The Future of Talent Acquisition: AI, ethics and what’s next…

Hannah

Welcome to the deep dive, the show where we explore the hottest topics in HR assessment and the world of work in today’s episode. We’re diving into one of the most relevant and hype topics in talent acquisition AI.

Hannah

What’s real, what’s noise, and what do talent acquisition leaders need to know right now.

Hannah

To help us cut through the buzz and get to the truth, we’re joined by the wonderful Matt Alder, author, consultant and host of one of the most listened to talent acquisition podcasts in the World, ‘Recruiting Future’.

Hannah

With 25 years experience in the industry, Matt truly is a leading voice on the future of talent strategy.

Hannah

We’ll be talking about where AI is making a real difference in hiring the ethical pitfalls to watch out for, and what the future holds for recruiters, candidates and hiring teams alike.

Hannah

Whether you’re leading a talent acquisition function or just trying to hire smarter in a fast changing market, this is one conversation you don’t want to miss. Matt, welcome.

Matt

Well, thank you very much for having me.

Hannah

Such a pleasure.

Matt, what does the real world adoption of AI in talent acquisition look like right now beyond the headlines?

Matt

Well, I think there as the famous phrase goes, the future is here, but it’s just not evenly distributed, distributed, distributed it. It kind of it really depends. I think that there are some specific industries, some specific companies, some specific geographies where they’re kind of pushing things as far as they can at the cutting edge, I think for most employers, though, they’re still very much not off the starting blocks. I think that a lot of companies are waiting for the software that they use to kind of lead them through the AI revolution if that if that makes sense.

Matt

So I think it’s a variable picture, but I think the vast majority of organisations are sort of using AI by default rather than design at the moment, which is understandable, but possibly problematic as well in terms of not really fully make the most technology or having a strategy in place to think about.

Hannah

How they might do that and what needs to change? Why are they sitting back and waiting for the tech that they used to take them forwards, why aren’t they propelling themselves forwards?

Matt

Because nothing has ever hit us this quickly. So over the last 20 years, we’ve seen lots of different technological revolutions come into the workplace. So the Internet, social media, mobile, the mobile Internet, cloud computing, all those kind of things and each one of those innovations has kind of had a faster and faster development curve and adoption curve.

Matt

Nothing has been as quick as AI has in terms of how it’s leaped forward in the last couple of years now.

Matt

We’ve had various aspects of AI around us and in in recruiting for a long time, but really the leap forward from the generative AI kind of revolution has been has been just too fast for people to get their heads around. So I think there is a there’s a problem with speed.

Matt

I think they’re also people are worried about you know various aspects of it. Some companies have blanket policies. They don’t let any of their employees use AI in any shape or form. So we’re just at that kind of very early stage, but unfortunately that market and technology is moving much quicker than we’ve ever experienced before.

Hannah

Are we overwhelmed?

Matt

I would say so. Yeah. And I think that we don’t even really appreciate half of what’s going on or half of what’s possible at the moment. So we’re probably overwhelmed, but we should probably be even more overwhelmed than we than we actually are.

Hannah

And what do you do with that then?

Matt

Well, I think it’s just really important to have a really curious mindset about this, I think that sometimes people kind of block these things off or not explore them in the in the level of detail that they perhaps should. So I’d go back to a quote that Sam Altman from open AI said on a podcast with Bill Gates about 18 months ago, which was:

Matt

Over the next 10 to 15 years the AI Revolution is going to go absolutely staggering pace and if you have more than 10 or 15 years left in your career, this absolutely concerns you.

Matt

So I think that there’s that sense of urgency there that people really need to be exploring, be thinking about this and really kind of getting their heads around what’s possible. It’s also very difficult because there’s so much I wanna say, misinformation. It’s not really misinformation. But there’s so much speculation and marketing spin and people arguing about things that don’t Matter. There’s just so much noise out there. I think it’s very difficult to really get a sense of what’s happening.

Hannah

And how do you cut through that noise?

Matt

I think, and this is kind of really the sort of the mission of my podcast is to look for stories to look for where people are using this in practise. You know what’s happening, what kind of results are they getting.

Matt

Also I think with HR and recruiting, we tend to be sort of behind the curve sometimes with adoption compared to other departments in the enterprise. So I think that you could take a good look at what’s going on in finance, what’s going on in marketing, what’s going on in sales and in most cases get a bit of a steer about how this technology is being used.

