- You must have high-quality data informing an AI-driven approach to talent acquisition.
- AI can help you resurface and match talent to roles at scale.
- Automating repetitive tasks with AI lets you focus on more strategic decision-making to help your organization meet and exceed overall goals..
Pop quiz time: What was the most popular search topic last year—artificial intelligence or Taylor Swift?
If you guessed Taylor Swift, you’d be wrong based on 2024 Google search results.
The rapid rise of AI, especially GenAI and agentic AI, has made it a mainstream topic. AI is no longer just a tech industry trend—it’s influencing organizations on a global scale.
According to our Annual Eightfold Talent Survey, 96% of HR practitioners and leaders say that they’re using AI in some capacity. In talent acquisition, AI can be used for everything from sourcing candidates to predicting job success.
With most HR professionals deploying AI in some way to improve processes , staying ahead is critical to staying competitive.
This is where Eightfold Talent Tracking can help. It is an ATS built to work with Talent Intelligence and makes Eightfold world’s first AI-native, end-to-end talent acquisition experience.
Keep reading for a basic understanding of how AI can apply to talent acquisition and how Talent Tracking can open up possibilities.
Related content: Talent Tracking can help enhance your recruiting efforts. Learn more.
Effective AI is only as good as its data
AI’s effectiveness depends on the quality of data it has access to. For HR teams, this means ensuring AI systems use these three critical data sources:
- Internal company data to understand hiring trends and successful employee profiles.
- External labor market data that expands sourcing strategies and helps identify best-fit candidates based on their skills.
- User interactions to refine AI recommendations based on recruiter feedback.
Here’s an example of how that works: Your office headquarters is near a college with an exceptional mechanical engineering program. Those are just the workers your business needs.
But you’re expanding, and that growth dictates the need for more engineers in new locations with different skill sets than you’ve traditionally hired. How do you find those workers?
A talent intelligence platform would be able to take the internal data you have about skill sets you’ve hired for in the past, combine them with the external data of talent available in the locations you’re expanding to, plus skill sets of similar engineering positions, and combine it all to create a profile of best-fit candidates with skills adjacencies.
In other words, it would help you identify engineers whose skills show potential to learn the new roles you need them to take on to keep your business growing.
Without the right mix of data, AI could reinforce past hiring patterns rather than drive meaningful improvements.
Related content: Learn more about the value in resurfacing talent in this Talent Table discussion.
AI resurfaces talent you forgot about
When you open a new role, do you review past applications? Or do you post and analyze new data to find the right candidate?
Sorting through the volume of data you hold on past candidates might be overwhelming, but it could also be the new starting place for smarter recruiting.
ATS systems where that data lives are static and become outdated quickly, with silver-medalist candidates and past applicants often overlooked.
AI platforms can refresh and update these records by analyzing public data sources, helping HR teams re-engage with past candidates who may now be a perfect fit.
They also elevate the candidate experience by delivering fast, frictionless interaction with personalized offer management.
Match candidates to roles at scale with AI
AI’s ability to match candidates to roles goes beyond simple keyword searches. It can analyze skills, experiences, and career trajectories to stack-rank candidates based on skills and potential in the context of the open role.
Take a project manager, for example. There are many different types of project management roles across all industries. A project manager in construction may not seem like a fit for the tech industry by traditional hiring methods.
However, a tool like talent tracking could identify that both industries require a keen understanding of time management, budgeting, effective communication, and risk management, making the candidate with construction experience the right fit for a new tech project management role.
And AI can help you do so at scale. Rather than manually making these connections, the data within your platform can review thousands of candidates and surface the top talent.
Additionally, once a candidate is hired and settled in their role, AI can match them with personalized content, like training or personal development opportunities, reducing the manual workload for HR teams.
Boost productivity with agentic AI
Recruiters spend significant time on administrative tasks like crafting job descriptions, ranking applicants, and sending follow-up emails.
AI has advanced beyond mere automation to actually take on some of these repeatable tasks and free up your time. Agentic AI is next level when it comes to boosting productivity. AI Agents can execute more complex, multi-step tasks on your behalf, from clicking a button to write a job description, to setting up an entire community.
More advanced functions free you up to focus on higher value tasks, like making strategic hiring decisions. It’s a perfect example of how AI enhances the work people are doing rather than replacing them.
Importantly, AI should always function as a collaborative tool, keeping you in control while enhancing efficiency.
How Talent Tracking can help
Legacy ATS’s are traditionally designed to be static. These systems aren’t built to work with AI. If you’re only working with a legacy ATS, there’s a high probability you’re not getting the most out of your HR tech investments.
To help our customers move past these static legacy systems, we created Talent Tracking. When you add this to Talent Acquisition, it becomes the world’s first AI-native, end-to-end talent acquisition experience — designed to take on time-consuming and tedious work, so your TA teams can focus on the human side of recruiting and building strategies to serve your business.
It helps you:
- Streamline talent acquisition from requisition to offer: Deliver a unified recruiter experience, accelerating every step from requisition and offer management to screening and CRM.
- Elevate the candidate experience: Deliver fast and frictionless candidate experiences with personalized offer management.
- Resurface hidden talent: With AI managing your talent pipeline, those silver medalists and even employees looking for the next challenge will never fall under the radar again.
- Automate and optimize every step with AI: Drive efficiency with workflow automation and make better hiring decisions with AI-powered talent insights in the flow of work.
- Maintain enterprise-grade compliance: Track every step in the candidate life cycle, capture every requisition change, and easily download point-in-time reports including EEOC.
Embrace agentic AI for a smarter TA strategy
The future of talent acquisition is AI-driven, but success depends on using the technology thoughtfully.
If you are using a platform that has high-quality data, robust candidate pipelines updated in real time, and AI-powered matching and orchestration, your hiring practice is elevated to a point where you can focus on higher-value strategic work — and be confident that agentic AI is taking care of the rest.
Learn more about Talent Tracking and how it enhances recruitment by integrating AI-powered insights and a skills-first approach.
