Where Boomers once dominated the job market, there are now Boomers, Gen-Xers, and Millennials to contend with. Inundated by an insurmountable number of candidate resumes, HR finds itself locked in a tedious and time consuming process of weeding out low quality talent. Artificial intelligence promises to alleviate that with quicker, more accurate extraction of quality hires, but I can promise you, AI is not going find any better a candidate for you.
AI, as it exists today, is simply going pile more resumes on your desk.
For a machine to sniff out a quality candidate in your pipeline, an ENORMOUS amount of data has to constantly be provided, because, as is the nature of machine learning, it learns as it goes. A hole in the data creates a void of knowledge, such as an inability to answer a question, and the only resolution to closing that gap is by someone inserting that missing data into the database for “next time.”
That in itself creates a bad candidate experience.
What you are really getting with AI is a kick-ass keyword search that constantly needs an influx of semantic language to function efficiently.
But the amount of learning a computer needs to do your job better and faster than you, really, is miniscule, given that you don’t have to be that smart to be a recruiter to begin with.
Seriously though, the accuracy of decision making by artificial intelligence in recruiting really depends on the amount of quality data it is given.
But here’s the rub.
That data comes from the subjective, aggregate variables of any given top performers your company considers quality of hire.
If finding quality of hire is predicated on the performance of an above average employee over a given amount of time, logic says all you have to do is make the requirements for any position predicated on the collective experience of that “super-employee,” right?
Collective experience includes education, on-the-job experience, intelligence, personality, and reasoning skills, among other things. Things that are both qualitative and quantitative.
The problem is, AI isn’t capable of this yet. Humans, while largely simple, are unpredictable. All AI is capable of at the moment is rudimentary guesswork based on the data it is given.
True Artificial Intelligence, in the way it has promised to make recruiting more efficient, to make a truly human judgement, needs to asses all the qualities of an individual and fit that individual into the designation of “quality.” But people are fricking crazy and irrational. As ridiculous as it sounds, a computer has to be just as fricking crazy and irrational to be able to make a sound judgement of character and on company fit, given all the unique variables as they pertain to the requisites of a quality hire for your company.
That simply doesn’t exist yet. And likely won’t exist for another decade.
All you get today is a piece of tech umbrellaed under an overplayed buzzword and grand promise that does nothing more than put more work in front of you, more efficiently.
Recruiting AI does nothing more than make an elaborate guess. A job any recruiter can do.
So, congratulations. If you’ve purchased any AI tech for your recruiting strategy recently, you’ve just been had.
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