Article · 6-minute read
By Olivia Black – 15th May 2025
In today’s hyper-competitive talent market, speed isn’t a luxury, it’s a strategic advantage. Yet, for many mid-sized companies, hiring timelines are still painfully slow.
Recent figures revealed that the average time-to-hire in professional services is 47 days, while roles in finance, engineering and some other sectors can take even longer1. This is clearly problematic when top talent can be off the market in less than two weeks.
Artificial intelligence is transforming recruitment from a slow, manual process into a high-speed, high-accuracy operation. For small and mid-sized businesses competing with enterprise players for skilled professionals, AI can level the playing field but only if you know how to use it strategically.
For many companies, delays in hiring happen at a number of predictable stages:
Talent teams are flooded with applications, a majority of which are from unqualified candidates.
Recruitment teams and hiring managers might often disagree on what skills and behaviors are necessary for the role at hand.
Scheduling across busy calendars adds unnecessary days to the timeline.
Slow communication and offer cycles cost top-tier hires.
When hiring managers are balancing multiple roles or lack the support of a full-fledged recruitment function, these inefficiencies compound, and top candidates walk to competitors.
Addressing common misconceptions that humans will be completely replaced by robots, EY CEO Janet Truncale has emphasized that AI will not reduce EY’s 400,000-person workforce but will instead enable productivity gains, potentially allowing the firm to double in size without reducing headcount2.
“AI enhances employees’ performance, allowing them to focus on more complex, interesting tasks, making human roles more valuable, not obsolete.”
Janet Truncale, CEO
Indeed, AI tools in the hiring space are built to streamline repetitive, low-value tasks that clog up the process:
AI can parse and rank thousands of CVs in seconds based on skills, experience, and contextual data. Instead of filtering manually, recruiters get a shortlist of the most promising candidates.3
The AI-powered Role Profiler that is a key feature of our next-gen platform Wave Connect provides an instant recommendation on the behaviors most critical for success, simplifying and streamlining your hiring process.
The tool optimizes your understanding of success factors, aligns your team, and reduces stakeholder time by up to 89%.
Machine learning models analyze past successful hires and use that data to match new candidates not just on skills, but on predicted performance and cultural alignment.
Calendar integration bots can coordinate interview slots between candidates and hiring panels, often completing scheduling in hours instead of days.
AI chatbots can handle candidate FAQs, collect pre-screening info, and keep applicants warm while recruiters focus on high-touch tasks.
“AI as a tool can give us more time to focus on the high-value tasks that require the empathy, problem-solving, and nuance that only humans can provide.”4
Lindsey Zuloaga, Chief Data Scientist
L’Oreal faced a high number of applications and wanted to improve their candidate experience in order to ensure the best talent was progressing to later stages of the process.
L’Oreal introduced a Chatbot named Mya to help screen for their 5000+ vacancies, automating the initial stages of recruitment by answering candidate queries and conducting first-round interviews, freeing up human colleagues for more complex parts of the process.
To address these challenges, the firm leveraged AI to automate the extraction of crucial details from resumes, such as educational histories, work experiences, certifications, security clearances, and references. The data then underwent an approval process to ensure only relevant candidates were selected for government projects.
The implementation of AI-powered resume summarization led to several positive outcomes:
You don’t need a full AI transformation to start seeing results. Even adding just one AI capability — like smart resume parsing or AI-powered role profiling — can knock time off your hiring programs and allow you to focus on more strategic human-centered tasks.
Where are the bottlenecks? Look at your past 10 hires to identify any areas.
We would naturally recommend to start by utilizing our AI Role Profiler to slash time and align stakeholders on what really matters.
Use data to prove ROI and get leadership buy-in for scaling AI usage.
If you’re considering using AI to reduce time to hire, these are some of the KPIs to benchmark and track:
Time to Hire
35–45 days
12–21 days
Role Profiling
4 hours
<1 hour
Resume Screening Time (per role)
6–8 hours
<1 hour
Interview Scheduling Time
2–4 days
<1 hour
Candidate Drop-Off Rate
25–35%
<15%
“It’s like the early days of self-driving cars: You still need your hands on the wheel…”
Trey Causey, Head of Responsible AI & Data Science
Trey Causey, Head of Responsible AI at Indeed, advocates for a trust-but-verify strategy, balancing innovation with regulation compliance in AI hiring practices.7
Fast hiring doesn’t mean careless hiring. When used well, AI amplifies human intelligence, helping your team move faster without sacrificing quality or fairness. It gives your recruiters time to focus on what they do best: connecting with people, understanding fit, and driving long-term value through talent.
If your hiring process feels like it’s stuck in slow motion, maybe now is the time to give it a tech-powered push.
Get in touch to discuss the evolving world of talent acquisition with one of our experts or set up a demo of our AI-powered Role Profiler.
Olivia is our Client Solutions and Onboarding Director at Saville Assessment.
You can connect with her on LinkedIn here.
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