The subject of Artificial Intelligence (AI) really fascinates me and working in the recruitment sector, there is a lot of talk about whether AI is going to remove the need for recruiters completely in the future. However, I believe it has been established that although AI will be very prominent in the future of how companies recruit, it won’t eliminate the role of a recruiter, just enhance the way they work.
So, I have been reading a lot of blogs about AI in recruitment, and recently attended the LinkedIn Talent Intelligence Summit where I heard from Adelyn Zhou on ‘How to Thrive in an Era of Machine Learning’, where she spoke about artificial Intelligence and how it is likely to affect the recruitment sector. However, what I haven’t heard much about is how AI is going to affect the candidate looking for a job. How will it impact on their applications, interviewing processes, references, offers, and even negotiating the best deal for themselves?
We know that in the 21st century privacy online is slowly disappearing, and although there are now more regulations in place to keep our data private, how will that work in terms of AI and machine learning? If AI software is going to be trawling through online profiles to find candidates, does that mean they are going to be keeping all of this data, and if so, what is it they are looking for?
If we take the humanity out of a CV, and the search is done on key words alone, you don’t get a feel for a candidate’s personal values or character, which for a recruiter might well be the main reason they might be making the introduction to a company in the first place. Some skills can be automated but finding the right personality fit cannot – certainly not in the short term of AI’s capability.
It will be interesting to see how AI develops in the future and if candidates will have to change the way they write their CVs to ensure they meet the AI searching parameters, but it saddens me that ‘key words’ may be the only way to get you a job in the future, rather than being the best candidate for the job. Nothing beats the good old-fashioned human touch, with the experience to identify something really interesting in a CV and the ability to pick up the phone and really connect with the person on the other end.
Here’s to hoping AI impacts that relationship positively.
