Why Recruiting is Broken: AI & Automation in the Hiring Processes
Recruiting is broken. I don’t say that to be dramatic – I truly believe it. Through traditional job boards, it’s just too easy for candidates to apply for positions they may not be suited for – or even have the qualifications to do. The resulting avalanche of applications and resumes makes it incredibly difficult to separate high-quality candidates from poorly suited ones, and hiring a single candidate in this manner can take days or weeks longer than it should.
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AI is now being touted as the solution to the challenge of sifting through mountains of applications. But “modern” hiring approaches leveraging AI and automation technology have fallen disappointedly short.
Automation and AI-based technologies promised to deliver a revolution in hiring processes, simplifying the process of identifying and evaluating candidates. Instead, companies that have become overly reliant on these tools have encountered a new swath of challenges and exacerbated existing, systemic ones.
Bias in AI models has been staunchly demonstrated. ChatGPT writes job postings that are twice as biased as humans, thanks to a training dataset that favors men and little intervention on the part of humans to rectify it.
AI models used by Ziprecruiter, Career Builder, and LinkedIn have been shown to reinforce gender pay gaps and perpetuate stereotypes.
All of this leaves us wondering: was hiring always so complicated?
Of course not. And it doesn’t have to be. Hiring doesn’t need to be the arduous process it is with job boards. But neither should we expect it to be a fully automated process, where AI selects, interviews, and makes offers to candidates without an ounce of human intervention.
