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Why Employers Should Stop Relying On AI As A Recruitment Tool

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As has been written here and elsewhere, one of the great mysteries of the current economic environment is how businesses of all sorts can be complaining of staff shortages at the same time as even the best qualified young people struggle to get on to the employment ladder. In the normal scheme of things, one would expect employers to be able to hold out for only the most talented candidates if jobs were scarce. At a time when they are supposedly desperate to fill roles, employers should be prepared to lower their expectations a little and take on people who, if not perfectly qualified immediately, might grow into the roles.

But, no, while talking endlessly about the need for engagement, purpose, community and the rest, what do they do? They rush headlong into technology that promises to free them from accusations of bias and so aid their diversity and inclusiveness credentials and yet is so off-putting in its lack of connection and humanity that the very people one might have expected to embrace it — the young — are so underwhelmed that they become disheartened at the very idea of applying for jobs.

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence about what is going on with the artificial intelligence-assisted interviews that increasing numbers of employers are using to filter job applicants. But the issue has been brought into focus by research by the U.K.’s University of Sussex, published in conjunction with the launch of a toolkit that the university’s business school has produced with the Institute for Employment Studies, an independent research body and consultancy. Interviews with students looking for work found four key themes.

  1. Feelings of diminished humanity. Job seekers believed they needed to perform in rigid ways — for instance, holding a fixed gaze and an unnatural posture, fixing a smile and speaking in a monotone — to the extent that they felt they had to behave like robots.
  2. Lack of understanding. Job hunters often did not know how they were going to be assessed by these Asynchromous Video Interviews.
  3. Glorification of AI Technology. This was underpinned by the belief that the technology was superior to human decision-making, meaning that candidates thought their changed behaviour was inevitable in the recruitment experience.
  4. Feeling emotionally and cognitively exhausted. This was a result of behaving in a way that job hunters thought was necessary for the interview but which was unnatural.

Becci Newton, the institute’s director of public policy research and one of the authors of the toolkit, said: “The use of AI in the interview process can be a challenging and off-putting experience for early careerists who lack significant interview experience and are relatively new to the labour market. At a time where post-pandemic youth employment issues are high on the policy agenda, more consideration needs to be placed on the employment needs of young people and better preparing them for new challenges they may face during recruitment.”

The toolkit undoubtedly serves a purpose in helping careers advisers and potential job candidates understand better how these modern recruitment processes work and what is required to succeed. It is also encouraging in that it offers advice to employers on how best to use them.

But the reality is that employers need to go further. They will make all sorts of claims about how taking humans out of the initial recruitment process makes it fairer (well, not necessarily), but in truth the technology appeals because it saves time and money. There is no case for a return to the old days, when people were hired because of who they knew and because they reminded hirers of themselves in their younger days. But if companies really want to make their hiring processes more inclusive — and, by the way, improve the quality and commitment of their recruits — they should surely be forging better relationships with colleges and other training centres, setting up placement schemes and the like with a view to creating what they no doubt will call “talent pipelines” that will do away with the need for such stressful and time-consuming practices as are currently in vogue.

When recruiting people just starting out on their careers, employers really need to get away from the idea that just because they can they should look all over the world for the best recruits. In this day and age in most places, they can meet their diversity targets by hiring people from under their noses. Talk to them like people, find out what makes them tick and they may find that they have employees who are more grateful and thus more inclined to stay for the longer haul.

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