How AI can boost your firm’s recruitment efforts

On any given week, how much of your firm’s time and resources are spent on recruitment?

Probably way more than you’d like, especially when all that time could be spent on serving clients instead. But you can’t provide clients with high-quality service if you don’t have the right people on your team.

Given the tight market for good talent in the profession, this seemingly endless cycle is an issue that affects firms of all sizes. And it’s more acute for small and midsized firms that don’t have dedicated HR departments. At those firms, much of the hard work of recruitment falls to executives and team leaders, who are already juggling a host of other pressing priorities. If you’ve ever blocked out your calendar for an afternoon of reviewing resumes and conducting interviews, you already know how difficult and disruptive this can be.

Interviews can be fun. It’s all the other stuff that is so painful.

So much recruitment work is routine drudgery. For many firm leaders, interviewing prospective hires can be energizing and enlightening. But coordinating schedules to book an interview? Screening 30 resumes to find the three candidates that are actually qualified? Posting a new job listing to online job-finding sites? That’s low-value work that is also incredibly time-consuming.

It’s also exactly the type of work that AI was made to take on. Even better, these AI capabilities have been built into reliable, efficient, trustworthy solutions from established providers that already know the profession and its needs.

What AI-enabled recruitment really looks like in everyday usage

How does AI-enabled recruitment really work? To better understand, let’s look at one of the top solutions available today. Paychex Recruiting Copilot, in partnership with Findem, is an AI-based tool designed specifically to relieve the administrative burden of recruitment to allow firms to focus on the most important aspects requiring human judgment and expertise. You start by describing the ideal employee for the role, focusing less on rigid rules for submissions and more on keywords, as you would in a search engine. Maybe you need someone in the Topeka area, and you’re looking specifically for startup experience. Enter all the relevant criteria in the tool and click “search.”

This is where AI sets itself apart from regular searches, going deeper into more sources to identify a shorter, more focused list of qualified job seekers who meet your criteria-- not 100 “maybe” candidates, but 10 “likely” candidates, for example. This curated candidate screening can significantly reduce the amount of time and effort required to sort through resumes, accelerating your path to outreach.

From there, the solution facilitates your contact with candidates, keeping them engaged at every step – a more natural, fluid, easy approach than endless email back-and-forths. Using an intuitive dashboard, you and your team can manage recruitment efforts more effectively, all in one place. Plus, all talent matches stay saved in your account for future reference – no need to start all over again.

Getting out of your AI comfort zone has never been more comfortable

By now, you’ve probably read about many potential applications of AI in accounting firms. Recruitment may be the easiest, most immediate way to put AI to work in your firm. The overly complex, fragmented world of job postings is about to change across all industries. This is the moment to take advantage of these changes and put your firm ahead in the race for talent.

Through the CPA.com Paychex Partner program, we make it easy to integrate these tools into your firm’s existing operations. And you can try them for free, using real data to search for real candidates. Start by exploring the CPA.com Paychex Partner Program to see how you can put Paychex Recruiting Copilot, in partnership with Findem, to work for your firm today.