The AI Effect: Pushing a Broken Recruiting System to the Brink

Jane began exploring the technology that now powers the current boom in artificial intelligence and conversational AI back in 2014. Over the past nine years, she's developed an impressive expertise and skill set. Her current job? It's okay. It pays the bills, leaves a lot extra for Jane to save for her children's education and have a great quality of life. It doesn't make her leap out of bed in the morning, but it's far from repugnant. Would she be interested in a new job under the right conditions? Absolutely. But is she actively looking for one? Not a chance.

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Every day, Jane is inundated with dozens of LinkedIn messages, text messages, and emails from recruiters who have an old copy of her resume. At the beginning of the AI revolution, she would sift through them and even respond to some. However, it didn't take long for her to realize that most of these messages were as impersonal as they were irrelevant to her career aspirations. They were churned out by recruiting AI chatbots that had no understanding of her specific interests or experience. As Jane's frustrations mounted, she began ignoring all recruiting outreach, even the few messages that might be relevant to her dreams. It's just too much to sift through to find something worthwhile.

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This is the result of a broken recruiting system gone awry.

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As an entrepreneur in the recruiting and staffing space for 25 years, I've seen firsthand how the recruiting process is broken. What's happening to Jane and thousands of in-demand professionals like her is the start of a disturbing trend in the recruiting industry. I'm clear that recruiting is fundamentally broken, but the advent of generative AI threatens to exacerbate the problem, and it certainly won't fix it.

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The current state of recruiting is a mess. In my 25-year career, I've seen the cracks in the system gradually widen, and I'm clear they're about to turn into chasms. At the core of the brokenness of recruiting is that we apply the simple process of buying stuff to the infinitely more complex process of engaging with other human beings. We start the process of recruiting after we realize that we have an opening, making us motivated buyers right out of the gate. But more importantly, our truncated timetable means that we only have time to engage with people who are actively looking for our specific job at the moment we need to hire. So, we're motivated buyers exclusively talking to motivated sellers. It's a recipe for bad decision-making.

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Now, I don't think there's a problem with being on the job market, it's just that the numbers aren't in favor of hiring managers. According to LinkedIn's 2022 U.S. Emerging Jobs Report, positions take on average between 43 and 60 days to fill. Yet, the best candidates are only on the job market for 10 days. So, if it takes you 60 days to find the right person, but the right person is only available for 10 days, you're highly unlikely to be the lucky one to snatch up a stellar candidate like Jane when she hits her limit and decides to throw her resume into the fray. And that's not the only statistic that points to the brokenness of recruiting. The vast majority of hiring managers, 76% of them, report that their biggest struggle is trying to attract the right candidates for their team (according to Glassdoor). And hiring managers aren't the only ones struggling, 72.8% of recruiters are finding it difficult to find the right candidates to fill their open roles (according to Manpower).

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When both the supply and demand side are falling apart, it's a clear sign that the system is fundamentally broken.

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So, what happens when you add artificial intelligence to a broken system? You end up accelerating the brokenness, dramatically. Remember my friend Jane, drowning in a sea of bland AI-generated recruitment messages? Imagine her frustration spreading across the entire job market... a constant deluge of impersonal robotic messages flooding the inboxes of potential candidates. In my experience, people really hate being spammed by recruiters. And just because someone has experience doing something, it doesn't mean it's part of their future trajectory. Most people I know who have exceptional in-demand talent almost never take calls from recruiters, because the experience of being a product to serve somebody else's profit needs just feels gross. So they take themselves out of the game, even though they know there's probably something better out there for them. It's just too much work to weed through all the garbage that's continually thrown at them.

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And it's only going to get worse. We're in the midst of a demographic shift with a lot of corporate talent leaving the workforce and not enough people to replace them. Companies are going to get increasingly more desperate, as well as hiring managers who depend on the talent they can't find to accomplish their goals. The tools will make it easy for any hiring manager to achieve a base level competence in recruiting, where the process of identifying the right profile and sending a note to contact them will be done automatically. In a world where 78% of hiring managers are struggling to fill their open roles, that's a lot of spam that's about to come flooding out of these AI bots.

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As our technology has shifted, so has our understanding of how we go about the important process of adding people to our teams. We've moved from a world where we had to manually sift through resumes to find the right candidates, to a world where we can automate the process of finding the right candidates. But this shift has come with its own set of challenges.

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Although the recruiting industry has become commoditized, it's important to remember that recruiting isn't just about filling seats. It's not a numbers game where the goal is to throw as many candidates at a position as possible and hope that the right one sticks. Recruiting is culture. How we go about engaging with the talent that we need to excel says everything about who we are as an organization. Recruiting is about finding people who share our values, who are driven by the same purpose, and are willing to work hard in the service of that purpose and values.

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So how do we go about finding these people who share our purpose and values? It starts with engagement. We need to let go of this spammy spray and pray approach and focus on making meaningful connections. And this job is much bigger than our recruiting staff. We need to recognize that recruiting is everyone's responsibility. And when we recognize this, we can embolden our teams to take an active role in telling the stories that come from things like purpose and values. Our employees are the ones who interact, live, and breathe our company's culture, good or bad. It's our employees who have the greatest opportunity to create engaging content that flows from the narrative themes that come from purpose, values, and cultures. And when individuals authentically tell these stories on platforms like LinkedIn, the posts, driven by purpose and values and culture of the organization, will naturally attract the people who share those cultural affiliations.

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Once that engagement is sparked, recruiters have an important role to play in nurturing that engagement into relationships. It's by building these relationships that we show potential employees that our companies aren't just a machine looking to gobble up their skills and experience but can speak to them on a human level and give them the visceral experience that they care about them as individuals.

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This is the powerful future of recruiting. Recruiting based on a human-centered process that centers on personal relationship and engagement. It's a future that starts with a demonstration that we value the contributions of human beings and we're invested in their potential and future growth.

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This is a critical change that needs to be championed by the leadership of organizations. The C-Suite sets the tone for the entire organization. And when it comes to recruiting of the future, the role of leadership is more important than ever. Remember, recruiting is culture. It's about engaging with other human beings, understanding their desires, and aligning them with the purpose of your organizations. In this day of complexity where the value of individualism and connection are paramount, leadership is no longer just about making big decisions or driving a company's growth. It's about creating an environment where great things can happen, setting the stage for meaningful connections and engagement. When company leaders foster trust and connection, great things emerge.

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If current trends continue, those companies who keep using the same broken recruiting methodologies and allow generative AI to exacerbate these issues will lose the ability to attract the best and brightest talent on the market. That inability will be their doom. They'll be stuck in a vicious cycle of impersonal and ineffective transactional relationships that result from using recruiting tactics that leave both companies and potential candidates frustrated and dissatisfied. Sure, AI will allow them to build faster caterpillars, but the ones who survive and thrive, they're creating butterflies.

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In this moment, there's an opportunity to build meaningful connections and create vibrant, diverse, and engaged workforces. This is the future that I'm advocating for, where we use artificial intelligence to facilitate the creation of connections and relationships, not spamming potential candidates with impersonal messages that fail to inspire.

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About the author -?Peter Laughter?– I walked away from a 25 year entrepreneurial career in the recruiting and staffing industry because recruiting is screwed. I founded?True Bearing?to reinventing recruiting using purpose, values, and storytelling as the currency companies can use to supercharge referrals and cultivate pipelines of rockstar talent.?

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