Welcome to the new world of recruitment. In these days of trying to increase “efficiency,” it seems like we have only made the problems related to finding and hiring great people worse and the odds of hiring the wrong person greater.
Most business owners do not have time to go through the labor-intensive process of finding and hiring top level talent. That is why they hire recruiting firms. Recruiters, being the go-between, have an interesting job. Afterall, their pay is based on filling a round hole with a round peg. The faster they can weed out pegs that do not fit the round hole they are trying to fill, the more time they can spend on more viable pegs. That just makes sense efficiency-wise.
So enters our first combatant. The Applicant Tracking System or ATS. This AI enabled system, among other things, scours applications for key words related to the job to be filled like qualifications, experience, education, etc. to weed out applications that do not fit. This cuts down significantly on the number of resumes or applications the recruiter must scour through. Only round pegs go through.
Now enters our second combatant. The AI resume builder. AI resume builders, like those used in SEO, look for key words and work to fit script to satisfy the algorithms used by Applicant Tracking Systems to round out the edges of their applicant’s resume.
I have personally never been great at writing resumes myself. I have always tended to go into the weeds detailing something important to me, however, probably irrelevant to a recruiter just wanting to know if I am a round peg. I honestly do not believe I am alone in this. It is people like me who keep professional resume builders and recruitment coaches in business.
Now, the important thing that gets lost here is genuine communication because actual people to people communication is being filtered in both directions. On the side of the company, genuinely great potential employees are being lost to them because their resume does not fit within the algorithm’s parameters. They also get an increased number of AI doctored resumes from unqualified individuals who have merely had AI pump out a resume that would defeat the ATS, much like the kid who has someone else write their term paper because they are too busy partying to study.
For the applicant, I read stories everyday where literally overqualified candidates may be spending many frustrating months trying to find their next opportunity or are forced to take lower paying jobs or hang onto jobs where their talents are wasted to keep things afloat.
Now I am not a paid recruiter and have never worked on commission based on placements. I do have a good history of recognizing when two people or two groups should be able to fit together in a relationship beneficial to both parties. I have usually found those relationships where everybody involved is willing to lay their cards on the table and communicate honestly about goals, limitations, needs, and concerns. Sometimes, it is not a fit. Sometimes it takes off. But the KEY is that everybody comes away knowing there was actual direct communication and honest understanding between everyone involved. While that approach is much more labor-intensive and requires more homework and communication, it makes more successful matches.