In the past two days alone, ChatGPT, one of the world’s most popular AI platforms, was featured in two main LinkedIn News articles—one of which detailed that OpenAI, the company behind the platform, is projected to hit $1 billion in revenue within the next year. Already, as of June 2023, the platform has reportedly hit over 100 billion visits. And as the platform continues to gain traction, so too does its AI tech—that is, the more users who use the platform, the more it continues to evolve and improve in its responses. And still, there are certain processes that many feel AI—not just ChatGPT, but the tech overall—will never accomplish quite like human beings. Indeed, many feel AI can never, for one, replace recruiters.
But does that mean that you can’t or shouldn’t use AI for any part of recruitment processes? And what exactly are the limits of these abilities?
Let’s start with what AI can do for recruiters and other HR-related professionals.
Ways AI Can Be Used in Recruiting
Don’t get me wrong: embracing technology is often (if not always) essential for adapting to and keeping up with current workplace practices and other job market trends. In fact, refusing to learn or engage with many emerging forms of technology can be extremely detrimental to your career.
But of course, there are limits to these usages of technology, especially in customer- or client-facing industries—especially human resources.
Instead of entirely replacing recruiters, then, should use technology to help make the everyday functions of recruiters and other HR-related professionals more efficient.
As Co-Founder of Vervoe David Weinberg states, “Good AI hiring tools can help the recruiter make their decision by surfacing relevant information which would otherwise be unavailable to them. Instead of replacing the recruiter during the decision process, AI hiring tools should also help the recruiter spend more time on the best performers by ranking candidates based on job performance without bias.”
In addition to helping them make bias-free hiring decisions, just as Workwolf’s very own soft skills assessment Packfinder does, AI can also help recruiters speed up many everyday processes.
These include tasks such as copywriting for forms of communication and summarizing and writing information relevant to certain job functions, to name a few.
3 Ways AI Can Never Replace Recruiters
Certainly, there are many obstacles current iterations of AI will overcome in future iterations. For example, current iterations of AI still offer quite clunky copywriting that requires a thorough edit. As well, as James Manyika, Jake Silberg, and Brittany Presten suggest in “What Do We Do About the Biases in AI?” for Harvard Business Review, there are still many biases that AI is not able to recognize as such.
As well, as Allison McLellan writes for Indeed, “ChatGPT works by sorting through the vast amount of information on the internet and reporting it back to its user. However, not everything online is accurate, and you may not always know the source of data or information you receive.” Nor is everything online what’s best practice or what you as a unique recruiter value in your recruitment processes.
So, while ChatGPT can help you in your recruitment processes, in many ways, it will not—at least for the foreseeable future—replace recruiters entirely and the following functions.
1. Building a Rapport with Clients
Just as you build a rapport with the candidates you consider, so too do you build rapports with the companies for whom you recruit. And quite simply, AI cannot build the same rapport you can.
This is because although it can summarize and regurgitate text given to it, it can misinterpret or overlook points that an organization would deem absolutely crucial to hiring the right person. Things get lost in translation, and suddenly, the tech is way off course in its task, and redirecting it can be frustrating and tiresome.
What’s more, not everyone can pinpoint exactly what their needs are in order to express them to technology.
In fact, this is a huge part of a recruiter’s job—interpreting what a client needs in a candidate and understanding it without them having to spell it out for them. This, of course, comes with experience and emotional intelligence that, at least as of yet, AI has not quite mastered.
2. Selling a Job to Candidates
Another skill recruiters have that cannot be replicated is their ability to “sell” a job to their candidate. That is, even if a candidate is qualified for and nicely fits a job, it’s up to you to show the candidate how and why they’d thrive in such a position. And this goes beyond AI’s capabilities of matching job requirements to candidate qualifications.
Certainly, AI can summarize a job and highlight the positive and important parts of a job to a candidate, but it can’t quite express the experience of a job in the workplace you may know about first-hand.
And, of course, without expressions to emote to the candidate the fit of the job, AI on its own just won’t be quite as convincing a job is as good a fit as a recruiter might, even over the phone or in an email.
Nothing, it seems, especially in such crucial matters for a candidate, is quite like the human touch.
3. Fostering Relationships with Candidates after Placements
Lastly, while one can prompt AI to follow up on a candidate after they start working in their job placement, nothing will quite replace recruiters’ abilities to demonstrate care and that lasting rapport with clients that makes them return to your services time and again.
Perhaps implicitly, this is something AI just cannot replicate, since, of course, it won’t have the nuance that a human being will have to address a specific and unique worker.
And again, AI could potentially pull specific details from a candidate’s information—like, from their resume or other application documents—but nothing is quite like a recruiter remembering specific details that show they care about and are paying attention to the candidate in particular.
In many ways, it seems that even as AI continues to evolve and grow in its capabilities, there are many aspects of a recruiter’s job that just seem irreplaceable.
Do you agree or disagree with any points in this blog? Is there any other aspect of recruiting that you think AI won’t ever be able to replicate? Let’s keep the conversation going! Leave a comment on our latest LinkedIn post to share your thoughts.
