AI and Recruitment

How do organisations adopt and implement AI systems in their recruiting processes? It’s a bit of a minefield. We get job specs in now where you can clearly see they have been put through the ChatGPT grinder. A job spec looking for a Systems Administrator who has 5+ years’ experience on Enterprise Architecture? ChatGPT is a brilliant tool but it has its weaknesses and if not used correctly can lead to situations where job specifications are wildly above the actual day-to-day requirements of a role, which is leading to longer time to hire in certain cases as companies continuing to search for someone they don’t actually need and pass over candidates who are eminently capable of performing the role.

AI as the Recruitment Panacea!

My own LinkedIn feed is full of ads for a “Build your own AI Recruitment Process”. Looking at the marketing on LinkedIn it’s just Bish, Bash, Bosh all done charge a fee and move on. The client is supposedly left with an AI Recruitment engine that will seamlessly meet all their needs moving forward. Really? In this brave new world, it’s a purely transactional action, the Candidate has been reduced to a commodity that will be filtered down from hundreds of applicants to a shiny new hire at the push of a button. Recruitment once upon a time had a reputation for Barrow Boy selling. This very definitely harkens back to those days; it has more than a whiff of opportunistic leveraging of companies’ uncertainty around how to implement AI to make a quick buck.

AI’s strength and Weaknesses

AI is fantastic for certain recruitment tasks, for instance AI can parse CVs faster and at a better level than most humans, it’s a brilliant application for it. However, the weakness is that it operates on the basis that what is in the CV is true. Tools like HireVue or Hiretual stack rank candidates based on fit, again primarily based on the written word. Some organisations use AI Chatbots to handle communications, answer questions and schedule interviews. It’s a useful tool, but you wonder about the message it sends to candidates. Others use bots for automated response and rejection, again treating the candidate like a commodity.

Some large household names use AI screening of automated video interviews to screen candidates, analyse speech, facial expressions and use of language. Humans have evolved over millions of years to master the subtleties of body language and tone in social interactions. Reducing an interview to a one-way video of a candidate answering questions is a totally artificial and frankly daft way to find out what a person is actually like in a real situation. Any candidate worth their salt will have practiced their response numerous times before they record a video response. My strong feeling is the result is totally undermined by the practice efforts, rendering any analysis or conclusions drawn to be decidedly iffy, at best.

AI in HR

IBM announced in May this year that 94% of what they called routine tasks in HR were now being handled by AI. Forbes Magazine reported on this, what constituted routine tasks included AI agents writing performance reviews, creating development plans and coaching managers, presumably all done by IBM watsonx. Tasking an AI agent to do a performance review is certainly one way of ensuring it gets done; however, it removes a crucial human interaction between manager and the employee reporting to them. It would be incredibly interesting to get official IBM employee feedback on the process and see what the employee view of the new automated HR processes are. Reddit is frequently the home of the disgruntled but the comments there on this topic are a very interesting barometer. Organisations are built around people; they are not commodities; too much automation will damage an organisation in time. People won’t feel as bought into the corporate culture and retention rates will suffer and talent will be lost.

The Value of Experience

A lot of AI tools also come into their own on a scale that most organisations in the Irish marketplace just don’t have. Let’s not forget that people are expensive, and AI certainly has a place in cost reduction. Recruiters are no different, they come with a cost, but they also come with an attribute that AI can’t replicate, market knowledge and experience. Recruitment is a unique business in many ways in that every interaction has 2 Clients, the Company and the Candidate. AI as it has been applied to date has been significantly weighted towards the Company side of the equation, relegating the Candidate to very much a subsidiary position. Recruitment  has always been a 2 way street and will continue to be. The number of candidates who now won’t apply for certain companies is growing as those companies get a reputation for being a new type of Black Hole, a CV Black Hole, where bar an automated response there will be no further communication and no feedback forthcoming as to why you were unsuccessful.

Recruiters need to communicate clearly to their Clients what they have that AI can’t replicate. Fundamentally market knowledge is key and that is why it is still of real value to use a professional Recruiter. Recruiters need to bring their experience and market knowledge to the table and leverage it for their Clients’ benefit. There are CVs that are works of fiction. If you are around long enough you get to know why so and so left that role or who didn’t work out where and why.  There are candidates who apply for roles we advertise that we would never submit because we know the real story behind why they left site A or B. Or you will notice that the 6 months when a candidate went into Company C has been omitted from their CV and dates stretched or travel or a personal project inserted instead. Equally there are hiring managers whose work style won’t suit certain candidates and their preferences. It’s a competitive market for talent, Recruiters build relationships and trust with Candidates, that relationship can be leveraged for a Client’s benefit. Negotiation is a key element, it’s a nuanced process, divorced from the binary world of AI. Understanding a Candidate’s personal motivation, their preferences, their bargaining range or increasingly things like the trade-off been commuting time and a higher salary or remote/hybrid days are subtleties that remain in the human domain for the moment.

AI certainly has a role but understanding and mastering these components where they add value is how Recruiters can continue to thrive.