Indeed’s new AI assistant takes aim at sourcing

Indeed on Monday launched Sourcing Assistant, its new AI-powered assistant designed to help recruiters at the top of the funnel.

Sourcing Assistant aims to evolve sourcing beyond the keyword query, by identifying potential candidates with related skill sets and recent candidate activity across Indeed’s pool of hundreds of millions of profiles.

Indeed’s “Smart Sourcing product came out a few years ago, and it was a big upgrade,” Indeed’s VP of product, Thomas Bergman, told HR Brew ahead of the launch. “But then the actual querying and reviewing of results was still super tedious and time consuming.”

New AI tools and trends on both sides of the hiring relationship have upset an already tenuous equilibrium when it comes to candidate matching. In fact, 71% of hiring managers say higher volume has made it harder to find qualified candidates, according to a recent Harris Poll survey conducted for Indeed.

“It’s really hard to find all of the best candidates, and even if you have these big Boolean fields, you’re not going to get everyone,” he said.

Recruiters can continue to run manual keyword searches; the manual sourcing workflow in Smart Sourcing remains unchanged. But the new AI-powered assistant serves as a supplement that can search Indeed’s massive candidate pool beyond the scope of what a human can produce with strategic and creative boolean queries.

The assistant ingests job descriptions and generates qualifications for the role. Recruiters can edit or change the criteria manually in natural language. The tool surfaces up matches to evaluate and further train the AI on the candidate profile. The hiring assistant also collects rejection information to continually train on the types of criteria that make a good fit for the organization or role.

“The query is just one tiny little bit,” he said. “It doesn’t capture the full human experience of everything that we need to do in the [candidate] search,” so Indeed’s AI intake process mimics the more human hiring manager-recruiter process of extrapolating.

After training the assistant on the search, recruiters can set limits, adjusting caps on candidate outreach, who to exclude, or when to stop. The tool prompts recruiters to set daily outreach limits, but prioritizes quality over hitting the daily limit. Recruiters can track and watch the tool’s progress and begin outreach to the best, most interested candidates.

Sourcing Assistant is currently available to employers in the US with an Indeed Smart Sourcing subscription, but Bergman expects the customer base to expand in the next year.