Bot’s gone home
What are the most important aspects of recruitment for you? This is a question I’ve frequently asked employers or consumers of flexible labour – interims, contractors, temps and so on. The answers vary from finding a person to get work done, to filling a vacancy quickly or creating a role for someone with the right skills and values to join the business. It’s likely that everyone reading this piece will have a slightly different answer to the question. Recruitment does that to people! It’s the ‘hot potato’ that everyone knows best how to do, but at what cost?
I’m not judging anyone this afternoon because it’s far too hot and it’s their right, although sometimes the anticipated outcomes aren’t clear to the market, let alone what’s important. I love that we can employ technologies in recruitment that can take a well-written job description(JD) and accompanying personal profile (the person most likely to succeed in the job) and turn it into an attractive job advert with essential search criteria. Then the magic happens as hundreds of applications (or CVs) come in and are checked against the criteria, before a shortlist is created.
At this stage we’re none of us certain how the applications or the CVs were created any more than whether the JD is an accurate reflection of the work to be done. It’s an imprecise science that hasn’t needed any human intervention until now or has it? Didn’t a person create the JD for the employer and didn’t the jobseeker apply? Two respectable questions although I’m unsure how to answer!
There’s a possibility the JD (and the personal profile) were created from the target operating model(TOM) or the organisation design (or both) without human intervention. And there’s a chance that the jobseeker had only minimal input to their application having posted their CV to a job site.
This system approach continues as our shortlisted candidates are invited to interview (a fully automated process) and sent interview questions in advance. The questions will be ‘on message’ because they were generated by the same system that introduced us to the JD, personal profile and the job advert. And the candidate will get some assistance from the plethora of online tools or Apps that provide model answers and candidate feedback.
‘Thank goodness for some human intervention at interview’ did I hear you comment? That’s where the fun begins. The interviewers may not have been as close to the recruitment campaign as the bots and may not have done their homework. They grab the piece of paper, oops, sorry, the tablet with the typed questions and begin the interview.
The candidate, who thought they needed to learn their answers to the questions ‘parrot fashion’ gets nervous and forgets their script – what’s next? The ill-prepared interviewers aren’t sure how to react or to help (they’ve only just seen the questions themselves) and the recruitment ‘good luck’ fairies seem to have packed up for the day!
Right skills, right values? I doubt it. A good recruitment outcome? Get out of here. Or maybe someone gets lucky? An ideal candidate who fulfills the brief, but wait a moment – that’s not the person I envisaged and come to think of it, that’s not the job I had in mind. Who signed off on the JD? … Oops, bot’s gone home!
Whether you’re an employer or a candidate please:
· Make good use of the tools at your disposal
· Add the human dimension with a little ‘sense checking’
· Try not to rely on AI to do your due diligence
· Remember that bots need intelligent guidance from humans
· Remember that judgement remains a human quality
· Recognise that ‘values’ and ‘culture’ can’t always be captured by an algorithm
