The Importance of Making Room for Humans and AI in Recruitment OR Successful Hiring Strategies Must Combine Human Judgment with AI Insights
You’ve probably heard the horror stories about big brands using artificial intelligence (AI) to optimise their hiring processes. One of the most famous incidents happened several years ago when Amazon found out that its new recruiting engine didn’t like women [1]. For years, Amazon had been using AI to review job applicants’ CVs and give them a score out of five. The goal was to speed up the search for top talent. But they soon realised that the system taught itself to favour male candidates and penalised any resumes that featured the word “women”.
But technology has come a long way since then. Today, AI tools are rapidly being deployed across recruitment processes and introducing new ways to attract, screen, and hire top talent. As a simple example, hiring managers and HR professionals are using AI to improve candidate assessments. Not only can you create tests based on a specific role, but you can also track and monitor the applicant’s activity while taking the test. Once a candidate logs on, they are given a certain time window to complete the test, and the platform monitors their behaviour to determine if they’ve completed the test themselves or if they’ve copied and pasted their answers from elsewhere.
And these tools are already gaining traction. A recent Gallup survey [2] found that 93% of Fortune 500 Chief Human Resource Officers (CHROs) have already adopted AI technologies to improve their workflows. While the benefits are clear – such as greater efficiency, faster processes, and cost savings – this tech-driven approach can lack a personal touch.
As someone who has been working in HR for many years, this is why I don’t think AI will replace human recruiters anytime soon. But I do believe it will elevate the work we do, especially when it’s used strategically alongside recruitment and HR professionals.
Dawn of the AI interview
More and more, HR and recruitment teams are using AI to streamline the interview process, particularly when they have to sift through hundreds of applicants. This approach sees a candidate doing a video conference call with a bot, being asked a series of questions and then having their responses recorded and analysed. The goal is to filter and rank job applicants and provide hiring teams with a shortlist of candidates based on predetermined criteria.
But because the assessments are based on set rules, no leeway is given to someone who deviates from these parameters. Let’s imagine a mom has a gap in her CV because she took time off to raise her children; an AI tool could flag this as a sign of a lack of commitment or reliability and disqualify the candidate. But a human interviewer will likely have the sense to ask a candidate to explain what they were doing during this time.
It’s also important to keep in mind that AI can’t pick up on subtle shifts in tone or body language, and because it doesn’t understand emotions, it may have difficulty interpreting things like sarcasm or humour. Some systems can also struggle to interpret less common accents, which could cause the tool to ‘judge’ a candidate unfairly or miss important details in their replies.
At redPanda Software, our interview process entails spending a significant amount of time with candidates. We even have them present on how their values align with our core values. This is to assess cultural fit. If we were to choose someone based solely on a short video interview, I don’t believe we would find the best candidates.
In anything we do, we must remember that the hiring experience should be positive for the company and the applicant. According to a recent survey [3], more than half (52%) of candidates would turn down an otherwise appealing offer if they had a negative experience at any point during the recruitment process. AI delivers many benefits, but it can’t fully replace human insight and connection. Going forward, the most successful hiring strategies will be those that strike a balance between using AI to streamline and enhance the process, while still relying on human judgment, empathy, and intuition.
Sources:
1. BBC News. Amazon scrapped ‘sexist AI’ tool. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45809919
2. Gallup. AI in the Workplace: Answering 3 Big Questions. Retrieved from https://www.gallup.com/workplace/651203/workplace-answering-big-questions.aspx
3. BCG. What Job Seekers Wish Employers Knew. Retrieved from https://www.bcg.com/publications/2023/recruitment-recommendations-for-employers
