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Can AI Replace Human Recruiters?

Writer's picture: Niranjan KoranneNiranjan Koranne

Updated: Jan 31

Artificial intelligence or AI has been in talks in the last 6-8  months, with the introduction of ChatGPT to the world. All the areas or job functions where the presence of humans is required are under threat of being replaced by AI. Recruitment, One of the job functions which requires significant human efforts is also on the radar. Do you feel that AI can replace the human touch in the recruitment field?


What is AI?

AI is a simulation of human intelligence into machines with the help of computer programming. In other words, programming a machine to work like a human. So, repetitive tasks that require a good amount of human effort can be replaced with a bot that has been programmed with human intelligence or AI. This will save a lot of human effort and in turn money. 


Activities in recruitment

Now with understanding in place, let's understand the activities involved in recruitment. Recruitment involves activities like sourcing the candidates matching the job description, sharing them to the hiring teams, scheduling the interviews for the selected candidates and passing the up-to-date information to candidate and hiring teams. 


What happens if AI takes over? 

The sourcing activity requires a good amount of human effort (understanding JD, identifying skills and searching them over the internet). But, mapping this to a computer program could result in biased results, if computer data points are biased. The Leading IT companies have faced this situation and stopped using their in-house AI-based software. Also, candidates may want to discuss the opportunity shared more before proceeding further in the process. So, human intervention is needed for this activity.


For example, in my recent conversation with one of the candidates, I found that the candidate has previously worked alongside a person who is one of the leaders of the company for which I was approaching him. For this reason, the candidate was interested in the opportunity and willing to go through the process. This piece of information is not possible to collect with a chatbot/AI in place. Sharing the identified candidates to hiring teams can be automated with a script that runs after a specified time defined by us. This is automation which is different from AI.


Is AI suitable for all recruitment activities?

Activities like Scheduling interviews and passing up-to-date information to candidates and hiring teams can not be replaced by AI. These activities require the emotional touch that any robot can’t give, which may also have a negative impact, as some candidates may prefer to talk to humans rather than robots(chatbots). So, we may lose potential candidates. Moreover, the soft skills of the candidate can not be judged with AI in place. During the complete interview process, we take feedback from candidates about the interviews. The feedback may get diluted, if AI takes over. As, the feedback questions will be limited or in some cases, candidates may not give feedback as they are presented with computer-generated feedback questions over email.


Other important factors

Data security, ownership and Data governance also need to be considered, if we are going to use a third-party AI-based recruitment software. If these are compromised or not properly addressed by a 3rd party team, it may result in losing the trust of the candidates.


Concluding…

So, considering all the above points, It is clear that AI can not replace humans in the field of recruitment. However, we can get help from AI to get you the matching profiles which will be scrutinized further by humans if those are matching the requirement to avoid bias. We can call it AI-assisted recruitment and not AI-based recruitment.

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1 Comment


Shirish Kale
Shirish Kale
Jul 07, 2024

AI can work like human but can't think like human. So wherever thinking is required AI can't take over.

Secondly initially everyone was thinking that computers will eat up job but on the contra they have generated hudge employment. Same may happen.

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