Is AI talent matching the next big thing in HR/TA?

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Is AI talent matching the next big thing in HR/TA?

Lead consultant at Test Partnership, Ben Schwencke, answers the timely question: is AI talent matching the next big thing in HR/TA?

Transcript:

No, no, I don't think it's the next big thing. And for a few reasons. So firstly, what do we mean? So in my mind, um, AI talent matching involves uploading a CV, candidates' resume, filling out an application form, something like that, and then using AI to match people. The jobs rank them based on their suitability, based on the information input.

Now, that sounds okay if you try not to think about it, but in reality, the CV, the application form has been made almost completely redundant by AI in the first place. So virtually every CV, virtually every application form you should seriously consider has been made by an AI in the first place, and therefore is not representative of the candidate's skill in any meaningful capacity.

Consequently, giving meaningless information to an AI and telling it to make important high stakes selection decisions doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Um, it would make more sense if that information they presented was valuable in some way. It simply isn't. And in many ways it never was, even before AI outsourced that whole process to itself.

So I don't see how that can be of any particular value. Okay, all you would be doing is telling an AI to choose randomly from a load of AI generated CVs, it's kind of a backward way of thinking. It's kind of like developing a robot horse to pull a car, instead of using a car. Okay, the method is outdated.

Okay, we can drop that as a method. We shouldn't be trying to innovate on top of this outdated method. Finished. is done now as a screening tool. All it can do now is tell you whether or not they can work in the country or did they meet very minimum requirements for a particular role. That is the extent of their utility now. A trained HR manager or talent acquisition lead can look at a CV and would pull the same information, you know, that an AI would, that is none at all. There's nothing there. So fundamentally, no, I don't think AI is going to make this any better. You're just making, you're making the process more scalable.

The process that doesn't work in the first place. So no, I don't think this is the future. I think there are better applications for AI, frankly. For example, something that could conduct interviews would be very valuable. That would save a lot of time. Especially if it could score more effectively than a human interviewer could.

And empirically you could test that. But empirically we know that interviews are useful tools. And so we have a benchmark which we can work with. Whereas CVs, application forms, they're finished. Okay, that was never a good idea in the first place, and it definitely isn't now. Making decisions using an AI isn't going to enhance that in any meaningful way.