The right choices

I recently heard that the advent of technology was probably the end of recruiting and that I had to change jobs because it was a losing battle. I was given the best arguments: machines, artificial intelligence, the indecency of some recruiters who were going to precipitate the end of all of them. It made me think and become aware of what brings a person who is looking for a job so close to someone who is in charge of deciding if he or she is the best person for the job.

It's true: job seekers and recruiters are in the same category, unique and singular. Indeed, they can today be held responsible for the failure of the job interview as a vehicle for the successful launch and continuation of a career: candidates exaggerate their strong points - sometimes even going so far as to lie, and recruiters (and in the broadest sense human resources players) rely on increasingly subjective information to make their decision.

Should expectations be lowered? Should we embody more of a "self" than unintentionally erase stress? It goes without saying: this will increase the chances of making a career more qualitative, of offering it a longevity that today these two attitudes bias almost entirely. The fact that the main protagonists of a recruitment process prevent themselves from acting on it is already a problem in itself, but it is getting worse as technology and the rapid evolution of the business world - through the emergence of "start-up" and "scale-up" model companies - forces the world of human resources (on one side or the other) to constantly adapt to new working methods, new strategic decisions coming from the business, new tools, which are modified, updated and revolutionized every day. The indisputable criteria of the past, such as skills or experience, can less and less define the chances of success or failure of a human being in a function.

In the not-so-distant future, employers may rely less on the CV and more on attitude: on how a candidate feels, on reactions to reactions, on how he or she looks, on his or her appetite for conversation. New technological tools will soon be able to automatically analyze the professional but above all personal history (through social networks and perhaps one day through the authorized spying of private conversations) or biometric data. But don't we run the risk of falling into an immense and unimaginable excess of subjectivity? Isn't recruitment already too subjective? These methods, these technologies raise questions of justice and ethics, which lawyers, judges and specialists in the law of the individual will probably be keen to protect.

Of course, we must not stagnate in a world that must - like others - reinvent itself. The digitalization of our society is leading us, whatever we think about it, to a new recruitment environment. Obviously, we must evolve and dream of what we can improve in a world that has changed profoundly. But it will be a matter of calibrating our future tools, our future standards, so that we do not go down the wrong path and take the risk of jeopardizing what is for all of us the very essence of life: freedom. The freedom to think, to react, to be surprised, and not to create an anguish of not being able to find a job, of not being able to have a great career because we offer our naturalness a central place at the heart of our way of acting and being. 

In conclusion, no, the technological age does not mean the end of recruitment, but we must know how to take a step back to leave sufficient safeguards for these subjectivities which, in too many other areas, are already damaging socio-professional relations and, more broadly, human relations. Let us never forget that recruitment, human resources, is the best place to give someone a chance. Recruitment is a job, for those who do it, a major moment for those who are confronted with it, during which trust must be total: the trust you have to place in people on both sides who give their all so that the moment is sincere, devoid of bad feelings and acting for the good, of companies and people.