Which Skills Supersede Chat GPT and AI?
Our recruiting functions evolved over the decades in response to the needs and technologies that were available. We moved from paper and the telephone to email and the Internet. We transitioned from stand-alone tools such as applicant tracking systems to more cloud-based systems.
We face new needs and technologies that are perhaps more transformative than anything we have seen. We are dealing with a far more complex workforce that is no longer satisfied with a forty-hour, five-day work week. We have people wishing to work part-time, sometimes as consultants and contractors. We have hybrid workers, office workers, and remote workers. We have hiring managers across a spectrum – some wanting only permanent people and others open to more transitory employees.
Finding the skills our organizations need has been challenging for many years and is getting more complex. And many HR policies and traditional practices have not kept up with these changes.
What happens now that our recruiting processes and technologies have hit the edges of what they were designed to do? When they are not responsive enough to these changes and our existing technologies fall short of meeting the needs of our clients. How do we respond?
Crumple Zones
Modern cars are carefully designed to lessen the impact of a crash with crumple zones that protect the occupants from severe injury. We need to consider what our crumple sones are to prevent us from becoming outdated and replaced. How do we avoid being made irrelevant?
Good design requires both robustness and flexibility. A function must be robust enough to perform under many different conditions, including unanticipated requirements, external disruptions, and a range of decision-making styles. And the function also has to be flexible enough to adapt and accommodate new needs.
Most recruitment functions are set up as hierarchies. Everyone has a defined set of activities and rarely feel comfortable doing anything outside of those activities. Even though there are “full-stack” recruiters, for the most part, the profession has become very specialized. Sourcers source candidates; recruiters interview candidates, do the legal and administrative work, and interface with managers.
Our crumple zone is to accept and adapt to AI that will take over many tasks and activities that we feel only humans can do. We need to find what AI cannot do. Our survival depends on this.
Chatbots can do many of our activities and are increasingly able to source candidates, engage them, screen, and assess them adequately enough to present a decent slate of candidates to a hiring manager. Yes, perhaps not as fully vetted as a recruiter might have done, but good enough. And good enough is what we need to worry about because, in the end, cost and time are more important to leadership than the highest quality.
What AI Cannot Do: Recruiter Survival Skills
Strategic Planning
Recruitment strategies include forecasting workforce needs, understanding organizational goals and priorities, and knowing market trends. These require understanding trends and the competition that only a human can provide.
Redesigning What We Do
The most critical first step in preserving our future is redesigning what we do and how we do it. Rather than try to show how much better we are than AI, we must embrace and use it in every way possible while augmenting it with recruiters where necessary. For example, let the chatbot try to find candidates and only use recruiters when it fails. Move all screening to the chatbot and use recruiters only to add depth and present candidates to hiring managers. Let ChatGPT rewrite job descriptions and post jobs with guidance from a recruiter.
The idea is to find ways to use automation as much as possible while training recruiters to take in responsibilities that are at a higher level, as outlined below.
Culture Fit and Judgment
AI cannot assess whether a candidate fits the company culture. This is subjective and nuanced and requires a contextual understanding of the company’s culture and social norms. While AI can assess technical or hard skills based on data points like experience or educational background, assessing soft skills such as communication style or work ethic requires subjective judgment calls from humans. Anything that calls for judgment is a challenge for AI.
Branding and Marketing
Successful competition for talent will revolve around firms that can create the strongest, most compelling brand and messaging.
The most potent survival skill will be creating excitement about your firm. For all of its capabilities, AI is not yet able to understand what your business does or how to promote it in a way that engages not only the mind but also the imagination and excitement of what your firm does. This is called primal branding, which, for example, Steve Jobs excelled at.
Engaging with the Most Talented
Much like the best headhunters today, the exceptional recruiter will be able to build a relationship with those candidates and with a hiring manager that will be deep and long-lasting. They will seek a personal connection and trust that can only come from another human. While AI can engage many potential hires, it will not be able to engage or convince the most talented and the hardest to hire.
Influencing and Negotiating with Hiring Managers and Candidates
Recruiting often involves negotiating salary terms and benefits packages between the employer and the candidate. Personal judgment and relationship building are crucial to achieving a mutually beneficial outcome.
Improving every recruiter’s ability to influence and engage with candidates and hiring managers may be a skill with the highest potential for survival. The ability to negotiate and compromise are uniquely human traits. Understanding motivations and needs and working out deals that satisfy all parties is a beneficial and practical skill that no chatbot has.
Help Your Team and Yourself
Experts estimate that emotional intelligence, a component of artificial general intelligence, might be achieved somewhere between 2040-2060. It seems that those uniquely human skills will be relevant for a long time, while the more data-driven and scientific skills may be superseded by A.I. much sooner.
Allow your team to experiment with new technologies on a small scale to get used to them. Help them build new skills through classes and practice. Let them try creating job descriptions with ChatGPT, for example, and have them give feedback to senior leaders and hiring managers on how that worked out.
By letting your team slowly create their own future, you avoid the shock and fear of sudden change. Provide forums for giving feedback to leadership where leadership can provide meaningful answers. This lets people feel like their concerns are heard. The future of recruitment is secure, but only when we realize that we need to cultivate and embrace new skills and ways of working.
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Could You Use A Trusted Advisor?
If you are looking for guidance or help in becoming a more strategic leader, we may be able to help. For the past twenty-five years, I have been helping recruitment leaders in major corporations, non-profits, and NGOs to redesign, improve, or transform their talent acquisition functions. I work with you as a partner to assess and improve your processes, find and remove constraints, create more engaging career sites, and choose the most useful and relevant technology. I will work with you as a coach, mentor, or consultant – whichever meets your needs. I have only one goal – to make recruiting strategic and pertinent to your organization. Let me know if I can help. Send me an email at kwheeler@futureoftalent.org.
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