AI Recruiting Arms Race: The Candidates are Multiplying
The candidates are multiplying - and all their resumes all look…the same?
Hiring from and through your network will become the most critical talent pool in 2024.
AI has equipped candidates faster than recruiting teams. Since the market contraction in mid 2022, talent teams have been gutted - leaving them understaffed and under-resourced. With over 260,000 workers laid off in tech over the last 12 months, there’s more active talent on the market with fewer in demand (tech, remote) open roles.
In the US there’s been a nearly 20% increase in applicants.
9% of jobs on LinkedIn are fully remote and those roles attract almost half of all applications.
And with an uptick of hiring in December, proposed interest rate cuts in March, momentum is only building.
Looking at 2024, LinkedIn found on average 40% of workers planned to find a new role.
A recruiter shared with me that she’d had a role online for 72 hours and received 1,500 applicants. She didn’t know where to start. Posts are pulled offline sometimes hours after they’re live - flooded with resumes.
This has been driven in part with new advances in AI powered tools available to candidates. Need your resume rewritten to match the job post? Done. Need a custom cover letter? Done. Want to have an AI automatically apply to jobs on your behalf? Done. Want real time answers to interviewer questions? Done. Need that technical assessment completed? Done and done.
While teams can be augmented, scaled back, and redeployed with AI support throughout businesses, the last place leaders are looking to invest is in hiring. If we only need a few good hires this year, why would we give you software to be faster at that? So smaller talent teams are left with thousands of applicants for a few openings that all appear to be well qualified…without the tools to sort through them. Forget skills based hiring - how can teams make hires at all?
The first approach: fight fire with fire.
That must be the answer - you have to use AI in hiring to fight back against…all the AI in hiring. Going through demos of tools to augment the screening process you see the AI content loop being created: an AI is asked to craft a compelling version of a resume based on a job description for the candidate -> then the AI screening tool screens candidate resumes for language that aligns with your job descriptions. It’s really two AI tools optimizing for each other.
Add more automated screening?
Ok - so let’s add in a secondary stage where we screen people using behavioral interview questions, or maybe a skills test. Candidates pop these questions into their AI bot and boom we’re no further along. Fine - then let’s use video. It’s going to analyze facial expressions and ask questions that penalize long gaps or recognize when people are typing, copying, pasting…not a great look. If you have to pull out surveillance facial tic measuring tools to narrow your applicant pool this isn’t inspiring much trust. Which at this point is pretty broken on both sides.
The middle ground looks like checks and balances but doesn’t do much to solve the 1,500 applications problem.
No more resumes, only verified profiles. One proposed application of blockchain technology was a way to verify and validate your work experiences, responsibilities, and skills. That could be a path forward, although not completely practical yet.
Reference checks early and often. AI tools for faster, more extensive reference or background checks through candidate networks will become popular - again with a way to check for AI generated replies and ID verification.
Assessment platforms catering to all functions. And ending take home assignments in favor of assessment platforms that include plagiarism detection and AI guardrails.
Designing hiring processes becomes less about finding fair ways to determine strengths and provide spaces for candidates to demonstrate their skill sets and more about safeguarding against AI enabled fraud. And, ironically, all for these folks to work at your organization where they’ll need to leverage AI in their job.
In the short term, organizations may leverage lack of trust and transparency in hiring decisions to continue the push for RTO - even if it’s just RTO for interviews. It’s hard to use a chatbot in a 1/1 when you’re sitting in a conference room across from your interviewer. While more expensive in the short term, it would reduce the costs of bad hires in the long term.
But, I predict the first response will be a significant rise in referral hiring of known talent - a continuation of the “hidden” job market (happening now) where networks are leveraged more and more to bring in hires that can be referenced and validated by people one or two degrees removed from your organization. These hires will ultimately be seen as lower risk.
And finally - something that companies should be leading the way with in conversations with candidates is AI transparency. How does your organization use AI? How do you expect candidates to use AI in interviews? As employees? And, critically, how do you leverage AI in your hiring decisions? How is that technology audited? What checks and balances exist?
AI is an imperfect technology. Hiring is an imperfect decision. With the right mix of both - perhaps we can strive for a more perfect talent function. But currently, it’s a race we’re losing.
Don’t blame the candidates - blame the sytem. And work to fix it!
P.S. Don’t blame the candidates. Hiring, networking, applying - has for too long felt like an impenetrable labyrinth with no clear way in, out, or “fair” rules. If they can get through screening, they’re met with hiring teams that lie to them, recruiters that ghost, offers they can’t effectively negotiate with “real” market data, and benefits that come and go at the whims of “market conditions” to work roles that may be laid off from 6mos later. An extreme but perfect example of candidate’s fighting back: the r/overemployed phenomenon, which wouldn’t exist if teams had realistically scoped hiring needs at any point in the last 4 years.
I have worked with intensely talented people to build and rebuild their resumes to communicate their experiences and skills - and if a chatbot can get them there faster? Great. Use the tools available to you! Everyone else is. I’ve even heard of candidates leveraging chatbots to practice negotiating their offers - bravo. We need equalization instead of information asymmetry for candidates and companies to rebuild trust and cut through the AI noise.
