A Glimpse Into The Future Of Recruiting

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Can AI be the key to modernizing the recruiting process? A look into the next revolution in recruiting.

The resume: a staple of the hiring process for years. Traditionally, job seekers have been producing chronological summaries of their employment history, job titles and responsibilities, and education. Whether agonizing over which paper stock would make the best first impression, or which font best says “creative, but deadline-conscious,” the resume has remained mostly unchanged.

Things haven’t evolved much on the hiring side, either. Job descriptions have remained largely unchanged since they migrated from classified ads to online career sites. Sure, some companies are sprucing them up with video, multimedia, and hyperlinks – but most job descriptions remain compliance-driven laundry lists of responsibilities and qualifications recycled from the last time the position was advertised.

Has the application process changed? Not really. Sure, recruiters are reviewing applications in their applicant tracking systems (ATS) as opposed to rifling through stacks of printed or faxed resumes, but it’s still a human scanning a document to identify relevant skills and experience that may qualify the applicant for further examination. A human with their own biases that steer and shape their assessment – even if only subconsciously.

On average, recruiters spend six seconds scanning a resume to determine if they want to consider an applicant. Think about that. In the time it takes to have the internal debate on whether to upsize your soda, a recruiter is deciding an applicant’s fate. Even the best recruiters, whose ability to review resumes has been honed by reviewing thousands of resumes, will miss great hires. Why? Today’s careers aren’t linear.

The Antiquated Case For “Fully Baked” Resumes

While in most companies, the recruiting process is run by recruiters, it’s driven by hiring managers. Hiring managers with lean teams, project deadlines, and increasing pressure to do more with less. These factors drive an insatiable appetite for “fully-baked” candidates. Candidates who’ve worked in the right companies, went to the proper schools, who have the immediately transferrable responsibilities, and the vertically progressive career path that positions them into an instantly productive role.

That expectation is rooted in the ghosts of careers past. The days when careers were linear, and everyone stayed on a vertical path of career progression within their specific field. That view is incongruent with today’s careers.


Welcome To The Future

Imagine a future where job descriptions and resumes no longer matter. Target candidate profiles are created by analyzing massive amounts of data (pattern assessments of top performers, prioritized and weighted deliverables, application funnel history, performance data, and more). Machine learning parses through all of this data to understand what experiences, traits, dispositions, career paths, and more, would allow for the highest odds of success in a role.


Sound like far-fetched Jetsonian future? It’s already here.

Last year Unilever ditched resumes in favor of AI and algorithmic matching for a segment of their new graduate hiring.

Using a tool called Pymetrics, they shifted an entire segment of their University hiring away from the traditional on-campus model towards a new approach based on AI assessments. The results were significant:

  • Applications doubled over the first 90 days
  • Unilever hired its most diverse class to date, with considerable increase in nonwhite applicants and hires
  • The hiring class was also much more socio-economically diverse, with many hires coming from schools they did not typically visit and recruit
  • Time to fill shrank from four months to four weeks

In this case (and I expect most cases for the near-term future), humans take over with traditional interviews once the initial AI assessment is complete. The opportunity to inject bias at this stage still exists, but the candidate pool will likely include a much more diverse slate of prospects – including some “jagged resumes” that traditional resume evaluation would have missed.

The results of Unilever’s initiative is certainly encouraging, but it doesn’t necessarily indicate the beginning of the end of the resume quite yet. New grads, or high-volume hiring roles where candidates are accustomed to doing more on the front end of the application process, are much more likely to invest the time necessary to complete the games and evaluations necessary for AI to gather enough data to make an assessment. Would a software engineer in San Francisco? Perhaps not today, but that doesn’t mean we won’t get there.

The future of recruiting will always be human, but will be increasingly augmented by tools and technology that will benefit recruiters and job seekers alike.

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Lars is the Founder of Amplify, a growth catalyst for 21st Century HR. He's also the Co-Founder of HR Open Source (HROS.co). He’s spent 20 years in HR and Recruiting bui...