Slate magazine is calling out a new recruiting trend with the potential to make everyone involved from the recruiting team through the CEO look bad.
Check out Slate’s piece on the use of AI in screening interviews here:
https://slate.com/life/2025/05/jobs-ai-job-hiring-character-interview.html
This is the latest in a long series of bad online experiences in hiring, right up there with having to retype a resume into a job site after already uploading the same resume. Bad consultants and bad software peddlers have been saddling unsuspecting HR executives with this kind of trash for decades now. It is time once and for all to say “Hell NO!” to bad ideas.
HR, including recruiters, you may not know it but you are in the dignity business. When you don’t respect the dignity of candidates, you are alienating them. Way to go in creating future malcontents even before they are hired. You are setting a tone.
As AI comes at us, someone should start using the phrase “candidate experience” again and ensure the new tools are behind the scenes, not front and center. AI should help me complete the forms, not make me feel like I have entered an alien dystopia.
While technology motors ahead and miracles are promised and some are even arriving, some things that stink seem to be as old as work itself. Such as using lousy technology that makes work even less satisfying than it was before. Anyone remember the first Microsoft software versions that would quit unexpectedly and if you hadn’t saved whatever you were working on it went bye bye? Kind of feels like that right now.
If you haven’t considered it yet, there is also a compliance/empathy/human decency element to this discussion. There are obvious and non-obvious disabilities that this technology will not be able to account for, requiring the person being interviewed to seek a solution outside the computer screen. Great talent is available that might self select out or be made to feel like an “exception” by one of these systems. We all need to do better than that.
Armies of consultants are out there right now looking to sell you the latest ways to use AI to achieve savings. Here are a few questions to ask when they arrive, and when senior leadership starts to hand out mandates and savings targets. Open with this comment: “We want to WIN. We Want to win the best talent, so….”
- How will this help us improve our selection and onboarding of candidates – in their eyes, not ours? What will they say about us in the media and on job review sites?
- How will this affect our candidate experience? From the moment they engage with us, what will be their impression?
- What will interaction with our website/recruiter/online tools tell the candidates about us?
- What will improve in terms of ease of use for applicants and reduction of redundant data inputs?
- How will we ensure that whatever AI tool we use is not picking up or creating its own bias in any process involving job candidates?
- How will we impress people with our approach?
If you are reading this, there is a chance that like me you consider talent acquisition the most important thing a company does. Talent is the very source of your competitive advantage and the best firms treat it that way. The worst treat it like an administrative activity to be mined for savings, and then complain that it doesn’t work.
HR leaders must fight to keep talent strategic. Letting AI or Bots handle any kind of interviews ain’t no way to run a railroad. If you do, you deserve what you’re gonna get.
