Robots in Recruitment

Over a decade in the game is slowly turning me into an old-man recruiter. It usually rears its balding liver-spotted head when talking about BD to the tune of “Kids these days with all their texting, they don’t know how to pick up the phone!” It’s true that the pre-internet days did bring with it some transferable skills that turned out to be pretty useful in recruitment. Every recruiter's first experience with gatekeepers came when you would call your mate's house phone and their parents picked up, forcing us to interact with Mr or Mrs. Patterson in order to get a meeting with their son or daughter. This isn’t to say that tech has negatively impacted our industry, or that consultants who weren’t responsible for decimating a family computer by downloading Napster/Limewire are less equipped. It’s actually never been easier to be a recruiter with the ability to virtually meet candidates and clients from anywhere in the world. Even in that scenario, there is a risk of losing the nuances that make recruiters, recruiters, and with all this tech at our fingertips, is there a risk of us becoming lazy?

You would be hard pushed to find a recruiter that hasn’t at least dabbled with ChatGPT especially when it comes to writing an advert. We as an industry know that an advert going up is more than just an attempt to lure prospective candidates but is just as much about market presence. So if you’re not paying you should be pumping them out. They are a necessary evil albeit a monotonous and laborious one. But by relying on that wee paper clip with glass from Windows 97, which for me is the ‘face’ of AI, we’re potentially missing out on the subtle cues and wordings that we know our target audience is looking for. It’s not just on our side, candidates now can essentially phone it in. The idea that candidates meticulously craft a cover letter specifically tailored to your role went out the window a long time ago and was further exemplified by LinkedIn recently with AI-Generated Messaging. If you open up a message to a consultant that you haven’t interacted with before you are offered the option to “draft with AI” Below is the result of that, with necessary redactions to preserve the privacy of candidates I’m relentlessly hitting up.

Hi BLANK,

Hope you're doing well! Noticed you're currently working with clients of BLANK Recruitment. Excited to explore opportunities relevant to my background, which includes working with New Zealand's best recruitment brands as a Director and Principal Consultant in the rec-to-rec market.

Would love to connect and learn more about the company. Thank you, and let's set up a time to chat soon!

Obviously, it scrapes the relevant information such as the location, job title, taglines, etc. but where’s the love? The desperation? The effort!? No matter how many exclamation marks you still feel the coldness of old Clippie’s cadences. I work in a shared office space and am surrounded by all sorts of weird and wonderful companies. I struck up a conversation with an enigmatic German fella the other week. He works in the world of AI, he was very excited to tell me how with his software he could automate an email to every one of my clients. It felt like a broke his Germanic heart when I revealed that mailouts aren’t a new thing. To further burst his luftballoon I elaborated, it isn’t an effective way to do business in our industry. Recruiters are people too and I think we all have a slight disdain when it comes to automated messages, we know that you don’t know if this role/candidate is perfect for me, because you sent the same message to 500 other people.

My point is that we are an industry of people persons. Removing the human element from either the application process or the presentation of a candidate comes across as disingenuous. Empathy is a huge part of what we do and excluding my PS2 which I felt a level of sympathy for when it booted up with the noise of a Boeing 737, you can’t feel emotions towards a machine. If you can’t put yourself in your candidate's or clients' shoes how can you effectively represent them?