Dirk Verburg

I coach several people who are looking for another role, and it seems that the user satisfaction with the average recruitment process is even worse than in 2018, when I wrote a blog post with the title: ‘Recruiters should stop spraying and praying’.

In this post I wrote ‘We should therefore not be surprised if, in the near future, recruitment will become an AI-fuelled war between recruiting bots used by corporate recruiters, and application bots used by candidates.’

Today it looks like my predictions have become reality.

A ’sub-optimal’ candidate experience

What are the frustrations on the supply side of the market i.e. from the candidates? Here are the things I hear from my coachees:

• Selection requirements defined after submission – It is tempting for recruiters to work with broad requirements (‘data savviness’) to make sure they attract enough candidates and to determine the actual selection criteria only once they receive a critical mass of reactions (‘If we have candidates mastering Tableau, we will focus on them – otherwise we will also take candidates who master Excel into account’). This results in rejection emails with sentences like ‘We carefully reviewed your background and experience and we regret to inform you that we have decided not to pursue your application at this time because other candidates’ qualifications more closely match the position requirements..’ I.e., candidates do not know the criteria they will ultimately be matched against
• Data entry – Since parsing CVs in ATS’s more often than not poses issues, many candidates have to spend a considerable amount of time manually entering their data in an ATS (especially Workday is notorious – look at the comments on Reddit)¹.
• Puzzles and Videos – Some companies take this concept to the extremes by asking all candidates (so not only the shortlisted ones) to solve puzzles and create videos with case studies through Hirevue, which takes each candidate approximately 2 hours.
• Phantom roles – Some companies are known to advertise for roles which they already identified internal candidates for. In these companies, the external recruiting process serves only as due diligence (‘We could not find external candidates that are better than the internal candidate we planned to appoint’). I.e. external candidates are doing work for nothing
• No feedback – After all their hard work, most often the only feedback candidates receive (if at all) is a standard sentence from an address like no-reply@successfactors.com stating ‘After careful consideration, we`ve decided not to move forward with your application for this position.’or, ‘If, however, you are not contacted regarding the position you applied for within 30 days, please consider that your application has not been successful for that role’ , encouraging them to ‘keep an eye on our other openings on the career site!’, ”. Yeah right…

Of course, this triggers several reactions from the candidates:

• ‘Pump up the volume’ – Candidates will start ‘shooting at everything that moves’ to improve their statistical chances of landing a job
• Underrepresented groups in the recruitment process – Many great candidates who are employed already, may not even take the trouble to apply to the advertisement of corporate roles, given the low statistical chance of being selected. Instead, they are likely to wait until they are approached by external (executive) recruiters
• Gaming the system – Since recruiters are expected to check on completeness first, candidates will make sure all requirements are artificially covered in their cover letter and CV. As a last resort, they might even try copying these in with letter size 1 with a white font to make them invisible to the human eye, in the hope that ‘the system’ will identify their CV as ‘complete’.
• Skip the middleman – Since the corporate recruiter who posted the role is often anonymous, more and more candidates start reaching out directly to the hiring manager (who is often relatively easy to identify with the help of LinkedIn), to make them aware of their interest and position themselves.

All in all, this commoditizes human beings and leads to a process that is not transparent and inefficient, leading to unnecessary work and frustrations, both by the candidates, as well as recruiters.

The impact of AI

In the last couple of years, several AI tools have come to the market that support both recruiters as well as applicants, in this process.

A couple of weeks ago I attended a meeting at the offices of Michael Page in Zurich about AI. In the course of the discussion, we explored the impact AI is already having NOW on the different steps of the recruitment process:

1. Recruiters use AI to create job descriptions and publish these on LinkedIn and other job sites
2. Applicants use AI to tailor their cover letters and CVs to match these job descriptions and upload these to the ATS
3. Recruiters can use AI ‘plug-ins’ on top of existing ATS solutions to review the applications and select the candidates going to the next round
4. Recruiters use AI to define interview questions (partly based on the applications of the individual candidates) and conduct (parts) of the actual interview through AI#footnotes ¹
5. Candidates use AI to formulate answers to the AI-generated questions

Time for disruption

There are three conclusions we can draw from this overview:

1. The corporate recruiting process has not fundamentally changed since the introduction of AI: the steps and sequence remained the same
2. The existing customers of the process (applicants and recruiters) have not become happier. The only difference is that applicants are now able to generate tailored CVs and cover letters in a matter of seconds, but their candidate experience has not improved. Recruiters are now able to screen Cover Letters and CVs faster, thereby increasing their productivity. However, the actual nature of their role has not changed
3. A large part of the process is, or could be an AI-AI conversation without any human interaction
   

This is a signal that corporate recruitment processes are ready for disruption. According to Investopedia, ’A disruptive technology is an innovation that significantly alters the way that consumers, industries, or businesses operate. A disruptive technology sweeps away the systems or habits it replaces because it has attributes that are recognizably superior’.

In other words: somewhere someone will find a better to handle corporate recruitment.

Innovators

One of the companies actively working on ‘attributes that are recognizably superior’ is Found. A company that wants to move individuals from ‘good to great’ jobs, based on the personal preference of the candidates. The concept of the company consists of three key components:

• Community-based hiring – Participants join the Found community after completing gamified cognitive and behavioral assessments. No CV or cover letter is needed. Over 90% are currently in a job but want to find a new role that is better aligned with their career aspirations. This is in stark contrast with in-house ‘talent communities’ of large corporations, where the word ‘Talent community’ merely means two things: (1) We are keeping your Resume on file, and (2) we will add you to our mailing list with new Job Openings
• Immediate value for talent – As members of the pool, the participants profit from career coaching, peer mentoring, learning and networking.
• Highly accurate matching– An AI algorithm matches candidates with possible roles; candidates are in the lead and have a choice of being introduced or not. 88% of the roles that are presented to candidates are indicated by them as interesting and relevant roles
  

Compare this participant’s experience and success rate with the existing corporate recruiting process.

I think I know what most candidates would prefer…

1. Some of the questions are also completely useless: e.g. asking for the exact start date (dd/mmm/yyyy) and the end date (dd/mm/yyyy) of the study of the candidate. Sure, it makes a massive difference if someone started on August 3 or August 5, or graduated on October 5 instead of October 21… ↩

1. See https://www.wikijob.co.uk/interview-advice/interview-types/sonru-video-interview-tips Realy creepy… ↩︎