The original Blade Runner movie goes down as a classic in my opinion.
I loved it when Harrison Ford did an interview to gauge emotional response. It was futuristic science fiction drama at it’s finest.
Or was it?
You may not be aware but the Sci-Fi future in recruitment has well and truly landed.
Is Adelaide, South Australia, Australia, or the world for that matter really ready to totally buy-in to the ultra-high tech of what has been in the past a somewhat traditional high touch approach?
The big question for me is often, What do we want to accomplish?
In other words, what do we want to accomplish in the recruitment process?
I think most would agree we are trying to aim for three recruitment indicators. Firstly, a Quality appointment. Secondly, a Reasonable Time-frame, and thirdly at a Cost-Effective Price Point.
So, when I recently learned more about the depth of AI that several recruitment software companies utilise I naturally began to think about the three recruitment indicators.
Now don’t get me wrong, while I am not Gen Y I am not adverse to a good dose of technology in business practices, but without dropping company names let’s consider some of the applications these companies have floating around out there.
If I understand correctly, one of the new start-ups in the AI recruitment software market gathers all the data from an applicant’s social media feeds to undertake a psychological type analysis as to whether you are the right type of person to be considered. This is done largely from a content analysis perspective.
Another company does video interviewing that uses an analysis of emotional/facial expressions that they record (think Blade Runner) that is compared to those that are high performers in the organisation to determine if you meet the next stage in the process.
Video Interviewing of course has now hit the next level. A well-established company makes available to companies video interviews that are conducted with applicants by robots, which you cannot establish a rapport with by the way (several movies come to mind here).
For large markets, international recruitment, or vanilla flavoured job types there very well may be some merit in how these ultra-high tech algorithmically driven recruitment applications may positively affect recruitment indicators.
However, is there something else at stake here that HR professionals are going to have to grasp somehow out of the hands of recruitment software firms?
In most western countries, many of which have changing immigration circumstances, it is often illegal to discriminate against an employee, either intentionally or through a disparate impact, on account of his or her race, colour, religion, sex, national origin, or age.
This begs the question, what might be the societal impacts of being able to so cleverly develop technology that at the end of the day is all about us, the employees?
So, how does an organisation position itself as an employer of choice in a world where the first face an applicant sees from the company is the face of a robot?
We live in interesting times.