Matt

So I think I think there’s lots of sensible places to look beyond joining in the latest LinkedIn argument about will we be replaced by robots? Ohh yes, we will. Oh no, we weren’t the kind of pantomime style debate that tends to happen around this topic.

Hannah

Indeed.

Hannah

Where do you think the use of AI might be falling short in hiring processes?

Matt

So I think that one of the one of the problems with this is because it’s moving so quickly, a lot of the promises made and discussions that’s going on are really talking about technology that’s not quite in the mainstream yet. So it might be here in a month, it might be here in six months, it might be here in a year.

Matt

So I think that sometimes there are false expectations about what’s possible. I also think that because there’s been such a kind of a gold rush of software companies trying to sort of embed AI into their system somewhere just so they can sort of put their hands up and say we’ve got AI, we’ve got AI.

Matt

You know, sometimes that’s underwhelming or inappropriate or not very useful, and that can you know, be really kind of disillusioning. So it’s a combination of factors I think about hyper reality not meeting. But then in other places there are there are things going on that you can really see this kind of working well.

Matt

So I think there’s just this uneven distribution of of technology, of understanding of all those kind of things. And it’s just a very complicated, nuanced position. And I think that as humans we try and look for almost like a yes or no answer. It’s like does this work for a hiring?

Matt

Yes or no, and it’s just very, very nuanced. And also it changes. It changes very, very quickly. So I’m fully comfortable, I think that by the time this podcast comes out, some of the things that I’ve said might be out of date or you know might never happen or I might have missed something blindingly obvious because that’s just the state of at the moment.

Matt

You have to have that kind of really kind of flexible way of thinking about this and not be afraid about being wrong. I think that’s kind of an important aspect which I think in business is a very difficult thing to do because you know, we’re not really allowed to be wrong.

Hannah

And in HR, perhaps an even more difficult thing to do, right? Yeah.

Matt

Oh, absolutely. A million percent.

Hannah

Where have you seen it work really well?

Matt

So there are lots of different and interesting use cases. So at the basic level, you know, we see people doing things like cement automating the production of job adverts from job descriptions or automating job description production, and in some ways you kind of look at that and say well actually you know, shouldn’t humans be doing this?

Matt

But it’s been an area that’s been so problematic for so long and anything that kind of makes that better is brilliant. So we’ve seen quite a quite a lot of that moving up from there. Obviously a lot of interview scheduling, interview note taking those kind of things, seeing some great stuff done with AI just in terms of kind of aggregating all of the interview data you know, being able to coach people on how to interview better and just, you know, kind of get a picture of interviewing that we’d never be able to have never been able to have before. I think that’s really interesting.

Matt

We’re also seeing it in sourcing, so you know, going out there using AI to try and find more candidates, all those kind of things. But I think the really interesting cutting edge uses of it have been in the in some of the high volume hiring spaces. So I can think of sort of two or three examples of this.

Matt

Fast food restaurants, healthcare and you know sort of generally places where the same job is being hired on a kind of a repeatable basis. And there in some cases we’ve seen you know almost full into automation of the first part of that process so you know dealing with all the applications you know screening and scoring people who apply, dealing with the whole first screening. And I’ve seen that done via text. I’ve seen that done by voice calls.

Matt

And you know, taking things through to that sort of hiring manager, interview stage and doing that incredibly successfully, I think that we hear a lot of a lot of stories about how that goes wrong and not enough stories about some of the companies who are doing this really well and getting, you know, some phenomenal results.

Matt

So I think that’s been really interesting to watch the organisations that are that are doing that, but they tend to be, you know, high volume hiring where the same job is being recruited for again and again and again.

Hannah

Yeah. Do you think it’s actually problematic that the media is always going to pick up on the stories that go wrong versus the success stories? Do you think that’s warped reality?

Matt

Yeah, it’s a difficult one because I think that and I’m sure we’ll talk about this later, there’s lots of things to be worried about.

Matt

When it comes to AI and there are lots of things that are happening that perhaps shouldn’t be happening. But that said, there is a danger that are we holding some of these, some of these machines to a much higher standard than we’re holding humans.

