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It's been a hard year for recruiting leaders. Those in the technology sector have seen jobs vanish as hiring slows down and layoffs become the norm.
Yes, there are still many open jobs, and unemployment hovers near record lows. But the challenge for employers hiring today is that workers don’t want to move unless they have to. With economic uncertainty still prevalent, nobody wants to be last in and first out if more cuts were to come. Unfortunately, the job requisitions don’t stop.
Yet as I talked to recruiting leaders at the ERE Recruiting Conference last month, I found that the room was full of optimistic realism. Maybe the long-promised recession would pass gently? Companies aren’t talking about recession fears nearly as much as some make it seem to be, although that could certainly change.
And since there is little any of us can do about the macroeconomic picture, the talk of the conference shifted to all things AI. Here’s why AI matters for recruiters.
AI Can Support the Recruiting Process
AI dominated recruiters’ conversations at this year’s conference for a reason. While the technology was barely a blip on the radar at last year’s conference, the event also took place before the mainstream application of ChatGPT. Today, it’s hard to find any talent acquisition content that doesn’t at least mention the prospect of AI.
When I informally polled the audience on whether AI was part of their considerations around new technology, nearly everyone raised their hands. Perhaps it’s not all that surprising since recruiters have been early adopters of AI. Chatbots, for instance, have been most prevalent in recruiting, so it may be a natural continuum to now see AI finding its way into candidate sourcing and screening — though the screening part comes with some caveats of human intervention.
Ultimately, talent acquisition leaders say they see a lot of ways that AI can help them do their job more effectively. “Nobody gets into recruiting because they like to change applicant statuses in an applicant tracking system,” one attendee told me.
Could AI be the answer to doing away with the administrative tasks that can dominate a recruiter's day? If a hiring technology can schedule and manage an interview process, why can’t it also change the status from “Pending Interview” to “Interviewed” after an interview is complete?
Nobody I talked to had huge ambitions for what they wanted AI to help them do. One person was using a custom ChatGPT prompt to write outreach emails based on a person’s background, using the technology to speed up the process, though not insanely so.
Another person I spoke with said he wanted better chatbot performance so that people wouldn’t have to call as frequently. A person at a tech firm said she hoped that AI-enabled sourcing could help them replace an individual they lost due to cutbacks.
The consensus seemed to be around improving the process, rather than reinventing the wheel. There are plenty of repetitive tasks that need to be completed in talent acquisition that could be more intelligently managed and scaled with AI.
And while a lot of the talk about AI has been about the jobs they’ll replace, David Danks, a professor of data science and philosophy at the University of California San Diego, told the audience that jobs are much more likely to change rather than be eliminated. And in his view, recruiting is probably one profession that will change quite a bit.
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Related Article: Why Is AI Adoption for Recruiting Just Crawling Along?
Not Helping With Decisions … Yet
What’s not on the table for most recruiters is having AI assess, rank and make decisions on candidates. Focusing on search and communication steers most professionals clear of the existential question of AI for their profession. That’s leaving talent acquisition leaders confident that they can integrate current AI tools that don’t necessarily do more than scale processes that have to be manually completed today.
But let’s not get too complacent, either. Those ethical questions are coming. And they are probably coming sooner than most expect, with significant legal and ethical hurdles ahead. But for now, talent acquisition leaders welcome the help — in human or technology form.
