More and more recruitment agencies are using AI and Machine Learning to help them reduce their dependency on traditional human-centric headhunting. The question we need to ask is how does this tech fare in challenging human intuition?
Recruitment in its standard form is very labour intensive and time consuming, requiring recruiters to sit at a desk for hours searching for the right candidates and churning out large volumes of messages to those deemed suitable. Many times I have wondered myself.. “Isn’t there an automated way that this can be done for me?” After all, I interact with AI all the time.
For example, when Netflix recommends a show I might be interested or Facebook shows me a article I might enjoy all based on my past behaviors and what I have liked already. There is no human acting as a middleman for these types of interactions to work. Sometimes however, things might not work as expected. Like Netflix suddenly recommending I watch “Peppa Pig” because I watched “Orange is the New Black”.
One of the main advantages of HR tech is freeing up teams so they can focus more on the elements of the hiring process that genuinely require human beings, such as giving support to candidates as they go through the emotionally-taxing process of changing jobs.
There is a further advantage in that algorithms can help to avoid bias, are blind to prejudices and help to create a more systematic data driven assessment.
This new tech is already in the early stages and many companies are adapting to this new way of recruitment relying on robots to mine data and make the best matching decisions based on algorithms and machine learning. In the future, algorithms will connect recruiters with a selection of candidates who will need real human guidance in very specific tech sectors focusing more on quality over quantity. Knowing how to make use of AI, without seeing it as being a direct replacement for professional recruiters looks like the most sensible approach for now.
