Navigating the Future Workforce: The Opportunities and Challenges of AI and Automation in Recruitment

In today's rapidly evolving professional landscape, the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation technologies is reshaping the fundamental practices of recruitment. As organisations strive to adapt to the demands of the digital age and the shifting expectations of both employers and candidates, the discussion surrounding AI and automation in recruitment has gained prominence.

In this Q&A, I sat down with Jonathan Stewart most recently Global Head of TA, Enabling Functions & Regional Director TA, Insights APAC at Kantar, a leading marketing data and analytics company, to explore some key aspects of this transformation and understand its significance in the business environment.

There’s been a lot of discussion recently about AI and automation in relation to recruitment. What do you think are some of the major risks and benefits?

We’ve already been using automation to support recruitment for some time, notably in areas like interview scheduling, (programmatic) job posting, online assessments, and video interviews. Recruitment is full of opportunities to automate, particularly if you have established clearly defined and transparent processes in place. The inbound process, which is where people actively apply for jobs, is particularly suitable, and it creates benefits such as speed and efficiency which typically lead to a good candidate experience for applicants. Outbound (and senior hiring), where you are typically headhunting passive candidates, is a bit more challenging to automate as it traditionally begins with a recruiter-led reach out and requires ‘human’ skills such as persuasion, storytelling, and negotiation to close the ‘sale’ of the company and role.

The more complex technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (including Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing), are more recent entrants into the space. Chatbots have been around for a few years now, acting as candidate co-pilots, and they can enhance the candidate experience by answering questions about matching roles, steps to apply, company, role etc. which the candidate might have, and critically they can do this 24 hours a day and 7 days per week. They can also be set up to drive candidates through the (pre-defined) recruitment process itself without the need for any recruiter input until the later stages. Interestingly, these technologies get better over time as they “learn” from earlier interactions and continue to develop.

In its early iterations, AI was often employed as tools to support sourcing. This did not come without a problem, however. A global online retailer scrapped their early AI sourcing tool when it began selecting mainly male candidates for interviews on the assumption that because more males had been hired in the past, they therefore made better candidates. In other words, the AI tool was entrenching the bias which already existed in the process. These days, the AI offering in the market is much more advanced of course and many of the big players are building AI functionality into current platforms and tools – though questions still linger about the black box decision-making of these tools, particularly as the algorithms become more complex or searches include more parameters. As is the case across HR, many TA teams are still working their way around how best to employ these new products and how to build guardrails against potential dangers like bias and data security. What is going to be critical here is the need for companies to move to a skills-focused talent lens to support the adoption of AI, since it provides a unified framework and language within which the AI can identify and match candidates against pre-defined and aligned demand profiles. There is tremendous debate at the moment about how to do this, how to sustain a skills taxonomy in an ever-changing business, and even whether it is worth going down this route at all.

Another trend to note is the entrance of generative AI into the application and interview process. Candidates are starting to employ AI to write their CVs, apply for jobs, and even conduct virtual interviews or case studies. Similarly, recruiters might be using the same tool for writing JDs and job postings, creating case studies, or even eventually screening candidates. A bleak and imminent possible future, then, is one in which we find candidate AI directly facing off against recruiter AI to decide who gets the job. How this situation develops is yet to be seen.

We read a lot about Candidate Experience, and how it is an important focus for hiring companies. What does a good Candidate Experience look like to you and how can we use new technologies to enhance this?

Despite what they claim, most companies offering to candidates is pretty similar; if we are honest, EVPs tend to be an amalgamation of the same five or six “differentiators”, salaries and benefits are benchmarked and often pitched at the market median, and most companies are in constant transformation of some sort or other. Therefore, Candidate Experience has become one of the few levers companies can use to differentiate themselves in the competition for talent. What does good CX look like though? Generally, candidates expect a quick, respectful, and responsive service when moving through application and assessment. They want to receive measured and specific qualitative feedback along the way, whether successful or unsuccessful, and have good access to information about the company and role. It’s really not rocket science, or at least it shouldn’t be.

I think it’s a fair claim, however, that candidate's experience has never been worse. Why is this? Well, the way you apply for a job in 2024 is not unlike how you applied for a job in 2014 or maybe even 2004; you fill in the same online application form, click apply through the job board, or message someone directly. While this used to be a manual process, these days we all have automation tools at our fingertips so candidates can fire off hundreds of applications a day – even while they sleep. Recruiters simply cannot keep up with the volume of applications and, because many of the recruiter tools are also a legacy of an earlier age, at least in functionality, managing the volume of candidates in a respectful way has become near impossible. We have seen a few years now where many applicants receive little to no feedback (and if so, automated) or are ghosted entirely, even after interviewing. What is more, fear of legal action means that many companies fear providing any substantive feedback at all, even to candidates who have attended interviews. Never has candidate expectations and experience been so far apart. Add to this mix the trend for downsizing recruitment teams and you have the recipe for the problem we are experiencing today.

