Let’s stop pretending that “AI” is somehow improving the candidate experience. These concepts are, by the accepted ontology of our industry, a logical contradiction, if not mutually exclusive.
Sure, a ton of “AI” vendors out there seem to tout their software or solutions as making a “transformative” or “evolutionary” impact on candidate experience (both superlatives appear frequently on product marketing collateral). And perhaps, there’s some truth in this.
The thing is, any impact of AI on the transformation and/or evolution of candidate experience has been deleterious at best, and disastrous in the aggregate. This should come as no surprise, considering that the frictionless, highly automated, and low touch processes promised by AI are antithetical to the high touch, highly personalized, and human-centric approach that defines a best-in-class candidate experience.
What was once about connection, empathy, and communication has become an algorithmic gatekeeper, one where candidates use AI tools to apply en masse, companies use AI tools to screen said candidates at scale, resulting in little to no interpersonal engagement – and even fewer hires.
Just a lot of ghosted candidates, glitchy chatbots (er, “conversational intelligence”) and automated rejection emails from some LLM, complete with an off-puttingly upbeat tone and the occasional emoji thrown in for good measure.
Hi <first><last> – Hey, bestie, just wanted to hit you up with some news. Unfortunately, we’ve decided to move forward with other candidates at this time — but are so thankful for your ⏰ + 💡!
If recruiting – and by extension, candidate experience – used to put a premium on people, the focus instead has shifted almost exclusively to process efficiency and outcome optimization.
Those people – the silver medalists, the brand advocates, the talent community you’ve worked so hard to create and curate – those people have been reduced to data points, and their candidate experiences have become, more or less, training data for whatever proprietary LLM has replaced real recruiters.
I know – this is weird, coming from someone who historically hates the soft stuff that’s long undermined our profession – particularly given my focus on empirical evidence and impact based outcomes, and my long running preference for process over platforms, having long seen TA more as a science than an art.
But recently, AI has forced the entire industry to overcorrect, creating a precipitous shift in recruiting strategy from green fields to black boxes, and from “gut feeling” to “AI alignment” – and the profession, at least in the short term, seems the worse off for it.
So, yeah. I want to talk a little bit about how the hell we ended up here; why TA leaders have suddenly abandoned their time-tested, well honed cynicism about the latest fad disguised as a “trending topic” or whatever the latest shiny object might be, and fully embraced AI as a panacea for hiring success.
Which begs the question – is there any hope left for humanity in hiring?
Or are we going the way of HR Business Partners and becoming a profession dominated by homogenous robots more concerned with policy and process absolutes than the ambiguity and anecdotes that have long defined how hiring happens – and that made recruiting so special.
