The Slow death of a recruitment sourcer.
Sri (Srikrishnan Ananthanarayanan)
Passionate about Sustainability, DEI Champion, LGBTQ+ Ally
It’s ironical that I’m posting this piece right after #tascon17 (talent acquisition and sourcing conference). After yesterday’s sessions at the conference and meeting with a few industry sourcing stalwarts, I’m forced to rethink the future of sourcers in recruitment function. I’m not exaggerating when I say the title of recruitment sourcers (sourcers as known in the recruitment parlance) will be non-existent by 2022.. perhaps by 2020 itself!
With AI’s percolation & automation moves into almost every service industry, “most mundane, monotonous yet manual and must” will be replaced by intelligent bots. Recruitment will not be spared. My recent interactions with a slew of smart start-ups have more than convinced me that the current so-called sourcing activities will be automated and replaced with smart bots.
All the people that I spoke to (from the startups) are very optimistic that their respective products will source profiles with 90+% accuracy for any job that you have. Most of them are confident that their tool can also throw up phone numbers or mail ids of potential candidates.
It’s almost abnormal, not to leave behind a digital trace of your existence in the digital world. These smart sourcing tools use advanced scraping and x-ray'ing techniques to comb the wild web to sniff out the email ids in no time. As a matter of fact, I literally lost my balance when I was told that you will have profiles stacked up within 90 seconds of pressing the “publish the JD” button! Scary isn’t it?
Well, I’m not completely surprised. With Microsoft investing more into Linkedin, guys at Google don’t want to be lagging behind. Recruitment as an Industry is all about people and People = Data = Money! Google has silently done a beta release of “Google Hire”. They will mash machine learning, AI and abracadabra together to ensure that a few recruitment software players file for chapter 11.
What will happen to the sourcers?
The answer is simple. Move up the value chain to be a real recruiter, else you will be forced to retire well before you actually want to. Sourcers.. are you listening? Would love to hear your comments.
Data Engineer
6 年Robots don't talk to people (yet) and people don't like to talk to robots. Sourcing is more than just entering Boolean on Linkedin. A robot is far from automating research. Otherwise you would say that PhDs would be out of a job soon.
Talent Acquisition | Executive Sourcer | Full Cycle Recruiter |
7 年I think both of your articles bring interesting view points. I am strictly a Sourcer (to help put my comment in context). While I think a computer can put together search strings and produce profiles, resumes, names etc. I think it lacks the ability to engage passive candidates and qualify them to make sure they are a good cultural fit. I think a Sourcers role can shift with a system that is able to identify candidates but someone needs to screen them. Having a great background on paper does not make the candidate the right fit.
Similar to today's news, the headline is simply a scare tactic to get us to read the article. I find the article rather short sighted. In two+ years a prediction that all human sourcers will be nonexistent and replaced by AI or bots is simply not going to happen. There is an entire human element that goes into what I do that cannot be replaced by a bot. It has and always will be about the candidate experience and there is not bot that can improve that.
I agree with others technology will not replace the recruiter reaching out to a candidate for their business sake they wish it would