AI – Radical Change Ahead for Talent Acquisition

AI – Radical Change Ahead for Talent Acquisition

October 14, 2024

The degree of interest in Artificial Intelligence (AI) within the world of recruitment is enormous at the moment.  Many in Talent Acquisition roles are licking their lips at the opportunity to automate their processes, reduce time-to-hire, and lower administrative burdens.

Currently a lot of the discussion about the deployment of AI capability into recruitment processes is focused on generating efficiencies in areas such as resume screening, interview analysis and improving candidate experience. However, there is less discussion about improving recruitment outcomes, particularly when we define outcomes as the selection of candidates that become high performers.        

Here’s three examples of where the introduction of AI tools might bring efficiency but not better results (yet).

  • Whilst AI may be able to sift through piles of resumes more efficiently than the human recruiter, if the resumes are still being matched against an inaccurate position description, you will still be matching candidates against the wrong criteria, just in a shorter timeframe.
  • If your AI tool is using resume keyword search analysis as its methodology for shortlisting, it is just more efficiently progressing candidates on criteria that have a low chance of predicting high performance – job titles, time in roles and unsubstantiated claims of possessing criteria that may or may not be relevant to job success.
  • If your AI tool is interpreting candidates’ interview responses it may produce a quicker summary of key data, but it may not remove interviewer biases and stereotypes that often override objective decision making on the basis of interviews.

So, you might be thinking right about now that I am anti-AI.  That is not the case. I believe AI will eventually completely revolutionise the way recruitment is done.  The problem we have at the moment is that AI’s capability for recruitment is still in its relative infancy, and so if we want to achieve the best recruitment and selection outcomes right now, we have to do more than just apply AI. 

This includes moving beyond the traditional position description and insisting that our clients work with us to more closely examine the critical scenarios in the role and determine the candidate success criteria. It means removing conscious and unconscious biases that play out in interviews and adopting candidate evaluation processes that don’t corrupt decisions.  And it also means adding selection methods to our process to bring in more objective, relevant and reliable data.

As we do this we can better understand what we want from AI to take recruitment to the next level of effectiveness in being able to identify high performers.  This includes:

Whilst AI will bring enormous efficiencies to recruitment we must not take our eye off the importance of generating effective outcomes above all else. The greatest value we can acquire from a recruitment process is a long-term high performer. We need to put our minds to this now as we bring on AI capability to support that work, and to help us shape the future where AI can provide most if not all of the total solution.
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