With the massive arrival of artificial intelligence systems, the digital transformation of companies is undeniably at a turning point. This transformation is affecting all sectors and will also impact the world of recruitment, which is likely to undergo radical changes in the coming years.
Digital transformation is not just about adopting new tools in the company. More than an adaptation process, it profoundly modifies modifies organizational models, the strategies to be deployed, and, also, the professions. In this context, the ever-increasing use of AI will drastically alter the very tasks of the recruiter who, over the next decade, will see the nature of his missions radically changed.
How will AI contribute to reinventing the recruitment profession and what should the recruiter of tomorrow look like? Let's dive into a future that is ultimately very close.
I When the digital revolution impacts the world of recruitment
It was 22 years ago, it might as well have been the prehistory. In 1999, Monster was launched on the Internet. The site, the first job board with a truly global reach, was the first to really measure the incredible potential of digital technologies in recruitment. Then it was LinkedIn's turn to transform the sector in depth.
Created just 4 years after Monster, the social network dedicated to professionals was to definitively impact the very profession of recruiter. LinkedIn has 590 million members worldwide, including 16 million in France. This means that it represents a real manna for recruiters who hope to find the best employees.
LinkedIn has reversed the classic logic of hiring for specialized profiles: it is no longer the candidates who apply, but the companies and headhunters who go looking for them using this now indispensable tool. "LinkedIn has revolutionized recruitment and contributed to simplifying it, particularly through the implementation of automation processes", says Aurélie Lamy, Talent Acquisition Manager, Assessfirst
Automation, the new Holy Grail for recruiters? This is where ATS (Applicant Tracking System) comes in, which has become essential for recruiters.
The ATS is first and foremost a centralization tool that allows you to manage your recruitment campaigns. It is a kind of Swiss army knife that replaces the inbox, the Excel spreadsheet, shared folders for your candidate pools, the electronic agenda... It is also a collaborative tool for centralizing recruitment data. Shared by the entire team, all its members have access to the same information, which can be modified in real time. The ATS also facilitates the multi-distribution of job offers to reach specific profiles. "ATSs have become an indispensable tool for recruiters. ATSs have become an indispensable tool for recruiters, witha key advantage: they save a considerable amount of time,", explains Jennifer Boss, Chief People Officer, Iban First.
SOURCING AS A HEADACHE
From social networks to specialized software, the tools available to recruiters today are valuable allies. However, they are far from solving all the problems they face in their daily work. Sourcing remains a time-consuming task. "It's the number one challenge," says Essam Elbaze, Talent Acquisition Manager at Voodoo. "
The review of applications is also time-consuming (2,000 for 1% of hires for sales positions, reminds Jennifer Boss), the matching between job offers and demands continues to be more than approximate, and digital solutions are still struggling to incorporate new recruitment trends such as the ever-increasing importance given to soft skills.
Responding to these issues remains an unavoidable challenge for recruiters. Will the arrival of artificial intelligence solutions change this situation?
II AI to relieve the recruiter
Artificial intelligence (AI) consists in implementing a certain number of techniques aiming at allowing machines to imitate a real form of intelligence, and thus human. AI is being implemented in a growing number of fields of application. Today, according to an MCKinsey study (2020) on the use of artificial intelligence, half of the companies have already adopted the technology to apply it to at least some tasks.
In recruiting, AI will enable:
- A much more accurate sourcing
Hunting for the right profiles, for passive candidates, remains a tedious and time-consuming process. The use of AI in sourcing will facilitate the analysis of millions of data points and allow us to identify a specific skill or personality. Sourcing a candidate will be much more precise, and therefore efficient. It will also avoid the bottlenecks that still too often pollute the recruiter's mission. When analyzing a candidate's career path, recruiters look for keywords, whether it's a resume or a LinkedIn profile. It is this analysis process that AI is destined to replace.
- Even greater time savings
After ATS, which has already saved a lot of time, here come AI-based applications that save even more. From chatbots to answer the simplest questions of candidates, to appointment setting, to the sending of job offers, even better targeted by artificial intelligence, everything is combined to free up the maximum amount of time and allow the recruiter to redeploy his efforts on tasks with higher added value, improving his performance.
- Eliminating bias
"In recruitment, the problem of cognitive bias is omnipresent", says Mouhidine Seiv, CEO, Riminder.
Bias elimination is often presented as one of the major assets of AI. In reality, we know that some experiments in the field have ended in failure as in the case of Amazon, which in 2018 had to get rid of a misogynistic AI. It was based on the hires made during the last ten years at Amazon. Those hires were done by human beings, in an environment largely dominated by men. As a result, it penalized candidates who had attended non-mixed gender universities or any resume that contained the word "female". properly calibrated, AI has the real potential to eliminate recruiters' cognitive biases, experts say. AI-powered screening software uses predictive analytics to calculate the likelihood that a candidate will succeed in a role. This should enable recruiters and HR managers to make hiring decisions based on data rather than gut instinct and make them as unbiased as possible.
- Improving the candidate experience
Candidates now demand a fast and personalized hiring process. As a result, recruiters need to change their strategy in how they attract and identify talent. This includes improving their hiring process. AI will come in and help recruiters create a personalized experience that must meet candidates' expectations. It will help meet the specific needs expressed by the latter.
It can, for example, take the form of:
- AI-powered chatbots to quickly answer common candidate questions.
- tools that allow candidates to record short video clips of their answers to interview questions that will be automatically analyzed by an AI mechanism.
- AI can also be used to evaluate in real time the answers provided during the interview.
- Automation of the answers which, moreover, will be personalized.
In short, by speeding up processes exponentially and treating each person as a truly unique candidate, artificial intelligence will exponentially improve the lives of recruiters and candidates.
