In a world where your AI is talking to the candidate’s AI, how do you know what’s real?
How do you stop it?
How do you regulate it?
I know it’s considered bad form to begin an article with a question and I started with three in a row, so let me pause for a moment and let you try to answer them. And if you can’t answer them, then you’ve come to the right place. Because you’re in Era #1: Chaos. It’s where we all use AI to spam each other.
OK, here’s another question (last one, I promise): How do we get out of it?
First, we need to get back to the basics.
I know what you’re thinking. But Adam, isn’t Paradox constantly sharing client case studies on all the success employers are having with AI? Isn’t everything great? Well, yes and no. AI does work tremendously well in TA. And that’s sort of the problem.
We’re seeing our clients hire more people, faster than ever. In some cases, applications are up by 70% year over year. And that is great. It’s also not great, if you’re the recruiters in charge of sifting through all of them to identify best fits. For them, it’s just more work.
There’s something called the Red Queen Effect, which was inspired by a quote from the famous Lewis Carroll book Through the Looking-Glass: “It takes all the running you can do to stay in the same place.” Essentially, it posits that sometimes you need to continuously adapt faster and faster just to survive. In other words, if you were at a Taylor Swift concert and decided to stand up for a better view at the same time everyone else did, nobody’s view actually improved.
Bringing it back to using AI in TA: Yes, we’re running (hiring) faster than ever. Uphill. Into a headwind. All the gains in volume and speed are leading to increasingly diminished returns.
And so that’s where the chaos comes in. AI might be helping you screen and schedule more candidates, but it’s also helping candidates game the system by generating “perfect” applications and interviews. Which isn’t a bad thing, it’s just different. As TA evolves and newer and better solutions become available, unforeseen problems will also arise. Our job is to pivot, or risk running in place, stuck mired in the chaos.
That leads us to Era #2: Back to Basics. Which I think we’re on the precipice of.
How do you combat AI on AI hiring processes? Well, you stop using it in certain, strategic places. And instead you introduce checkpoints where you can generate signal to help determine what’s real. Assessments are perfect for this, and I’m already starting to see them have a bit of a renaissance. It’s amazing what you can accomplish — and what pain points you can alleviate — in about three minutes, which is how long it takes to complete our Traitify assessment. It’s a tool that will give you vital candidate information, quick and early on, that can lead to increased quality of hire and reduced turnover.
Another way to circumvent candidates from using AI? In-person interviews. I’m not one of these CEOs that has a vendetta against remote work, but this shift to entirely virtual hiring processes has certainly made things more challenging on recruiting teams. Layering in face-to-face interviews for certain roles is a fairly easy way to ensure the candidate is in fact who their resume says they are.
This stuff is obvious, sure. That’s why they’re “the basics.” But you’d be surprised at how many organizations aren’t doing the simplest things to help make their lives easier. I appreciate the value of AI more than anyone — but you can’t just throw it at every single problem. Sometimes, there’s really no substitute for good, old fashioned human ingenuity.
And then we build systems of trust.
Of course, the problem with some of “the basics” — and why we moved away from them in the first place — is because they cause friction. Even if an assessment only takes three minutes instead of 30, at some point candidates will grow weary when they’ve taken the same one 20 times. Before we know it candidates revolt, conversion rates plummet, and we’re back where we started.
Eventually, this will force us to build ways to get to the truth of who we’re hiring, at scale. That’s Era #3: Systems of Trust.
So how do we find systems where there is identity management? How do we find a use for blockchain? To be able to identify who a person is, so that they don't need to apply to a different record every time; to take the assessment one time and have it apply to many roles across various organizations. Or being able to have your work history linked to your profile, rather than having to do a background check for every job you ever apply to every six months.
Ultimately, this era will be great for candidates and for employers by removing a ton of friction that has always existed in the hiring process.
And finally, we can be strategic.
As we start to solve some of the chaos, things we’ll finally start to settle.
It’s like throwing a rock into a pool. There's this huge initial wave, and then as it flows into all the concentric circles the ripples slowly dissipate. The rock is AI — and as the chaos calms from the disruption of this new technology, we’ll ride the waves to where we all want to be:
Era #4: Strategy.
With AI being able to take on more and more of all that admin work that has burdened recruiting teams for years, the TA function will fundamentally change. Now, as long as there's competition for talent, talent acquisition will be a strategic part of organizations. There's no risk of recruiting going away or getting replaced by AI entirely. But it will need to be different. More strategic. Recruiting won’t be about actually scheduling the interview — because AI can do it — it will be about overseeing the process, managing the systems, and investing more time into interview prep, onboarding new hires, employee training, and so on. We will live in this world where technology focuses on delivery, people focus on strategy, and our businesses always have the talent it needs, when it needs it.
Will this happen tomorrow?
This month?
This year?
Here I go, finishing this article how I started it. These questions are a little easier to answer, though: no. We won’t create this TA utopia overnight. But we’re closer to achieving it than ever before — we just need to quell the chaos, first.
