When it rains, it pours. And recruiting teams are in for some nasty weather.
It’s like the perfect storm: A cooldown in the labor market and steady decline in job openings (since a peak in March 2022) has made it harder for job seekers to easily find new opportunities. On top of that, job hunters’ increasing reliance on AI tools that can apply to dozens, if not hundreds, of jobs for them in the blink of an eye have flooded recruiters’ desks with résumés.
What are recruiters to do? BairesDev, a California-headquartered software development outsourcing firm that places primarily Latin America-based developers, has seen an exponential increase in job applications in recent years: It received more than 1,979,000 unique applicants in 2023 and is on pace to hit 2,400,000 in 2024—about a 21% YoY increase.
“We need to navigate all of those résumés and find an efficient and objective and balanced and fair way to evaluate everyone and see if we can find the best people,” Felipe Turra, director of BairesDev’s talent acquisition competence center, told HR Brew.
Matchmaker, matchmaker. To address the résumé volume, Turra’s team developed its own AI tools to help speed up the time it takes to match candidates to requisitions. They did this in part by developing algorithms that work similarly to dating apps.
Applicants will often apply to as many as 20 or 30 positions at once. While that creates more volume for BairesDev’s recruiters, it also helps create profiles of applicants’ interests and skills, which algorithms and bots then scrape and analyze. They use AI to do something similar with requisitions.
Similar to how the algorithms behind a dating app like OK Cupid compare the interests of two users to recommend a match, the algorithms behind BairesDev compare factors like a candidate’s skills and experience, and salary expectations, to make recommendations.
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“We take all of these attributes and we try to understand what’s important for the client, what’s important for the candidate, and what’s important for BairesDev as well,” Turra said. “We try to see, what are the best matches that balance out the equation for these three parties, and that’s the magic behind it.”
Turra’s team is hesitant to fully rely on AI to make hiring decisions, so no candidates are ruled out based on its recommendations alone. Recruiters always look over the recommended candidates, and sometimes candidates the algorithm did not recommend, to ensure they’re not relying on the tech.
Turn back time. Turra’s team has seen significant payoffs: The process for matching applicants requires less manpower than it did previously. Moreover, it once took as many as 30 to 40 days to match an applicant with a contract; now, it takes less than a week.
“That’s a lot more efficient on the business side, and also the candidates that you find, you’re able to find them in a much better way,” Turra said, noting that a recent manual search revealed that, on average, successful candidates were waiting in BairesDev’s system for a very long time. “It’s not like we didn’t have those people. It just took us a long time to find those people because you didn’t have the right tools.”
Correction 01/07/25: This piece has been updated to reflect that BairesDev is headquartered in California.