An imperative that becomes all the more important at a time when the concept of employer brand has become decisive.
III Employer brand is key
The need to build a strong employer brand is more essential than ever. For Lucie Lhomme, Qare, "Employer brand is key".
It has a direct impact on recruitment, talent retention and, ultimately, on the company's reputation. If the organization is now obliged to take care of its communication, to make its values known, it is also necessary that the values displayed coincide with reality. This is why it has become essential to pay particular attention to the recruitment process. The first contact between the company and the candidate must lead the latter to live a maximum experience.
And for good reason. According to a Walters People study, 75% of candidates say that the recruitment process can influence their willingness to join a company or not, with the latter believing that the process should not exceed three weeks. Moreover, 90% of candidates have a rather negative or very negative image of a company that does not give an answer during a recruitment process. Moreover, 60% of them consider it essential that the company sends a follow-up email during the recruitment phase. Thanks to AI, the implementation of personalised feedback k will allow a better follow-up of the candidates during the recruitment process.
In this context, where technological progress is combined with new requirements from candidates, how is AI likely to transform the recruiter's job? The answer can be found in two words: augmented intelligence. Augmented intelligence suggests that technology is put at the service of humans to enhance their capabilities.
This technology will change the role of the recruiter in three main ways:
- Recruiters will be able to make proactive strategic hires.
- Recruiters will be able to better convince managers of the appropriateness of their choices, as AI allows them to use data and demonstrate from that data the quality of the proposed hire.
- Recruiters will have more time to spend with candidates to build strong relationships. In Addition, by promoting a more targeted, intelligent approach to recruiting, the use of AI will generate less frustration among candidates, especially because, being better targeted, fewer will not be selected.
This is a fact. The progress of AI will not prevent the human being from remaining at the center of the process with recruiters whose missions could be closer to that of a coach with, very early on, the possibility of being concerned about career development. AI will have the ability to identify talents who are equipped to take on a position or who wish to evolve within the company. Moreover, by eliminating time-consuming tasks, AI allows the recruiter to have more time to work on the employer brand of his company, which is his main task. This is the key task of the recruiter, and it allows him to set up a company/employee relationship that is increasingly optimized.
IV 2035: the recruiter is dead, long live the recruiter
And in 15 years, what will be the place of the recruiter?
"Ideally, the one in the current position will disappear and the candidate will no longer need to apply,", explains Juan Bourgois, CEO of Jobgether.
Science fiction? Not really, in a world where the very act of applying for a job makes less and less sense and raises the question of the durability of job boards as they currently exist.
Today many refuse to apply because of the lack of results expected in relation to the energy and time spent. And those who are actively looking for a job will (by force of circumstance) comply with the exercise, but will respond to too wide a range of offers, sometimes far from their area of competence, in the hope of landing a job. This, in turn, makes the recruiter's task even more difficult, as he or she is left with too many unsuitable CVs to review. The vicious circle continues indefinitely.
To meet these challenges, the first job matching systems have appeared on the market and will run at full speed with the rise of AI.
Based on a set of algorithms, job matching will ensure the most perfect match possible between job supply and demand. In other words, the technology allows us to select the best job for the candidate and the best candidate for the company .
For the former, it is no longer necessary to go through hundreds of job offers, and for the organization, it is no longer necessary to filter hundreds of resumes, a time-consuming task with no added value by definition, before finding the ideal profile.
With job matching, only relevant profiles are taken into account, not only on the basis of the candidates' hard skills, but also on other criteria such as their values, personality and soft skills, which are becoming increasingly important. This is why the candidate will no longer have to apply. It is the AI that will take care of it for him, based on his profile and all the elements that compose it.
Thanks to job matching, the relationship between the company and the candidate will be without any human intervention on either the recruiter's or the candidate's side.
The matching tool will assign a "fit" percentage between a company's offer and a candidate based on the candidate's skills but also on his soft-skills, values and aspirations.
This technology transforms the role of the headhunter, who will no longer have to hunt and will strongly change the job boards (Monster, Indeed,...), whose model today consists in browsing hundreds of ads to be able to apply (on average, you have to apply to 250 ads to find a job).
The ideal job is out there somewhere. But for the candidate who wants to get it, finding it is too often an obstacle course.. A difficulty that technology has not yet managed to solve.
The tool of tomorrow is therefore a technology that will make him visible to recruiters looking for the ideal profile in a a fully automated way.
In such a reality, the profession of recruiter, as we know it today, will have little place. " The hunter will disappear. Relieved of time-consuming tasks, the role of the recruiter will be radically transformed," summarises Juan Bourgois. summarizes Juan Bourgois. His value will be to validate the human/cultural FIT of the candidate with the company, he will have to "sell" the company and the position to the candidates. In short: goodbye headhunters and hello HR Development Manager! "
CONCLUSION
What can we learn from this journey into the future?
- The ever-increasing use of artificial intelligence invites us us to a profound transformation of the recruitment world of
- These radical changes, which are still in their infancy, will have a profound impact on both strategies andbusinesses.
- Job boards as we know them should progressively disappear and be replaced by AI job matching solutions, in a world where applying for a job makes less and less sense.
- The recruiter of tomorrow will not have much in common with the recruiter of today. The latter will truly be the first ambassador of the company's employer brand.
Acknowledgements :
Thanks to
Jennifer Boss, Chief People Officer, IbanFIrst
Essame Elbaze, Talent Acquisition Manager, Voodoo,
Aurélie Lamy, Talent Acquisition Manager, AssessFirst
Lucie Lhomme, Talent Acquisition Manager, Qare,
Mouhidine Seiv, CEO, Reminder
Laurent Cebarec, Ex. indeed, Monster
for agreeing to give their time and answer our questions.