From resume to first day: This AI tool takes over the recruiting process

Hiring new talent has become a lengthy, complicated and often overwhelming process, but what if AI could do the heavy lifting for you? This software company is doing just that. 

A.Team, a members-only network of freelance product builders, recently rolled out a new feature called Team Formation AI, which matches applicants to companies within minutes, and then enables organizations to hire them within days, using generative AI for the entire process. Leaders have access to a pool of 11,000 potential freelancers who have already been vetted by the platform. 

"We always talk about talent being the biggest piece of our bottom line," says AJ Thomas, chief experience officer in residence at A.Team. "But there's still a lot of time that is lost trying to find the skills and expertise you need. This [tool] is the convergence of not just talent building, but also tech building, and we're coming together to find how those two things can work together." 

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The AI's algorithm analyzes everything from interviews submitted by applicants and the experiences and projects listed on their profiles, along with other behavioral traits in order to make good culture fits. Hiring managers then receive a shortlist of candidates, along with an AI "talent agent" that answers more detailed questions about an applicant's skills, experiences and work preferences. Hiring managers can then request real-life interviews with them. 

"A hiring manager's time is really spent trying to source the right type of talent — they're casting this wide net with all of these sourcing channels feeding into it," Thomas says. "With Team Formation AI, we take all of the things that we know about the tech talent we have and curate a matching process." 

For example, if a company were to make a request through A.Team requesting support building a mobile banking app, the AI would then look for applicable positions an employer could pursue, including engineers, product managers, data scientists and designers, making matches based on their skills and personalities, too. 

Thomas acknowledges that there are still valid concerns regarding the amount of tech being used in the recruitment process and whether it creates bias or overlooks certain talent. Keeping human perspectives as the core focus required plenty of in-person communication when building out the platform. 

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"We intentionally asked all of the tech talent and clients in our network if we were to represent them without them being in the room, what would be the important information that people should know?" Thomas says. "We wanted to build trust with everyone involved." 

Today, most HR departments are using AI to do resume scans, which is helpful in the elimination process but still requires significant legwork from managers to make sure candidates are the right fit. They're going to have to take it a step further if they want to take full advantage of what AI has to offer.

"In this technological transformation season that we are in, the thing that's always been true is that curiosity has always been a superpower," Thomas says. "Go in and figure out how you could think about these processes differently and then how you could learn what it's actually about so that you can adopt it and use it to accelerate your [business]."