AI in recruiting: the death knell of the resume? – 06/20/2023 – Market

Students applying for graduate jobs this summer can take advantage of a new personal interview coach. If they submit a specific job description, they can receive personalized interview questions and answers and feedback on their own answers – all for free.

The coach, offered by job searcher Adzuna, is not human, but an artificial intelligence bot known as Prepper. It can generate interview questions for over 1 million live jobs at major companies, in industries ranging from technology and financial services to manufacturing and retail.

For a graduate job in PwC’s actuarial practice, the chatbot generates questions like: “What skills do you think an actuarial consultant should have?” and “How would you explain actuarial concepts to a client who has no finance background?” When a user answers a question, Prepper generates a score from zero to one hundred and tells you which parts worked well and which didn’t.

Prepper is part of a new wave of chatbots powered by generative AI – from ChatGPT to Bard and Claude. Chatbots are trained on large chunks of text extracted from the internet, including books, newspapers, blogs, videos and image captions. They can produce plausible, sophisticated text that is generally indistinguishable from human writing.

“The last 12 to 18 months have been crazy,” said Andrew Hunter, co-founder of Adzuna. “Of course it’s very trendy right now, but there are a lot of smart tools [para auxiliar] in recruiting and helping people find jobs more easily.”

AI is not a new tool in hiring and job hunting. Over the last decade, it has been used primarily to make processes more efficient and cheaper for employers – from keyword searching resumes to filtering candidate interviews on video.

But generative AI tools are rebalancing the power dynamic in favor of candidates. “A lot of the recent improvements we’ve seen in AI are on the candidate side,” says Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, an organizational psychologist and specialist in hiring technologies. “A few years ago, contractors pretended to use AI to look modern, even if they didn’t. Now they pretend not to use AI.”

When Chamorro-Premuzic recently tried to hire someone for a position, he asked a candidate if he had tried generative AI. “He said, ‘If it weren’t for ChatGPT, I wouldn’t be sitting across from you right now.’ Resume, cover letter and application were all written by AI.

Chamorro-Premuzic, who respected honesty and decided someone tech-savvy was worth taking on, hired the person. Others are less enthusiastic, warning that AI could signal the end of the traditional job application process.

“Generative AI can create very good profiles – there may be some mistakes, but only the individual will recognize them, not the employer,” says Matt Jones of recruitment technology firm Cielo. “It raises the question of the relevance of reviewing resumes, cover letters and applications, particularly early in your career. I wonder if this is the death knell for the CV.”

For graduates in an increasingly competitive job market, chatbots are a way to deal with a potentially overwhelming process. Ayushman Nath, a sophomore at the University of Cambridge, said many of his peers used ChatGPT, the public chatbot launched by Microsoft-backed OpenAI, asking him to write cover letters for specific companies. He knows people who advanced in the first rounds or got internships using cover letters and apps written by ChatGPT.

“From my experience, it’s good to jump through the initial hurdles. The initial rounds of filtering are not personalized, it feels very remote and inhuman. Everything is so automated,” says Nath of current recruiting processes.

Nath and his colleagues were also subjected to automated video interviews conducted by recruiting technology providers like HireVue, which record candidates answering predetermined questions, often with a time limit on each response.

Sometimes the recordings are watched by the employer’s hiring managers; or the platform’s AI algorithms will evaluate each candidate’s performance by looking for keywords in the job description.

The company has yet to release any generative AI products, but its lead data scientist, Lindsey Zuloaga, said her team is testing tools like chatbots to prepare interviews and extract information from video interviews.

“These systems are powerful, but they can also be wrong. How can we implement them with care and an ethical focus?” she said.

Grace Lordan, an economist at the London School of Economics and director of The Inclusion Initiative, which studies diversity in corporate environments, said companies, particularly technology groups, are experimenting with generative AI to conduct initial interviews.

“One of the biggest areas of bias is actually the interview,” she said. “That’s where people affinity bias, or representative bias, comes in, which means choosing people who look like others in the organization.”

AI-driven interviews can help remove that bias, she says. “Generative AI is quite convincing as an avatar. Using AI as another serious data point will enable machine resilience [contra o viés humano].”

More employers are also using new assessment methods to broaden the pool of candidates they select from, amid global skills and workforce shortages and as they push to improve diversity.

Automated systems designed to hire a more diverse workforce can find candidates who would otherwise be overlooked due to health issues, employment gaps, or because they lack a degree or are from a non-traditional background.

ChatGPT is a starting point, not a substitute, experts say

But while ChatGPT is a useful starting point for a cover letter or getting to know a potential employer’s background, recruiters say it’s no substitute for writing an introduction yourself.

Nath, the Cambridge student, said: “Companies are looking for a relationship with the people there, how to contact someone in the company or information that is not on the website. And those things can only be cultivated by personal interactions, not role models. of AI”.

Adzuna’s Hunter agrees: “The caveat I would give job seekers is that AI can act as a good copilot, but don’t let the technology try to do everything for you. It’s a very new technology, it’s going to generate standardized responses. If you allow the initial interactions with the employer to be fully handled by AI, you won’t get the job done.”

_{Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves}