AI for Recruiting: Boon or Bust?

On our minds

A while back, a post by a student at Johns Hopkins University caught our eye: “Dear Hiring Managers, Please Reject Us!” What followed was a plea for hiring managers to better communicate, particularly with candidates who have made it through multiple rounds of interviewing. The abundance of ghost jobs, as indicated by a mismatch of millions between the number of positions posted and monthly hires, compounds an already demoralizing experience.

It’s rough out there for hiring managers, as well. Thanks to a plethora of professional networking platforms and job boards, an attractive position can generate 1,000 applicants within a few days. Roughly 11,000 applications are submitted on LinkedIn every minute, many of them by bots.

AI is a huge part of recruitment on both ends, with some organizations using bots to conduct interviews, assess tone and language, and even collect facial recognition data. Thirty-five percent of respondents to a recent Resume.org survey said they use AI to filter out candidates even at late stages of the hiring process — despite well-documented evidence of AI  bias. This has led job-seekers to come up with creative ways to trick the system.

It’s not just hiring that’s becoming more hands-off. Workers complain of a lack of training and investment. Wharton Professor Peter Cappelli reports that the percentage of vacancies filled internally was  90% until the 1970s. Today, that figure has dropped to 24%. Meanwhile, growth rates in self- and temp-employment began to outpace those of traditional employment around 2008, during the Great Recession. In fact, one study found that 94% of new jobs created between 2005 and 2015 were contract or temporary labor. Training employees costs money and time. Employers may be unwilling to invest in employees they expect to leave, and for their part, employees who don’t have a “ladder” to climb are going to company-hop.

It’s too easy to blame AI and remote work for what is ultimately a shortsighted HR strategy. Things like fake job listings placed to raise a company's profile, or an unwillingness to prioritize employee mentorship, indicate a failure to invest in our greatest resource: people. Organizations that “get it” know that their relationship with an employee begins at recruitment. Those who authentically respect their talent want to see employees succeed holistically, not just for the bottom line. These organizations also understand that a stressful work environment, such as feeling you don’t know how to do your job, can weigh on an employee’s mental health, a critical, though often underestimated, factor in output and productivity.

AI is a tool, and tools are, arguably, neutral. It’s the decisions we make, how we choose to use tools, that make all the difference. An AI interview early in the hiring process has proven to be a more effective screener than a traditional automated process that only looks at resumes for identifying candidates who do well in the next phase — a human interview. Unless your new candidate will spend their days with AI rather than real-life colleagues, person-to-person hiring is also key. Furthermore, the entire process must be transparent, including the role of AI in hiring and the types of data the company collects.

Training and mentoring are possible, even if everyone is remote and asynchronous. Back in 2022, New York Times columnist Jessica Grose wrote that companies could be more intentional about relationship-building, since after-work drinks and other informal networking opportunities often disadvantage caregivers. Maybe, she posits, the move to remote work will force this change. In some ways, this has come to fruition; in others, it hasn't.

We’ve written about how remote companies might look to schools that successfully deliver online education. A key commonality among these schools is flexibility. Direct supervisors have the freedom to override broader “company policy” and make decisions that best suit their team's needs. This may mean assigning mentorship relationships and responsibilities, having a few face-to-face meetings each year, or implementing a tiered communication and check-in program that ramps up in the first few months of employment before gradually tapering off. A thoughtful use of AI can also position workers to succeed with AI chat functions for peer review and interim feedback loops.

The key here is communication. Ask new or newly promoted (or really, all!) employees what they need to thrive. Is it more in-person instruction? A specific at-home tech tool? A dedicated mentor? Written or video instructions to refer back to? Without asking, we'll never know what others need.

There is no question that the workforce and workplace have changed. Many of the perks foundational to past generations of workers — pensions, internal promotion, job security — are long gone. Meanwhile, workers have made it clear that they value flexibility and are increasingly viewing “return to office” mandates as hostile. Some see them as a way for companies to engage in quiet layoffs without being forthright. Workers also value skills development, with young workers ranking “learning and development” as the most important job  benefit, aside from insurance.

In this brave, new, flexible work world, the onus of mentoring the next generation of workers is on all of us, whether those workers will be our colleagues for a decade, two years, or just two months. But the onus for keeping the workplace person-centered in an era of bots and cost-cutting lies within each organization. In addition, more socially cohesive organizations enable peer learning, so it need not be top down. As we grapple with balancing flexibility with control, colocation with distribution, consider that  we all benefit from a better-trained workforce, whether at the company or macro (economic) level.

From the archives

Communication is always on our mind at PLASTARC. A few years ago, we wrote about the importance of intentional language to avoid unintended microaggressions and foster real  diversity and inclusion in the workplace. In 2021, we focused on how casual conversation improves mental health. In late 2020, as we were contemplating returning to the office full-time, we noticed that sometimes you had to work harder to foster connections with a dispersed workforce.

Since we’re all thinking about robots these days, we’ll leave you with this Kraftwerk video, an homage to the innovator, and the robot, in all of us.