This Week, In Recruiting - Issue 189

Sponsored by our friends Ashby

Tired of spending hours on manual recruiting tasks?

Ashby’s responsible AI and automation has got your back.

With smart scheduling that turns multi-hour coordination into just a few clicks and AI-powered email outreach that boosts reply rates by 46%, recruiting has never been easier — at least when it comes to  process.

Ashby’s AI-Assisted Application Review tool lets you fly through your inbound volume — think 1,500 resumes in just 6 hours!

Plus, Ashby’s AI-generated feedback summaries speed up collaboration across teams.

Ready for an ATS that elevates your recruiting game with thoughtful AI and automation? Book your demo here.

Open Kitchen: Future Proofing Your Recruitment Career

Two years ago I asked ChatGPT to list 100 activities which recruitment professionals currently undertook as part of their duties, make a judgement as to how susceptible each of these activities were to AI disintermediation and then force rank them 1-100 in order of which ones were most exposed to AI vs insulated from AI.

It was a cool experiment, as I was asking ChatGPT itself on which recruiter activities it felt it was capable of performing now and in future. The full list is still on a spreadsheet on my website, so you can have a look at it here.

It was also a sobering exercise.

A great many of the activities ChatGPT thought were most exposed to AI were also the activities which recruiters spend most time. Conversely, the activities which were most insulated - 'employee innovation', 'conflict resolution', 'employee empowerment', 'career counselling' etc - were ones unfamiliar to us - and in most cases, didn't sound much like recruitment at all. The general vibe it gave was that the recruiter role needed to transform, simply because AI is going to be able to do a great deal of the core work human recruiters were actually doing.

LinkedIn Hiring Assistant

Two years since, and we've waiting since that time for the AI Asteroid to strike.

Last week, it might have done so. LinkedIn's release of Hiring Assistant landed with less of a splash than it deserves because - on the surface at least - it looks like it may indeed be the tool which absorbs a great deal of the recruitment labour that human recruiters are currently performing.

Here are a few of things it says it can do

• Automated Pipelining of Candidates (based on job advert or search behaviour?)
• Automated interview logistics - meeting notes, interview scheduling etc
• Candidate summaries
• RLHF on candidate pipeline generation
• AI Message composition
• Probably AI Talent Relationship Management not far away?

So we have a tool - which we already log into every day - which can automatically generate candidates (source), rank them in order of relevance (assess), generate outreach message to them (engage), organise interview logistics (coordinate) and maybe keep in touch with them over time if they are not right, right now (relationship manage). If you wrote a job spec for a recruiter only 5 years ago, it would pretty much be a description of the capabilities of LinkedIn Hiring Assistant, with the notable exception of conducting interviews with candidates. For now, this seems outside of the envelope of what AI is capable of doing (LinkedIn presumes that Hiring Assistant will enable humans to do more interviews) but there is some evidence from point solution providers that (TalkPush, ScottyAI, Mercu etc) that even here first stage AI screening might now be more than capable to taking on some of the interviewing work.

The AI naysayer argument has credence so lets summarise it briefly here.

LinkedIn Hiring Assistant (and similar functions we will find in ATS's or point solutions which integrate into ATS's) produce mediocre results and still require a skilled human recruiter to monitor the output, edit the messages, conduct the oversight over the entire process. Ergo, AI will not replace human recruiters, but in fact enhance their productivity by taking on the laborious activity so that human recruiters can focus on the conversations with candidates and hiring managers.

Reminds me of a story of Liu Yang, the Chinese Robo Taxi driver whose job wasn't to actually driver the autonomous vehicle but to sit in the drivers seat and supervise the robots performance, and intervene if needed. The whole article is worth a read especially on the point where Yang says his own behaviour has changed since he took on the role of 'Robo Taxi Supervisor', as he found himself expecting his own (normal) car to start driving autonomously on his days off from work. Two years on and we now have fully autonomous cars on the road. People like Mr Yang are no longer doing the job of sitting in the drivers seat, but working as a human taxi driver that is now increasingly being outcompeted versus driverless competition.

The Assistant-becomes-Replacement pipeline is not hard to imagine. It is in fact the expected outcome of constantly improving technological innovation. At some point, the human being will stop intervening, because the AI output will get progressively better such that it no longer makes logical sense to edit to the message or change the recommendation. And under what basis would we even veto an AI recommendation? It can only be through human intuition which we currently call bias and that has long since been verboten in industry best practice.

So where does this leave us? How can Talent Acquisition professionals future their career? It's going to be subject of my talk at ERE in Anaheim next week (use discount code: HLERECA24) but I am going to use Open Kitchen today to give you an outline of my main recommendations.

