The Magical Intersection of Humans and Machines

The idea that technology might one day replace humans for certain jobs isn’t just an idea, it’s a reality. In fact, McKinsey recently identified the industries with the most automation ready roles, and there is little surprise that manufacturing, retail and foodservice topped the list.

So where does that leave us humans? Many studies indicate that machines won’t be able to replace the strategic mindset and decision-making prowess of people. What humans succeed at and where machines fail is making sense of new information, and acting on it creatively. That's because, in order to do anything, machines need to be trained on exactly what to do with very specific types of information. Humans can interpret information they've never encountered before, and choose to act on it in entirely new ways. They're able to use these skills to make nuanced decisions, drawing on an incredible range of diverse experiences and expertise in specific areas, like adaptability and empathy. To accomplish anything in today’s fast-paced work environment, we must leverage many of these soft skills that, at least for now, only we possess.

While automation isn’t going to completely displace humans in the workforce, we should prepare for the future of work and be smart about how we use automation to help us do our jobs better or differently in the future. To help identify the human skills that will complement and serve as foundational qualities alongside our robotic counterparts, I’d like to highlight the story known as the “Miracle on the Hudson” -- which serves as a real-life example of why human decision making is nuanced, something that machines will get smarter at but can never fully replicate.

Hindsight may be 20/20, but it’s still hindsight

Whether you remember the “most successful ditching in aviation history” when it happened on January 15, 2009, or saw the film Sully, starring Tom Hanks, you know that Capt. Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger’s heroic crash landing on the Hudson River after running into a flock of Canadian geese that took out both of his plane’s engines saved the lives of all 155 passengers.

In the movie’s dramatic denouement, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) tried to prove the water landing was an irresponsible act in judgement by running a series of computer-generated flight simulations based on verified data points recorded from the cockpit. In the film, post-crash investigation experts suggested that the plane could have been landed at one of two local airports. There was one important caveat: the simulation computers were only able to arrive at this conclusion after taking the time to run multiple simulations. And, after taking into account the split second decision making situation Sully was in, it was decided to reduce the amount of time the simulation machines had to use to land ‘safely’. With the reduction in time, the computers were not able to prove a safe landing would have been possible at either of the two local airports they first suggested. As it turns out, the pilots made the correct ‘in the moment’ decision; one that probably saved many lives.

In the real world, often what separates a good outcome from a bad outcome is whether the person in charge has the ability to make decisions leveraging instincts that draw on their life experiences, expertise, adaptability, and empathy--connecting the dots with new data in entirely new ways. In the future, we can use machines to learn from these situations to make make better automated decisions. But will the automated decisions always be the best decisions?

The power of data insights and human instincts

So, what does this all have to do with Recruiting? As a recruiting leader, I work closely with technology. I recognize that machines excel at analyzing data, and we use technology to generate reports that give us a window into the past, offering useful insights into quantifiable, measurable details that we review, learn from, and apply to future strategies.

Much like the analysis of the Hudson River crash landing, however, there’s often a disconnect between real world scenarios and what automated analysis identifies as the “correct” decision. While machines can gather all the possible data points, humans are still very much needed to identify the most relevant pieces of a specific situation--calling on their expertise and diverse range of experiences to form insights and opinions that inform their decisions. A couple of recruiting-specific situations come to mind:

1. An ATS report indicates there is a recruiter pipeline problem. Time to fill is off the charts. But, wait a minute--if that singular report were to go to the stakeholder without proper human interpretation they would not know that the report missed some key insights. With proper insights from the recruiter and perhaps a new or different report query, a new story emerges where there is a bottleneck with receiving feedback from the interview team vs a recruitment team issue.
2. While the automation and machine learning algorithms within our LinkedIn Recruiter tools are making a recruiter’s life much easier, more efficient and faster; reaching out to and nurturing prospects remains nuanced and takes human touch, insight, experience, compassion and creativity to get someone interested in learning more about your company or an opportunity. This is why we encourage recruiters to tailor their outreach and to create impactful, personalized messages. I have yet to see this human touch be replicated by a machine.

So, recruiters stay calm! While our jobs WILL CHANGE and we need to be ready for those changes, in a TED talk David Auter says, "Despite a century of creating machines to do our work for us, the proportion of adults in the US with a job has consistently gone up for the past 125 years. Why hasn't human labor become redundant and our skills obsolete ?” The answer: because real life tasks require the skills that currently people are the best at leveraging--experience, expertise, adaptability, and empathy--to make good decisions.

In Humans are Underrated, writer Geoff Colvin points out that we will always need humans to make the big, important decisions that have massive implications for others, and any job or task that is inherently relational will require human empathy to make decisions that incorporate social sensitivity, group problem solving and collaboration. For those reasons, we’ll always need professionals like parole officers, judges, politicians, business leaders, doctors, and lawyers (and I state emphatically: RECRUITERS) to parse out nuances of individual situations because the situations they deal with don’t happen in a vacuum.

Each of these roles rely heavily on these high-demand “soft skills”, like communication, teamwork, and critical thinking, which fall squarely in the humans’ court because excelling at them in context requires life experience, expertise, adaptability and empathy. In fact, LinkedIn data found that the most in-demand jobs are in sales, operations, and engineering, while the most promising jobs are in the healthcare and technology industries--precisely because they require these soft skills that are so uniquely human. The skills needed to save the lives of Sully’s passengers from “The Miracle on the Hudson” are the same abilities only humans possess and--fortunately for many of us in the workplace looking at more automation in the future--are highly transferable to many industries and roles.

The Magical Intersection of Humans and Machines

In order to compete in an age of increasing automation, the argument goes that we have to stay ahead of the curve of adoption and change. At the same time, it's important for us not lose sight of what jobs are here for in the first place: to benefit people.

Automation is inevitable. Technology that ultimately helps make our human-oriented work easier, better, and faster has great value. And, if history tells us anything, it is that all of this will, in turn, render the uniquely human skills we bring to our work even more important .

And if we learn anything from Sully’s story, miracles don’t happen on their own. Thanks to a human flying the plane, a decision was made that a safe landing at a nearby airport was a riskier choice than the landing on the Hudson. For now, it still takes nuanced human insight and analysis to drive and direct the system, and make judgement calls that fly past apparent obstacles to land on the right decision. The best recruiters I know leverage all of the advancements in recruiting automation to create efficiencies that free them up to do the work we’re all here to do anyway--Recruit.

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Many thanks to both @Imani C. Greene & @Cari Levay for the rounds of edits, ideas and insights - this would not have been possible without you!

Please let us know in the comments how you are feeling about the intersection of automation and the future of work.