Recruiters need to disregard the term AI

What is the current buzz term, or scare factor for recruitment, more specifically for recruiters?

AI, or Artificial Intelligence, which is being spruiked as an industry disruptor and potential taker of jobs, well you need to forget about it and here’s why.

In the technology world AI is all about machines, or computers making decisions and choices where they have not been told to do so, and hence learning by themselves based upon variables in the world around them and in turn acting upon those choices to again change the variable to make another choice not told to do so by a human. As fantastic as that sounds (I’m from a tech background) it is not going to be in a state to take a human’s interactive job for at least 50 years, and I’ll go as far as 100 years.

There are some international programs and dark room geeks working on the models to get some type of working AI for industry, still all rudimentary and will form the basis of AI in the future, but not now, especially not to take the role of the recruiter as we know of the role currently.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some very powerful tech solutions on the market today, which will automate process, gather information, set alerts, integrate with other system, auto send an activity to a candidate to perform and even wish you a happy birthday (presumably on your birth date), however all of these are programmed or configured to execute at a certain time, to do a specific thing and are usually done in sequence of events, ‘do this, then that’ for example (computers are faster than that and can do parallel processing, but go to geeks r us website for that detail)

The sequence of events in a computer process will usually follow a business process specified by a person within the business, and has caused computers to be used as an activity list of things to do, which doesn’t make them too impressive, which is why when a program comes along that seems to be doing a lot of fancy functions at once it is confused with the term AI. Sorry to say, all computer programs have the capability to outperform a person doing the tasks, however they are not designed to outperform but improve a recruiter’s activities, why? Because a computer cannot yet do what a human can, interact independently and subjectively to a world where the variable changes sporadically.

A Recruiters day to day is hectic, there are a lot of calls, emails and meetings which are all part of building a picture of a client, vacancy or candidate. It takes a lot to get the right information and use that in a meaningful way to be able to automate the process, however by using the current technology the day becomes more focused on the manual activities. Recruiters must concentrate on the interactions and not the automation which is there to compliment and improve the performance.

This is why recruiters need to disregard the term AI and stop being worried that a robot is going to replace them anytime soon, not going to happen. Therefore, you recruiters should Love the technology, massage the data and the process will flow to build more and more information for the functions to handle, which in time with enough data can be called Big Data… but that’s another topic!

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