1. AI-Self Enablement

The ubiquity of AI-powered tools like LinkedIn Hiring Assistant will make everyone better at the same time. Even those who will not pay or cannot afford the inevitably license fee hikes that come with AI-enablement, will find alternative solutions which provide comparable capability. One of the lessons of the LLM / GPT era is that competitor solutions close fast on the leader and in the end, there isn't a huge amount of difference between them. This is especially the case when you consider the recruitment applications of AI are table stakes for most LLM's - we are asking it to ingest textual data and structure it - couldn't be more basic for AI.

In this scenario, a recruiter who is not using AI in the areas which are most 'AI Exposed' (consult the spreadsheet...) will be conspicuously outcompeted by those who are. The recruiters who called themselves 'technical sourcers' out there will be extend their lead over the others as they are the ones who will become AI self-enabled before others and be able to deliver sourcing outcomes at significantly higher quality and higher speed than everyone else. The expectations of what a recruiter can achieve will increase as a result of AI. Suffice it say then, that recommendation No1 is for all recruiters to dive deep into AI-self enablement, stat.

2. Expansion of Scope - Pre-Acq Candidates

I ran a Halloween themed webinar with our friends at Eightfold last week on 'Reanimating Dead Candidates'. We were talking about the thousands of candidate records every company currently has of previously acquired candidates who for one reason or another did not end up getting the job. We've always struggled to find a way of better handling these candidates. The point of failure comes down to the fact that we cannot determine candidate interest in the new opportunities we now available - and the effort it takes to find this out does not produce faster fills for the vacancies we have.

AI changes this calculus.

Moribund data can be kept from ever getting cold with smarter use of AI as a talent relationship management tool. AI can be set to work on behalf of the acquired candidate, identifying opportunities within the organisation autonomously, may be even before the recruiter or hiring manager knowing about. The 'automated candidate pipelining' feature of LinkedIn Hiring Assistant is doing this on platform wide scale (problems with that of course...) but you can imagine ATS's doing an equivalent or better job with smaller data set of previously acquired candidates. Got to be on the roadmap right - how long before we see features like these in production? Innovation leaders like today's sponsor Ashby are more than likely to be amongst the first but it won't be long before these features become table stakes for any serious ATS provider.

Consider also the fact that external job advertisements is proving increasingly counter productive. Too many candidates are coming in for almost every job posted, too many AI-enabled candidates such that we as human recruiters can no longer discern which candidates we need to take further forward, necessitating the implementation of yet more technology to intercept inbound applications and have them perform an (AI-powered, naturally) assessment before a human being ever sees the application. With AI powered ATS, I suspect recruiters will finally do what CFO's have always been demanding of us - look at the database first (!)

3. Expansion of Scope - Internal Mobility

We understand why internal mobility doesn't happen. I should probably write a separate essay on this but to summarise consider the following impediments to which prevent a fully liquid 'internal marketplace' to take place.

• Discovery problem - employee cannot find the opportunities, as they are usually posted on internal channels which no one monitors 24/7
• Application problem - employee occurs potential social costs in applying for an internal role, what are the implications for failure?
• Talent hoarding problem - line managers are disincentivised from promoting internal mobility as it means more work for them for no gain for them.

Internal mobility is also entirely on the individual employee - there are institutional disincentives to move, so the only way this really happens if an employee actively pushes for it (at political risk to themselves) or they are pushed to do so unscrupulous managers as a means of offloading 'problem' employees.

AI solves all three of these problems, the first one explicitly, the second one logically and the third one inadvertently. AI can auto match potential internal candidates to new vacancies on job creation - no need for the intermediary step of having a human recruiter take a job spec and post it on the 'jobs' channel on company Slack or Teams. Auto match eliminates the politics of application also - its simply an outcome of the machine and both candidate and hiring manager are absolved from any accusations of disloyalty or poaching respectively. The third problem goes away as a result of line manager impotence - the match has been made with one of your guys, what you going to do about it??

Human recruiters have a role to play here, especially in managing the relationships between the stakeholders of an internal move. This is less about 'talent acquisition' and more about 'cultural maintenance' - you can imagine a recruiter counselling the matched employee on the career pathing options of stay or move; maybe even the recruiter turns into an employee career consigiliere, and not talk to the line managers at all until negotiating the terms of transition. We're no longer recruiting but we are increasing the liquidity of the internal talent marketplace.

