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October 22, 2024
Getting skilled faculty and administrators is rather challenging for educational institutions, but on the off chance that they can recruit such professionals, the institution is riddled with biases. They have been making efforts towards achieving diversity and inclusiveness, this essentially means they must change conventional methods of recruitment. This is where artificial intelligence (AI) comes in.
Moreso, AI-powered recruitment tools are making changes in the academic scope of employment and are helping institutions achieve their diversity goals without any bias. Also, these tools enhance other processes such as resume screening, candidate assessments, and candidate engagement, ensuring that every competent individual has a fair chance to compete irrespective of their up bringing. This blog post illustrates how education institutions should implement AI-powered recruitment solutions to ensure diversity and inclusion in their workforce.
The Importance of Diversity in Higher Education Hiring
Diversity isn’t just a catchy term that is thrown around in the higher education sector – it is essential. As with any other organization, colleges and universities stand to gain from a heterogeneous workforce as it offers different views and ideas that would help them serve their diverse student population more effectively. However, this diversity is not easily realizable especially if old hiring methods are utilized.
Even when people are doing their best to make such decisions, bias, both intentional and unintentional, can still affect who is selected to be contacted for a job interview and subsequently, who gets the employment. When it comes to employment, hiring managers know how to look for and evaluate candidates in the right positions and recognize top employees, even if they do not fit their expectations. This is even worse in academia when members in leadership or faculty positions do not have the same idea of diversity and inclusion.
How AI Helps Remove Bias from Recruitment in Academia
Artificial intelligence-powered recruitment automation platforms are proving to be an effective tool for bias mitigation during recruitment and selection, including at the college or university level. Colleges and universities can utilize AI in making decisions such as resume screening, candidate assessment, candidate engagement, etc. to create a fairer, more equitable hiring process.
In the higher education sector where leadership and faculty recruitment are highly specialized, AI-driven resume screening plays a crucial role in removing human bias. Normal manual processes of resume screening may have some unintended advantages to applying candidates from some institutions, regions, or other backgrounds.
AI-powered recruitment automation tools search for required qualifications, experience, and skills for the given position while filtering out other considerations that can lead to bias. For instance, AI can filter out individuals who have the relevant qualifications and experience without taking into consideration their gender, age, or name.
AI-powered candidate screening tools can assess hundreds of applications within a short time. This enhances efficiency since no qualified candidate can be left out owing to the fallibility of human beings. Such systems apply algorithms that rank candidates by their qualifications and suitability for the position, resulting in a more impersonal approach. This is even more so in higher education institutions where job descriptions can be very niche, the need for this degree of accuracy in hiring goes unmatched.
Moreover, AI chatbots also engage candidates in real time by responding to questions regarding the institution and providing updates on the application status. This ensures candidates remain active during the entire hiring process and minimizes the number of potential candidates who may have been highly qualified, yet disheartened by long wait times or mute arrangements.
In most academic institutions, apart from the subject matter expertise, applicants are usually expected to reach out to students or audiences and partake in other matters and functions of the institution. Existing methods of assessments are prone to prejudice especially when interviewers make judgments on irrelevant factors or unrelated issues.
AI recruitment tools enhance consistency in evaluations by eliminating subjectivity from the entire recruitment process. With AI, it becomes possible to reduce or rather eliminate bias due to recruiting managers, since every candidate can be judged based on the same parameters. These parameters may include assessing one’s design capabilities, research performance, or even administrative capabilities depending on the position. Therefore AI-based platforms may assist in hiring quality people in academic institutions.
Expanding the Talent Pool with AI Recruitment Tools
Colleges and universities do not only benefit when using AI recruitment tools as a method of resolving biases but also in enlarging the diversity of potential candidates. AI technologies such as job matching, and candidate searches make sure that even the hard-to-find potential candidates are easily accessible to the hiring institutions.
For instance, AI tools can evaluate past candidates who did not qualify for a certain post but are suited for the newly created one. Furthermore, AI can identify potential candidates who might have not seen a job advert, thus enabling institutions to widen their search for talents and source diverse candidates who would have otherwise been overlooked.
The Role of AI in Accelerating the Recruitment Process
Finding suitable people in the academic world is often drawn out which can be a turn-off for good candidates. With the help of artificial intelligence tools, these processes can be optimized such that most of the manual work including screening of CVs and interview scheduling is reduced greatly. Candidate-facing chatbots can answer questions by candidates and keep them in the loop of the progress of their application to make candidates active and accurate at the point of application.
In bringing added speed into the process, AI in turn enables learning institutions to recruit quickly without compromising on diversity or the quality of the candidates. This means that the quicker an institution gets to move the candidates through the employer’s recruitment processes, the more possibilities there will be to hire a star performer.
Conclusion: Leveraging AI for Inclusive Hiring in Education Industry
Recruitment practices within colleges and universities are undergoing a paradigm shift brought about using AI applications which make the processes increasingly unbiased and equitable. From automatic resume screening to candidate evaluation, AI-powered recruitment tools assist universities in alleviating human bias, expanding their reach, and filling available positions for professors and administrative staff across the board.
If your institution has limitations in achieving the set targets of diversity or is revolving around inefficiencies in finding AI-powered recruitment automation tools offer a way out. You can reach out to us at impress.ai to see how our recruitment automation platform could support your recruitment process while also ensuring that your institution leverages data to achieve diversity within the organization.
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