them in their current job, 60% are afraid it will eventually automate them out of work. 
• 57% of employees report they are currently receiving insufficient AI training from their employer.
• Two in three Gen Z employees now report using generative AI on a weekly basis, 78% more than boomers.
• Some 55% of employees use generative AI at least once a week at work, but 61% of users do not find it very trustworthy. 
• 30% of job seekers have begun looking for a new role due to generative AI.
• AI and automation could displace 85 million jobs globally by 2025, according to a 2020 estimate by the World Economic Forum.

Takeaway

Employees are both worried and excited about the potential for AI to transform work. Executives, however, seem to have their heads in the clouds as to how to leverage it responsibly by developing a coherent generative AI strategy that enlists compliant tools and provides adequate employee training. Given the rapid change in jobs that is likely to occur with AI, the empathy and foresight mentioned by the authors are exceedingly important for business success.

Leoforce and AI in Recruiting in North America

Leoforce is the maker of Arya, an AI sourcing and talent intelligence platform. In February 2024, it released the The Future of AI Recruiting and Transformation 2024 Report, which surveyed 273 HR and TA leaders across North America. Key findings from the report are listed below. 

• Only 30% of those surveyed are leveraging AI, and most only use it for a quarter of their processes.  
• For high-volume hiring, the percentage using AI goes up to 42% for those who use an applicant tracking system (ATS) + AI recruiting software.
• In 2024, AI adoption is predicted to spike, with 81% of surveyed companies planning to invest in AI-driven solutions to automate and enhance their recruiting processes.
• 30% of companies have increased investment in automation and AI recruiting solutions in the past 2 years.
• The number one benefit named by companies using AI + recruiting software was that automation reduced the time spent doing manual sourcing tasks, at 38%.
• 64% of companies are still evaluating increasing their investment in automation and AI recruiting solutions. 

Takeaway

Automation and AI are necessities for efficient hiring in a competitive market, and nearly a third of companies are already benefiting from the efficiency gains. However, with 70% of those surveyed in North America NOT leveraging AI, there’s plenty of opportunity for expansion, as evidenced by the 81% claiming they will invest in AI solutions this year. 

Leverage AI in Recruiting Today

SmartRecruiters has more than half a decade offering recruiting tools with AI. In 2018, we launched SmartAssistant, an AI-powered candidate discovery tool. Frasers Group, a UK-based retailer, uses SmartAssistant to hire more than 10,000 seasonal associates every year.

“SmartAssistant gives us a systematic, automated method of sifting and selecting to create an over-indexed shortlist of pre-qualified candidates that our stores can use to get people booked in for interviews.” 

– Adam Reynolds, Head of Talent, Frasers Group

In 2023, a new version of SmartAssistant was released that enables greater transparency and customization by skills, location, and other factors. In addition, SmartRecruiters customers can leverage the chatbot SmatPal, generative AI copilots for candidate communications, and will see more AI-enabled analytics tools in the coming year.

Rebecca Carr, Chief Product Officer at SmartRecruiters, is positive about the benefits AI in talent acquisition. 

“We’re at the perfect epicenter of innovation and experimentation. Companies will screen fewer people and get to hiring decisions faster. They’ll have better insight into their hiring activities so that they can be more proactive about streamlining their processes.”

– Rebecca Carr, Chief Product Officer, SmartRecruiters.

Read more from Rebecca on how SmartRecuriters keeps hiring human while safely leveraging AI and automation in SmartHorizons, our LinkedIn newsletter.

To begin hiring more efficiently with AI-enabled tools, get in touch with us for a demo today.