The recruitment landscape is undergoing a shift with the advent of artificial intelligence (AI). Both job seekers and recruiters are increasingly relying on AI, leading to a chaotic scenario that is affecting the hiring process.
Josh Holbrook, a software engineer, found himself in unfamiliar territory when he was screened by an AI chatbot instead of a human recruiter. His decade-old résumé, created in a technical format popular among academics, was incompatible with new automated recruitment platforms. He had to resort to a professional service to update his résumé in an AI-friendly format.
The Society for Human Resource Management found that about 40% of large-scale employers were already deploying AI in HR-related activities like recruitment. AI is now leveraged to write job descriptions, judge an applicant’s skills, power recruiting chatbots, and rate a candidate’s responses. Ian Siegel, the CEO of ZipRecruiter, estimated that nearly three-fourths of all résumés were never seen by humans.
Some job hunters have decided to fight fire with fire, turning to programs that use AI to optimize their résumés and apply to hundreds of jobs at a time. But the emerging AI-versus-AI recruitment battle is bad news for everyone. It turns hiring into a depersonalized process, inundates hiring managers, and reinforces weaknesses in the system it’s designed to improve.
Automation in recruitment isn’t new. After job sites like Monster and LinkedIn made it easy for people to apply for jobs in the early 2010s, companies adopted applicant-tracking systems to manage the deluge of online applications. Now most résumés are first seen by software designed to evaluate a person’s experience and education and rank them accordingly.
AI is supposed to fix this mess, saving companies time and money by outsourcing even more of the hiring process to machine-learning algorithms. In late 2019, Unilever said it had saved 100,000 hours and about $1 million in recruitment costs with the help of automated video interviews.
However, the AI-driven recruitment process is far from perfect. It has turned hiring into a depersonalized process, inundated hiring managers, and reinforced weaknesses in the system it’s designed to improve. The pressure from higher-ups to use AI, despite its imperfections, only seems to be exacerbating the situation.
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