Having completed his MCA from the Graphic Era Institute of Technology, Amardeep has 14 years of vast industry experience during which he has worked with Naukri.com, Shareaholic, Info Edge India, and HT Media.

Adecade ago, one would not have imagined a machine identifying suitable candidates for a position, placing interview calls, and predicting the retention rate of new hires. In the race for talent however, recruiters today are leveraging technology to highly optimize the recruitment process by adopting innovations that perform all the aforementioned tasks and more. Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled recruitment is the new mantra for HR professionals, as companies across industries deploy high-tech solutions that lead to a swifter, more cost-effective hiring process.

Before looking at the transformational impact that AI has on the recruitment sector in India, it is important to understand the challenges being faced by our jobs landscape. Searching for the right people for the organization is one of the most challenging tasks for a recruiter. In India, there exists a significant mismatch between the skills that an organization requires, and those that a candidate possesses. Recruiters face a huge influx of resumes that present candidates with a wide spectrum of skills. However, going through thousands of CVs manually is a time consuming and inefficient activity. By approaching this task sans technology, recruiters often miss-out on suitable candidates who could contribute to the company's growth.

As new-age job roles are becoming increasingly tech-focused, it becomes important to hand-pick candidates with these skills.

When recruiters do find suitable candidates, they often lose-out on good people due to a lack of communication with them. Therefore, delivering an optimum candidate experience is also one of the major challenges that are being faced by recruiters across the country. More than anything, recruiters need to ensure that skilled candidates pick their offer over others.

AI-enabled solutions are revolutionizing the HR domain by helping recruiters overcome major challenges in an effective and efficient manner. Recruiters are increasingly using tech-based tools to identify, hire and retain the best employees for their organization. They are employing new-age job-search platforms that offer seamless, tech-based services such as intelligent job-candidate matching. Through data analytics, automation and machine learning, these platforms are able to match candidates with the most relevant job profiles based on their experience and expertise. Recruiters can simply specify their hiring criteria, including salary expectations, past experience and most importantly ­ their skillsets. Based on these inputs, job search platforms can instantaneously shortlist the most suitable candidates for the organization.

Recruiters can then conduct interviews with only the very best and most suitable candidates. This reduces the decision-making time by a large margin and allows recruiters to meet their targets more efficiently. Further, recruiters can leverage predictive analysis in order to foresee a particular candidate's future in the organization in terms of retention and performance. This helps recruiters make the right choice and maximize the ROI on human resources.

By deploying AI-powered chatbots, HR professionals are also able to offer a superior candidate experience during the interview process. These chatbots can answer the general queries of candidates, schedule interviews and even offer feedback to candidates after their interviews. Through such proactive tech-enabled communication, recruiters are able to keep candidates interested in their job offer. Additionally, leading-edge job portals like Shine.com are also using data analytics to predict the emerging technologies and skills which will be in demand in the foreseeable future. Organizations can leverage this data to augment their hiring efforts and also deploy large-scale upskilling/reskilling programs to plug-in the existing skills gap.

The existing challenges and emerging technological solutions make it clear that AI's role in the HR domain is massive. However, the revolution has only begun. Going forward, recruiters will embrace the technology to create an iron-clad hiring process that benefits their organization and gives them a significant edge over competition.