LinkedIn fatigue and AI – the future of recruitment?

April 25th, 2017 | Industry News

Effective recruitment – how not to waste anybody’s time

According to Recruiter, there’s an increasing weariness in excellent candidates who are sick of being ‘targeted’ by recruiters who bombard them with ill-thought-out and often time-wasting pitches. It’s not just those who are on LinkedIn who find themselves on the wrong end of a badly focused communication from a recruiter whose employment software hasn’t kept up with the candidate’s current situation. ‘LinkedIn fatigue’ as it’s known is causing many top candidates to try to hide themselves from inept recruiters and one measure of the sophistication and application of recruitment software in the future will be the way that it uses the applicant tracking system to contact candidates only when a truly interesting opportunity arises.

Is AI the future of recruitment software?

Start-ups around the world are claiming that they are heralding a new future for recruitment platforms by incorporating large amounts of AI (artificial intelligence) into each newly-launched recruitment system.

However, digging down into the pitch from each AI lauding online recruitment software startup, reveals that in every case from snap.hr to Mya the AI component of each system is only one part of a whole package that requires expert human personnel to oversee and complete each recruitment process. It’s certainly true that each new generation of development contains an increasing complement of SAAS recruitment software that allows sophisticated web-based features to automate, analyse and evaluate basic candidate information. But beyond these relatively simple AI processes, no recruiting platform has, as yet, found a way to turn the final focus of identifying the best candidates for each situation into an algorithm.

There’s no doubt that AI is going to feature ever more strongly in the future of recruitment whether in-house or as part of the toolkit of a recruitment agency. Tasks like checking out if a new candidate has the right level of skills will one day be done entirely by chat bots. The time-consuming but necessary annual, six-monthly or quarterly check in to see if a candidate is still available and still seeking a new position is going to become the responsibility of an artificial intelligence that will free up personnel to focus on new opportunities and deal with the essentially human activity of using experience and instinct to match the best candidate to the right position even if – on paper – there are better candidates for the job. This human skill, of linking people to places, will always be necessary and we’ve proved the case – online dating run by AI doesn’t appear to be any more successful than any other form of candidate selection – there are imponderables that even AI and deep learning don’t seem able to master.

So, is AI the future of recruitment – yes and no. It will feature increasingly in any online recruitment database, but it’s unlikely to ever become an entirely artificially managed process. So what’s the best way to discover how AI can help you recruit?

The advantage of choosing to work with a cloud recruitment software system is that as each one of these applications is tested exhaustively in real life, it can be seamlessly integrated into your current applicant tracking software without costly reinvestment or time wasted in learning yet another new system.