On the plus side, we are seeing new tools appearing all the time that focus on providing good CX. ATS’s which allow quick application with minimal submission, chatbots that drive candidates through an automated process at their own pace, video interview tools with transcription allowing the interview experience to be more personalised and efficient, and assessment tools that provide the candidate with a breakdown of their results. For CX to be consistently good, we need to customise and personalise it; this means differentiating between the process we use for applicants (which should be quick to give a result, highly automated, give easy access to information about the company and role etc.) and our outreach process, where candidates typically expect a more white-glove service.

What role does talent acquisition play in helping organisations make informed commercial decisions about remote work, fractional working, and blended workforces?

We are already well into the age of flexible working. I think this will continue to grow as we see companies explore opportunities like fractional working, more blended workforces, four-day weeks, and leveraging remote workforces in lower-cost or more talent-rich locations. Once companies get to grips with the taxation, organisational and regulatory requirements of these, we will see the pace pick up.

From a TA point of view, we are being asked to supply the data and expert advice for leaders to make more strategic and commercial talent decisions these days. For instance, if I open an office or plant in this location compared with that, what is the cost v. capability v. readiness of each option from a human capital perspective? These are big business decisions that have very real impacts on commercial outcomes. HR must continue to grow its talent data, insights, and analytics functions and build the muscles required to best equip itself to answer these kinds of questions. As companies continue developing their Talent functions, these answers will also need to include internal talent pools, contingent workers, and third-party vendors, and - critically - HR will be involved in more upstream discussions about business strategy, rather than brought in simply to execute after the key decisions are already made.

How can organisations benefit from having a more data-driven approach to managing their talent resources and requirements, and how will this change the role of talent acquisition?

In the past, TA has tended to focus on delivery metrics, such as Time to Fill or roles hired. That was perfectly fine for a Function expected simply to deliver warm bodies into the business as and when asked, however, it generally also meant TA working reactively and with little strategic planning. Our biggest challenge was how to deal with requisitions coming at us unexpectedly like bullets out of the fog – already urgent and with the specifications set, however unrealistic.

Increasingly, we are seeing data, including both leading (e.g. employee surveys) and lagging indicators, (e.g., turnover) being employed to give us a more rounded and dynamic view of the workforce and its talent requirements. Embedding a skills taxonomy and employing a skills and capability lens can also make the picture much clearer since it allows us to map trends and directions of travel across our workforce as well as the open talent market. Lining up the strategic goals of the business with the skills required to deliver them, we can now fashion and plan our talent roadmap well in advance. This, in turn, allows us to build proactive fulfillment strategies around these well before the requirement is triggered and the cost, time, quality, and “readiness” of each option can be weighed up when deciding which parts of the Talent team to engage where. In common parlance, do we buy, build or borrow? Go-to-market recruitment, which is often the most expensive option and, in the past, the first to be triggered, becomes just one inflow into the overall talent roadmap, and ideally one only unleashed when all other options have been considered.

Under a strategic approach, once the hiring starts, TA has already had the opportunity to do some targeted tactical employer branding and candidate pipelining. Warmer candidates are more likely to respond and are easier to hire. Equipped with the right data and insights, hiring the best candidates at the optimal cost and speed just became that much easier.

How does a strong employer brand impact the attraction and retention of top talent, and what can we do about this?

There continues to be a shortage of talent with key skills in pretty much every market around the world. Having a strong and compelling employer brand clearly helps to attract and retain that talent; and an increased flow of higher quality applications in turn means cheaper and better hiring – studies have shown that the cost of acquiring (hiring) talent and retaining (salaries) are both significantly increased in a company with a weaker employer brand, so the commercial value is clear.

There is also the reputational impact of a weak employer brand or a poor candidate experience to consider. Candidates are often customers, service users, or stakeholders, so there can be a direct business impact when the candidate experience is poor and people come away with a negative perception of the organisation. Building trust and engagement takes time but losing it can happen quickly and it’s a tough ship to turn around. A strong employer brand will also engage the existing workforce, increasing loyalty, engagement, efficiency, and referrals – and the benefits of retaining good performers against having to replace them with new ones are huge.

It is not enough these days when building an employer brand to fall back on vapid or general claims; jobseekers and employees expect authentic experiences, compelling values, a clear purpose and to feel appreciated in every interaction with the company. Candidates will do their due diligence before and during application - with review sites like Glassdoor integral to job hunting, we shop these days for jobs as we do holidays and that means poor reviews carry a disproportionate weight in decision-making. Managing how you are perceived as a company is critical to both attracting and retaining the right talent. The employer brand is expressed as much by the experience felt at each touchpoint during the recruitment journey as it is by any corporate advert or message. A good exercise for any organisation is to map out the Prospect>Candidate>Employee>Manager>Senior Manager>Leaver touchpoints to ensure the experience and messages across these are aligned and compelling. It is also critical to include the experience of unsuccessful candidates and involuntary leavers when conducting this project.

If you are considering a career move, seeking advice on the current job landscape, or looking to hire your next star employee, please contact me.