4. Expansion of Scope - Chief Automation Officer

Did anyone see this dummy JD featured on Recruiting Brainfood newsletter (subscribe) a few weeks ago? It was produced two years ago by Step Smith, who is always one of those 6-12 months ahead of everyone else when it comes to trends and innovation. The AI-enablement of organisations is going to require a comprehensive audit of current working practices of every function. Currently, department heads of responsible for looking after their own - and CEO's are frustrated at the lack of progress seen so far. How long will it be before we see an automation function which supports this transition for all departments? Looking at the bullet points in this JD, I couldn't help but think how much of it might be in the TA / HR wheelhouse. One of the crucial tasks TA / HR can do to future proof our careers is to leading the automation efforts for everyone else. There really isn't a function in business which might otherwise be better placed to do it.

5. Expansion of Scope - Alternative Workforce / Non-FTE

The move to increase the ration of non-FTE to FTE has been an ongoing phenomenon long before Covid-19. I think peak SaaS - with the likes of Uber, AirBnB and WeWork - taught CEO's that it was possible to run hugely valuable companies with low fixed costs. We you needed wasn't necessary more headcount, you just needed human resources on-demand. The importance of this model was underlined not once but twice over the past 3 years - pandemic hit employers with large fixed costs in payroll hardest, whilst the two years we've had post ZIRP has also seen companies with large commitments to full time employees suffer most as they struggled with margins in a world which where credit was expensive, growth was anaemic and costs were inflexible.

The chart about was taken from Deloitte Insights....in 2018. This is from a survey of 10,000 CHRO's. We can see already then there was a heightened interest in creating a workforce population of mixed employment types, in the main to increase operational agility in a VUCA'd world.

The question for us in TA / HR is ....who 'owns' the non-FTE workforce? In 2018, it would undoubtedly fall to the line managers for contractors and freelancers, whilst perhaps procurement handled gig / crowd workers. In 2024, as we become more strategy in our approach to non-FTE, there is a clear need for TA / HR to step into the function of resource delivery beyond FTE.

Incidentally, I will be talking about the State of Non-FTE in 2024 in Brainfood Live later this month, where Runar Reistrup, CEO of YunoJuno, will share insight on where we are at. Event is up, so sign up to here

6. Recycling of Productivity - DEIB, Employee Engagement, Stakeholder Management

Doing more with less, is basically the purpose of AI-enablement. The idea is that less recruiters are going to do more work, now that we can offload a lot of the labour intensive work to AI. It's a happy vision but like all fairy tales, they don't happen as of course. What is much more likely to happen is that the productivity gains get immediately transmuted into increased profits and next year, we'll be asked to 'do even more with even less'

Important we recognise the moment for what it is: AI will help us save time but where that time get spent is a political contest.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Alexander Koutsoulas earlier this year to better understand his optimisations at PicsArt, which he achieved in spite of lack of budget and significantly reduced team capacity. The key was to negotiate for a 'recycling' of the productivity gains back to either further optimisations for efficiency or investment into other areas of talent work which businesses previously claimed they cared most about.

Remember Diversity & Inclusion?

It has perhaps not escaped anyone's notice that this previous essential priority has been off the top level agenda since the past two years - revealing to us all how shallow the commitment to more inclusive workplace always was. Well, it is our responsibility as the People function to convert at least some of the productivity gains we have secured for the business (save hiring managers 5000 hours of interview time per annum?) back into areas which are not necessarily efficient in the short term. Diversity takes extra work - can we secure that commitment from the business if we secure them extra time? We have to argue for it.

7. KPI the Human Touch

One of the most common refrains coming from TA / HR is that recruitment is always going to require 'the human touch'. I think we all hope that this is the case, but it seems to be that we would better served if we made sure it was the case. The problem we currently have is that we do not understand why the human touch is needed, nor when it is needed. That makes use vulnerable to the case studies which have been accumulating for a little while now that 'more human' does not necessarily mean better. One of the earliest companies to show this was Chatbot vendor JobPal (acquired by SmartRecruiters), who identified changes in candidate behaviour when it was known that they were interacting with a bot instead of a human. Candidates asked different questions - what was the salary, do you sponsor a visa, what is your policy on flexible working? The rationale was that candidates asked more direct, more important and more honest questions to a bot, because they felt asking a human recruiter the same questions might prejudice their application.

In this case, we can see that a human only experience would not be better for the candidate, as this would not only be more inefficient but it would also come at the non-trivial cognitive cost of masking true intent.

More human is not better but equally more robot is not always better either. What we need to do is better understand how a combined AI-enabled, Human centred hiring approach looks like. When do humans need to be involved in flow? When is a non-human an inappropriate point of contact? At what point do we offer an escalation, at what point do we stage an intervention? All of these things we have yet to figure out but I would start by thinking about KPI-ing the elements of human interaction which are currently not always captured.

