As employers increasingly rely on automation to manage large volumes of applications, more than one-third of recruiters feel they are missing out on top candidates due to AI tools, according to research from CV-Library.
Research shows that 83% of recruiters use AI for recruiting, and 28% rely on AI to review applications. However, 35% said it was leading to a loss of talent, and 27% believed that strong candidates were weeded out before they even got an interview.
The study, based on nearly 500 recruiters and 1,100 candidates, found that more than half (53 percent) of job seekers believed they were rejected by AI without a human review of their resumes.
Additionally, 46% say unfair rejection is one of their biggest job-hunting complaints, and 63% say AI-driven hiring is unfair compared to human judgment. The technology is also changing behavior, with 40 percent of job seekers abandoning or considering abandoning their applications when AI is used in early screening.
CV-Library quotes candidate David, 37, a part-time bartender from Doncaster City, as saying: “Being interviewed by an AI bot made me feel incredibly alienated. There was no feedback or human interaction, so I had no idea how I was being perceived. It felt like I was being screened, and with so little real communication, it was easy for the effort I put in to be completely overlooked.”
Young job seekers are most concerned about automated hiring decisions. Almost two-thirds (64%) of Gen Zers blame AI for early rejections of their applications, the highest of any generation. They are also the most frustrated by unfair rejections (53 percent), followed by Millennials (47 percent) and Gen Xers (46 percent).
The rise of AI is also changing the way candidates express themselves. 79% say AI-generated resumes have increased sharply in the past year, and this has some unintended consequences. 81% of recruiters say that AI is making resumes more standardized, less distinctive, and less individual and unique.
More than four in five recruiters (83%) say they use AI to speed up hiring, and 28% say they use AI to manage application volume. But they don’t always deliver benefits, with only 36 percent saying their speed to adoption has improved.
AI is most powerful at administrative tasks such as writing job descriptions (63 percent) and scheduling interviews (38 percent), but struggles with judgment-based decisions. 72% say AI is unable to assess cultural fit, and 55% say AI performs poorly when assessing soft skills.
“Candidates have long felt that the hiring process is dehumanizing and that the best talent is unfairly singled out,” said Lee Biggins, CEO and founder of CV-Library. “This insight from both agency and corporate recruiters suggests that their complaints may be justified.
“This is a timely wake-up call that you shouldn’t outsource everything to AI, especially when it comes to recruiting, where every candidate is unique. Automating painstaking processes can add value, but the best recruiters use AI to support, not replace, human intuition.”
Full report: https://www.cv-library.co.uk/recruitment-insight/ai-in-recruitment-survey/.
