Is the world ready for recruitment automation and is automation mature enough?

Recruitment is in a vicious circle of decline. The automation wars have well and truly begun in the UK when it comes to recruitment as employers and agencies seek to reduce the cost of recruitment and job seekers game the system to try and get a foothold in the process.

The vicious circle is simple. When the balance of power lies with the employer (there are fewer roles than there are candidates), the roles that are advertised attract large numbers of applicants and that means large numbers of CVs. Large numbers of CVs means that there are simply too many candidates to engage with and a significant sifting job is needed to reduce the number to a manageable level. Done manually this takes time and resources.

Can automation really take over the process?

So, the tendency is to take an already dehumanised process and apply further automation and intelligence. This comes in two basic forms. The first is (as many candidates reading this have experienced) the need to rewrite their CV into a set of boxes on a web form. No doubt to make the sifting easier but also to make it easier for the employer to comply with anonymity and discrimination policies as the data is loaded into a tool to enable the sifting process.

This is not a major issue other than for two key points:

• The candidate has already completed a comprehensive CV and now needs to rebuild it for ever job application. This is hugely time consuming and a negative experience for the candidates. The employer has essentially outsourced the data entry job to free labour. The candidate.

  
  

• Automation is extremely poor. Many will have experienced the ‘upload your CV’ button, only to find there is some form of automation which pulls it apart and tries to structure your free text into their structured data forms. The issue is, it rarely works and in fact, despite data entry being time consuming, correcting the mess an auto reader makes of your CV is even worse. You must spot errors, correct them, and validate where it appears to have gotten it right.

  
  

Applying the average CV to these automation processes appears to be (from experience) about as useful as putting your CV into a shredder and then trying to rebuild it from the parts.

The other type of automation that is hitting the recruitment industry is the automated matching process. Job specifications are loaded into a system and the system attempts to match the candidates to the job through that automated (no doubt AI driven) process.

The automation has its place. If the automation can support a more human centric approach to recruitment by freeing up manual processes, then that is great. But if it is making the decisions on behalf of the employer then this is bad. Augmenting a human centric process must be the key to success.

What are the risks of automation?

The genuine fear amongst recruiters and employers is simply that automation create a difficult to detect gaming situation. The more automation, the more candidates will learn to game the system, tweak CVs etc. to the point where the data in and data out is so corrupted that there is little value in it. This was clear in early automation. The dreaded ‘key word search’ technology used to find candidates in a database soon resulted in CVs full of artificial key words stuffing to try and get the CV to the top of the widest number of searches.

Good candidates may write good CVS. Automation will find the best candidates able to write the CVs to defeat the best automation. The good candidates you want will be screened out and your choices at interview may be, let us say, suboptimal.

It is interesting to note that there is significant fear of job losses to AI and robots. As Big Tech tries to make machines work like humans, it is not lost on us that the recruitment industry is starting to treat candidates like robots.

Candidates Matter is an ethics and standards-based company with a range of services to bring humans back into the centre of the recruitment process. It is not a recruitment company (you cannot hire through us). We support and augment the recruitment process for employers, recruiters, and candidates. For more information, see our three sets of services for Employers, Recruiters and Candidates.