I once landed a job largely because I’d worn a kilt to the interview.
I’d broken my ankle two weeks before (word of advice: don’t try moving a table downstairs by yourself) and was in a cast; I couldn’t fit into trousers. My then-girlfriend had a kilt and I thought, why not?
It was a fun icebreaker, and unusual enough to keep me in the interviewer’s mind. I did, for disclosure, have some of the skills they were looking for.
I thought about the kilt recently after speaking with the head of a Spanish HR startup called Shakers, which is developing video AI that can conduct job interviews. CEO Héctor Mata assured me that the tech is realistic and will help companies “collect 10k data points per candidate.”
I’m sure it’s pretty good — I was promised a demo but haven’t seen it yet — because fairly convincing AI does exist. But I started thinking about all the humanness we risk losing by using AI in the hiring process. What would AI have done if it had interviewed kilt-wearing me? Would that have been one of the 10k data points? How can anyone develop rapport with a computer?
I spoke to 15 startups about how they’re using AI in recruitment and learned that while many are very keen to use some tools, they’re extremely wary about handing full control over to AI. “No one dreams of landing their dream gig by sweet-talking a robot, just as nobody wants their first impression of your company to be a clunky chatbot grilling them on their hobbies,” says Pavel Shynkarenko, founder of Cyprus-based HR tech company Mellow.
And yet that’s pretty much where we’re headed. AI is rapidly changing and in some cases warping hiring — from both ends. Candidates are using AI to write cover letters and tweak their CVs in anticipation of AI screening.
A friend of mine is searching for a job right now and I asked her candidly: is AI writing your cover letters? “Yes, of course,” she told me, with an eyeroll.
Companies are being flooded by applications knocked out in seconds by ChatGPT. “We hired for two roles recently and got 500+ applications for a content writer role and 400+ for a product designer role,” says Jaron Soh, CEO of mental health app Voda. “I heavily discounted applicants with cover letters that looked like they were written purely with AI.”
Recruiters have had to get good at spotting this: the hallmarks include a lot of em dashes and a voice that feels blandly objective. Other tells include “a saccharine tone and paragraphs that looked like they were simply paraphrased versions of our job listing,” says Soh.
Soh did his sorting by hand, but a lot of companies are using AI as a smart assistant to screen the tsunami of AI CVs they’re receiving and then to rank who might fit best for a given role. “This creates an arms race where AI systems are increasingly evaluating AI-generated content,” says Andreas Bundi, a hiring specialist in Berlin.
And yes, a few companies are already deploying video AI: you can watch examples on TikTok of interviewees who’ve had to suffer while these systems glitch mid-interview.
Can AI fix the AI problem?
So what’s the solution to too much AI in hiring? Often, the surprising answer is… more AI.
Many people told me that tech can help fix the problems it’s creating. “Recruitment was already pretty crap and noisy and it’s getting noisier. AI is taking a broken process and making it worse,” says London-based founder Matt Wilson. And yet his four-month-old company, called Jack & Jill, has developed twin “AI agents” to help jobseekers land interviews and companies find hires.
Jack is the agent for applicants — the bot interviews jobseekers about their dream roles and then scours the internet for relevant job postings. Jill does the reverse of this, helping companies find suitable candidates. The service is free for jobseekers, while companies pay a small fee (10% of the first-year salary) if Jill helps them hire someone.
“Recruitment is such a dehumanising experience,” Wilson says. “And I know this is counterintuitive but our users tell us it’s actually humanising to have our AI bot listen to them talk about their dream jobs.”
Amos Wittenberg, CEO of London-based Unwritten, a company that helps assess climate change risks, uses AI to write job descriptions, to take notes during interviews and to write follow-up emails to candidates. “But I’m not at all comfortable using AI to do anything that could make the candidate experience worse,” he says.
Some companies are already adapting their hiring processes to get around the AI problem. For example, Paris-based Tocco Earth, a marketplace connecting producers of biomaterials with brands, now asks candidates to send video introductions, Anh Ng., the company’s head of operations, tells me (which will presumably work until deepfakes become the next recruitment minefield).
Don’t get high on your own supply
It might be reassuring to hear that AI recruitment toolmakers see a limit for how much AI should be in hiring.
Vienna-based Fonio, for example, develops AI that answers the phone on behalf of small companies; some of its clients use this tool to conduct preliminary job interviews. For example, if you’re hiring someone to drive a truck, the AI will ask you if you have the right licence. “We’re an AI company and I wouldn’t use AI for recruitment beyond general screening,” says Daniel Keinrath, Fonio’s CEO. “Otherwise it would set too much of a weird tone from the start.”
German company Tl;dv meanwhile has developed an AI notetaker which companies use to record their interviews. “But I’d find it dystopian to use AI exclusively to hire people,” says CEO Raphael Allstadt.
AI doesn’t do gut feeling
I returned to Bundi, the recruitment specialist. Of course he’s biased but after seeing AI tools in action, he’s confident the tech isn’t outdoing human recruiters.
Recently, he hired for a role in a European city which was strictly office-based, but despite plastering this location requirement all over the job description, he still received a huge volume of applicants applying from elsewhere. So he tried AI to see if it could fare better in filtering them out. “In this case, the AI did no better (possibly worse) than us humans,” he says.
And when it comes to the most important bit of hiring, the final yes or no decision, humans have AI well beaten, he thinks. “Despite all the lip service recruiters and employers pay to ‘structured’ interviewing, much of hiring still relies on intuition.”
And he doesn’t think AI can make gut feeling decisions. “The thing that gets lost in the AI hype cycle is that recruitment still comes with enormous human ambiguity and subtleties. For example, we talk a lot about culture fit and in hiring, but how can we train an AI to truly understand a company’s culture?”
This left me thinking that anyone who hands their whole recruitment process over to AI is a fool. And I feel confident enough to keep my kilt on hand for future interviews.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/is-ai-breaking-recruitment/
