Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist follows a shepherd boy on a journey to find the treasure from his dreams, [spoiler alert] only to learn that the treasure was back home where his journey began (so why did I read all 208 pages?). Coelho suggests sometimes you have to go on a journey to recognize the value of what you’ve got.
In some ways, recruiters have been on their own AI-powered, Alchemist-esque treasure hunt in TA. But even AI proponents see core human components in recruiting as vital to the future of work. New AI tools have created a new set of issues and concerns—forcing some to rethink how to pursue new talent.
And in some ways, emerging AI tools and platforms are creating the opportunity for recruiters to return to their people-focused roots: building and leveraging professional relationships, creating a positive candidate experience, and navigating the nuances of human needs in the workplace.
Trans-AI-ctional. “[TA] can be very transactional anytime you’re using AI,” said Bonnie Dilber, a recruiter with Zapier and a TA content creator. “You’re never going to have that same human touch, and if you’re a company that wants to hire the best talent out there, that talent wants to feel courted; they want to feel like your company is putting as much human time into them as they are into you.”
New AI tools have allowed for recruiters and TA pros to better communicate with their networks, create more effective cold-outreach messages, and for companies to better correspond with the massive amount of applicants for open roles that illustrates today’s job market via templated auto-send emails. But these AI level-ups, perhaps, aren’t always delivering on the candidate experience.
“Candidates are now complaining about that saying, ‘I don't want to hear from your ATS. I want to hear from a person.’ So what makes any product person believe that a candidate’s going to want to go through an experience where everything is automated or done through a machine, rather than a person, when people don’t even like getting a rejection [email] from the system,” said Dayforce’s VP of global TA Steve Knox.
Dayforce’s strategy is evolving “more and more” towards “bringing that human element back into the recruiting process,” said Knox in noting that the high-touch aspects of the company’s recruiting process are the components of the program that receive the highest praise.
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“Every time I ask candidates, ‘How would you feel if this process was automated’, everybody runs screaming, saying they would never want to go through that,” he said.
Joel Lalgee, who runs a boutique recruitment firm, The Realest Recruiter, and hosts a podcast of the same name, told HR Brew that AI has allowed for the mass-sending of personalized messages creating “a lot of high-quality spam.”
“But you only have an advantage with AI if you’re the only one using the tool,” Lalgee said. “Once everybody’s using a tool, it then becomes really, really noisy…In the future, if we’re all used to this high-quality spam, we’re not going to respond to messages.”
This is where a strong employer brand comes into play, otherwise recruiters for smaller or lesser-known organizations will need to contend with standing out in messages and differentiate their outreach from other companies. Lalgee said he sees in-person recruiting at conferences or industry events as continuing to be a key future component to TA
Fr-AI-ud. In addition to returning to bespoke, human-authored outreach, AI tools available to candidates have also led some TA leaders to bring candidates back into the office for in-person (ID-verified) interviews or skills assessments.
“When it comes to global hiring, we’re seeing a lot more fraud,” Lalgee said, pointing to people showing up for interviews who aren’t who they say they are, different people showing up for work on the first day than the person who interviewed, or “pyramid schemes”-type candidates, who take on roles but then outsource the actual work to freelancers or contractors.
Lalgee also pointed to fraud involving AI-use itself: in a virtual interview setting, candidates can sometimes appear on screen but are caught looking off screen for an excessive amount during the interview, referring to AI tools to deliver the best answers.
“I think the only way that I’ve heard from people trying to solve that problem is just to get people back on site,” Lalgee said. “Which kind of ruins remote work for everybody. So I’m like, how did we screw that one up?”