If we study the most common KPI's in our industry, they are almost all focused on efficiency. A few, like Candidate Net Promoter Score, are conspicuous by the fact they are not. Given that we 'do what we measure', I suspect it is quite important for us to KPI the elements of the human touch which is the basis of the hope that we human recruiters will always have a role to play in the AI-enabled, efficiency driven future. I'm really not sure how to do this, but I am now activated to speak to others who might know. If that is you (i/e you're a KPI expert), get in touch, I want to speak with you.

Anyways, the more to talk about - Collective Intelligence, Walled Cities, Conspicuous Humans, but AI tells me this post is already way past optimal reading length so we'll end it here for now.

See you in Anaheim, if not before.

Now out of the kitchen, onto the lounge 👇

What's Going On?

Big List of Recruiting and HR Events to Attend in 2024 & 2025

We've updated the Big List of Recruiter & HR Events for 2024 and now 2025. Make sure you add your events to this list, and we're going to get the thing updated ready to relaunch next year. Check out the events in the spreadsheet here and make sure you bookmark this as its going to be the 'forever stew' of industry events. Spreadsheet is here

Becoming Skills-Based: How to successfully implement Skills-Based Hiring, November 7th at 11am EST / 8am PST

Where are we with Skills Based Hiring? There is a concept that the 'juice isn't worth the squeezing' with SBH but it may be all we need is a how-to get going. Fantastic to see our friends at Brighthire put together a fantastic practitioner panel to explore how exactly companies can operationalise the skills based hiring. Register here

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep281 - US Presidential Election: Impact on TA & HR, Fri 8th November, 2pm GMT

It's the biggest event of the week and the outcome will no doubt have significant impact on talent acquisition and HR way beyond the borders the United States. Whilst the outcome is less likely apocalyptic than either sides doomsayers might like to claim it is undeniable the whoever sits in the White House will be consequential to our industry - economic growth, acceleration of hostile de-globalisation, promotion / demotion of DEI - even the raison d'etre of TA & HA. Lets talk about the implications of the outcome of the US Presidential election - we're with Jim Stroud, Editor (SourceCon), Steven Rothberg, Founder (College Recruiter), Kate Bischoff, Attorney & HR Consultant & friends. Register here

ERE Recruiting Conference, November 12-14, Anaheim, CA, USA

Excited to be visiting Anaheim next month - I'll be joining the likes of Jim Stroud, Kevin Wheeler, Kevin Grossman and friends one of the great recruiter-centric events of the year. Looking forward to giving my talk on 'Future Proofing Your Recruitment Career' - make sure you get a copy of this deck if you can't see it live. If you're at the event, please do come up and say hello!

NB: if you want a discount code, comment "ERE" below and I will DM you the code for the discount.

AI in Talent Acquisition: From Automating Tasks to Strategic Transformation, Nov 13th, 10am ET /

In the middle of the whole event at ERE, I am going to get up early and participate in this Eightfold webinar on AI automation to TA. We've already seen some incredible DIY activities from pioneering recruiters but we are seeing AI-powered updates from recruitment technology vendors which promise change in the way we perform our roles as Talent Acquisition professionals. Delighted to be part of this webinar - register here

Founders Focus - Ep52 - Up close and personal with Matthijs Metzemaekers, Founder, Carv, Tues 19th Nov, 10am GMT / 11am CET

We are back with Founders Focus - the show where we get up close and personal with the people changing the way we work and hire today. Interview intelligence and Recruitment Task Automation has been the hot categories in tech over the past 12 months and it is fantastic to see European based recruitment tech making gains in this space. I'm excited to be chatting with serial entrepreneur and recruitment tech veteran, Matthijs Metzemaekers, CEO of Carv. Register here

Tec Rec 2024, TITANIC Chaussee Hotel, Berlin, November 24th–26th, 2024

I am back in Berlin folks, first time at Rec Tec since before Covid. Looking forward to sharing thoughts on the state of tech hiring, learning from local employers as to how the changing circumstances have impacted hiring posture, diversity and inclusion, state of remote, state of outsourcing. I have a 50% discount on tickets so make sure you get them here rather than elsewhere!

If you have an event, webinar or podcast going on next week and want it featured on next week's newsletter, comment below with the link and event details. Don't forget to at mention me so that I see it

End Notes

Back in London for this week and finally getting my sh1t together. I have to say, it has taken about 2 weeks to recalibrate back to routine - and I'm still not 100% clear yet. US Presidential election tomorrow - we might not know the results immediately - but I suspect we will as it will be less close than many think it will be. Harris to win IMO - let me know what you think on this!

Cheers!

Hung Lee is the curator of Recruiting Brainfood, and now This Week In Recruiting. Subscribe to both if you are into recruiting or HR or just interested in world of work.