AI in action: Candidate summaries

by Emily Swartz Oct. 17th, 2024

Category: Staffing Technology Tips, Tricks, and How-Tos

This blog is part of our “AI in action” series, where we’ll dive into specific use cases for how AI can impact each part of the recruitment process. For more on how Bullhorn is leveraging AI, visit our webpage. 

Every day, recruiters juggle a multitude of tasks, from sourcing candidates to scheduling interviews and checking in with clients. To move at the fast pace the candidates and clients have come to expect, it’s crucial to leverage technology to streamline a recruiter’s day and free up time to focus on relationships and revenue-generating activities.

One of the most critical steps in the recruitment workflow is pitching a candidate to the client, which typically requires a candidate summary that covers things like skills, work history, certifications, and more. But with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of candidates in process at any given time, how can recruiters work smarter, not harder, to pitch candidates effectively?

AI can make a huge difference here. Read on to find out how recruiters can use AI to quickly pull relevant information from a candidate’s resume or profile and build a thorough summary to put the candidate’s (and the agency’s) best foot forward.

The power of AI-generated summaries

Recruiters spend a great deal of time ensuring important candidate data is entered into the ATS or CRM. Instead of scanning various documents, emails, or text messages to manually pull together a candidate summary, let AI do it for you based on the information already in the system.

Worried the quality of your data isn’t where it should be? We’ve got a resource for you.

AI can analyse the candidate’s resume and profile, extract essential information, and generate a concise, informative summary tailored specifically to the client, the open job, and any other relevant details in the ATS/CRM. 

These summaries can then be customised further to meet any other specific client needs, including adjusting the tone, length, and format as required.

What kind of impact can AI-powered summaries have?

1. Time savings: Manually summarising candidate profiles can be a time-consuming task. AI streamlines this process without sacrificing quality, allowing recruiters to focus on other critical aspects of their job.
2. Accuracy: AI can accurately pull relevant information from resumes and profiles, reducing the risk of human error.
3. Consistency: AI-generated summaries ensure a consistent format and tone, making it easier for recruiters and clients to identify the best fit for open roles.

With the improved accuracy and consistency that AI-powered summaries provide, recruiters can better market candidates to clients, increase their conversion rates, and save time that they would otherwise have to spend double-checking details or formatting summaries.

Real-world examples from those putting this AI into action

Don’t just take our word for it. Bullhorn customers are already putting AI into action to generate candidate summaries. Here’s what they have to say about the benefits they’re seeing:

• Javar Manning, Recruiting Manager, Miller Brothers Recruiting: “AI cuts down on the time it takes to write a candidate’s blurb. I just had an interview…for a quality lead engineer. I got that information from our transcribing tool, incorporated it with the resume, and used AI to gather more information and write a killer blurb! So, I’m getting more candidates to the interviews, quicker. With AI, I have a pretty good conversion rate for getting people to the interviews.”
• Will Hayes, COO, IDR: “The summary feature [of Bullhorn AI] wraps candidate information into a bulleted format for our recruiters, so they can easily use the information when marketing candidates to clients. It saves them time from having to research a bunch of stuff to create summarisations of these 20-page resumes in five bullets.”

5 ways to put this AI into action

It can feel daunting to implement a new tool for such a crucial part of the recruitment process. A candidate’s summary is often the first thing a client will see about a potential new hire, so it’s important to get it right!  There are plenty of accessible ways to incorporate this valuable technology while still maintaining human interaction when it makes sense in the process.

Here are actionable ways to use AI for resume parsing and candidate summaries:

1. Streamline resume parsing: Extract key information from resumes and profiles automatically, reducing or eliminating the need for manual data entry.
2. Integrate AI into the candidate search process: Use AI to automatically generate summaries for incoming resumes, saving time and effort while creating a short list of qualified candidates automatically.
3. Create customisable summaries and templates: Ask AI to create tailored summaries or templates to meet specific client needs, such as including previous work history or relevant certifications.
4. Leverage AI for candidate marketing: Create compelling candidate profiles using AI-generated summaries to market candidates to both passive and active clients.
5. Optimise your candidate summary process: Monitor the performance and conversion rate of your candidate submissions that use AI-generated summaries so you can make adjustments as needed to optimise results.

Learn more about what a reimagined recruitment looks like.