AI In Talent Acquisition: 5 Smart Use Cases
In today’s competitive hiring landscape, speed, quality, and precision are everything. But for most Talent Acquisition teams, those goals can feel hard to reach – especially when you are sifting through thousands of applications, working with fragmented data systems, and navigating changing business priorities. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing that equation.
“Access to hiring technologies – including AI-powered tools – is the #1 thing global HR professionals (51%) say would make the hiring process easier, with nearly three-quarters (74%) saying AI makes it easier to find qualified candidates.” – LinkedIn
At Beamery, we know AI – when applied responsibly and transparently – can transform the hiring process. It empowers teams to make faster, smarter, and more inclusive hiring decisions, all while improving the candidate experience. Here are five excellent ways that AI is being applied in talent acquisition.
1. Smarter candidate matching, at scale
AI doesn’t just sift through resumes faster: it understands them better. By analyzing skills, experiences, and even inferred capabilities, AI like Beamery’s can recommend best-fit candidates for open roles, even when they haven’t applied yet. This skills-based approach helps recruiters go beyond job titles to find candidates with the right potential.
AI needs to do two important things here: manage your talent data and job architecture (keeping it organized, up to date and actionable), and spot relevant matches between people (candidates in your system) and work (the tasks to be done). The data piece would take humans far longer to achieve; the recommendations are more accurate, scalable, and free from unconscious bias.
“We recognized the opportunity to leverage AI technology to enhance our talent calibration process, ensuring that we attract and identify candidates whose skills align more closely with the specific requirements of the roles we are hiring for.” – Angela Athas, TA Partner: Sourcing Strategist, Flex
2. Personalized talent marketing
In a world where candidates are increasingly discerning about where they work, personalized talent marketing is key. AI helps you craft highly targeted, personalized messages that resonate with each candidate’s unique motivations and career goals. Tailor your outreach by understanding candidates’ skills, past experiences, and even their engagement with your brand over time – at scale.
For example, Beamery’s AI can suggest specific roles, company culture insights, or even development opportunities aligned to a candidate’s interests, improving the quality of candidate engagement and response rates.
“Our ability to deliver hyper-personalized content and job recommendations to candidates has been critical. And it has been a huge piece of our AI usage here at DraftKings. We are able to customize the content that is being sent and shared with candidates. We’re able to provide custom job recommendations based on their skills and their job title. This component of AI is going to change how companies interact with candidates.” – Mike Rizzi, Senior Recruitment Marketing Manager, DraftKings
3. Speeding up repetitive tasks
A McKinsey survey found that, when considering how generative AI affects spending across a variety of core business functions from IT to marketing, organizations saw the most meaningful cost reductions in HR.
AI can eliminate bottlenecks by automating tasks like candidate rediscovery, outreach personalization, and pipeline prioritization. Recruiters get time back to focus on strategic work – like engaging talent and advising hiring managers – rather than combing through databases.
For high-volume roles, AI can pre-rank candidates by likelihood to engage or convert. That means less time screening, and more time closing top talent.
“Being able to free that [time] up so that all of our recruiters actually spend more time with candidates, with stakeholders, creating insights, becoming thought leaders, becoming the experts in their space, I think is a really amazing thing.” – Katharine Rooney, VP Talent Attraction & Acquisition, Mimecast
4. Reducing bias with transparent AI
One of the biggest promises of AI in hiring is improving fairness. But that only works if the AI is transparent and auditable. Beamery’s Responsible AI framework ensures that every recommendation is explainable, giving hiring teams the ability to understand why a candidate was surfaced.
This doesn’t replace human judgment – it enhances it. Recruiters stay in control, but now they have better insights and fewer blind spots. This creates a more equitable experience for all candidates, especially those without traditional qualifications or from underrepresented backgrounds, who might otherwise be overlooked by keyword-based systems.
“This [AI] allows us to lean into sort of a non-biased approach in terms of, hey, we should include these other skills because they’re really relevant and your keyword may be limiting to you. Maybe we’re able to uncover or resurface past candidates that we would never have found with our Boolean search that we know and love so well.” – Mike Rizzi, Senior Recruitment Marketing Manager, DraftKings
5. Supporting internal mobility
The best hires aren’t always external. AI can help organizations unlock their internal talent marketplace by mapping existing employees’ skills to open roles, learning pathways, and mentorship opportunities.
With Beamery, for example, companies can proactively recommend career growth opportunities to their workforce, improving retention and reducing the need for external hiring.
An integrated and insight-driven approach to AI
AI works best when it’s connected across your tech stack. Beamery integrates seamlessly with Workday, SAP, and other systems to bring together skills data from across your HR ecosystem. That unified view enables continuous, data-driven decision making: not just one-off hiring campaigns.
“AI will help us … have a clear picture of what skills we have, and what skills we need to be successful both today and tomorrow. Filling critical and hard-to-hire roles is central to our ability to drive our mission at Sellafield. Combining the power and capabilities of SAP and Beamery is how we’ll do that.” – Martin Stubbs, Talent Acquisition Leader at Sellafield Ltd.
Hiring with AI isn’t about replacing recruiters, it’s about giving them superpowers. With the right tools, talent teams can:
- Fill roles faster, even in competitive or niche markets
- Improve hiring quality by focusing on skills, not just resumes
- Reduce bias and increase access to opportunity
- Provide a better experience for candidates and employees alike
At Hilti, for example, the role of TA professionals has evolved thanks to Beamery, as they become more like “strategic advisors” to hiring managers: with clearer insights around the availability of skills, ideal candidate profiles, and readiness to fill roles. This has enhanced the quality of the talent pipeline, and of hires. Read the case study here.