So humans make mistakes in recruitment processes all the time. And I’m sure if you looked at some of those processes that have been partially automated up to the up to that hiring manager stage. They’re not automated kind of beyond that, I’m sure that the quality, in fact I know that, the quality of the candidate experience is infinitely better because people are getting transparent communication, it’s happening quicker and I’m sure there are mistakes occasionally, but, you know, probably less than they would be with human.

Matt

So I think it’s again it’s a really nuanced situation and I think that we live in a social media world where people wanna pounce on something and immediately have an opinion one way or the other. And I think that’s one of the issues cause it is a very complicated sort of environment out there.

Hannah

Yeah, absolutely. I that’s a really interesting thought, or question, are we holding machines to a higher standard than we hold humans? That’s not a conversation I have on a regular basis. It’s a really interesting thought.

Matt

And we probably and we should, we absolutely should. But I think at the same time we should be very aware of the shortcomings of the recruitment process as it is at the moment, I think in an ideal world, if every candidate could have a one-on-one conversation with every recruiter and get full and frank feedback for every kind of interaction they have then of course, humans could do that better, but that’s not the situation we’re in. We’re in a situation where candidate experience is terrible. You know, job searches affect people’s mental health because it’s so bad. And actually, if there’s technology that can make that better.

Matt

Maybe not as good as a one on one human conversation every time. Then we should be using it.

Hannah

Agree you mentioned hype earlier, Matt, I think you’ll probably have seen a lot of tech hype over the years in talent acquisition. What’s different, or not different about the AI wave?

Matt

As I said, it’s faster. I think that’s the big thing. I think what’s interesting and I’ve noticed this this year more than anything else. So I think last year if you kind of take as a barometer, walking around a recruiting technology conference and HR technology conference, you know last year everyone had to have AI on their stand somewhere with AI, with AI, all this kind of stuff.

Matt

And what I’m noticing this year is people focusing kind of much more, the companies that can, focusing kind of much more on the use cases, and it’s a little bit like, I don’t know whether old enough to remember, but when the Internet first came along, when the Internet first came along, you know, people say companies say we’re on the on the on the World Wide Web, on the Internet, we’re on the Internet. We have a website and no one says that anymore.

Hannah

I do remember at that moment.

Matt

So I think that with AI, we’re kind of hopefully we’ll get to that stage where we’re not talking about AI, we’re talking about, you know what these systems can deliver the business value, all those kind of things.

Matt

I think we’re still in, We need to talk about AI, stage of things and which creates lots of hype and lots of confusion, and I’m hoping that we will quickly move to another stage where we’re talking about use cases and we’re talking about results.

Hannah

And the practicalities.

Matt

Absolutely, yeah.

Hannah

What do you think is the biggest myth about AI in hiring?

Matt

That’s a good question. I think one of the things I hear time and time again, which kind of does my head in a little bit is, this kind of well-worn phrase that you won’t lose your job to AI, you’ll lose your job to a human using AI. So it gets using recruitment quite a lot.

Matt

So it’s like. you’re not going to lose your job to AI because it’s never going to replace us humans. You’re going to use your job to someone who uses AI. Now 12 or 18 months ago I think that I could. I could see that it it’s partially true in the short term.

Matt

I really don’t think it’s true in the long term, because as things develop, you know it’s very likely that jobs will just change massively and some jobs will cease to exist. There will be new jobs, you know, be interesting to see how it shakes out. So I think that’s kind of a fake comfort for people that they can sort of go away, learn a little bit of AI and their and their job is safe because it may be that their entire profession doesn’t exist in a few years time or their company doesn’t exist or whatever.

Matt

I think that is a myth, and I think it’s quite a dangerous one because it puts people into it, gives people a very false sense of security about what’s, you know, what’s going on and how quickly some of the changes happening.

Hannah

And so, what should those individuals be thinking about or doing, instead of furiously reading up on how to become a prompt expert?

Matt

I think it is really important to, you know, experiment with some of these tools there, there, there are three versions of them everywhere. And I think it’s an appropriate thing to do. But I think that it really is about taking a step back and thinking about asking very difficult questions about your job and your discipline, and saying, can a machine actually do this better than a human? and really dig it into that because a lot of the time the answers can be quite surprising, that yes, the machine can do that better than a human. And I think that is almost the process you have to go to kind of really understand, you know, where you add value.

Matt

And where you can bring value to this sort of emerging world, and it’s difficult because I think we’re still fairly in the dark about the time scales of this. So you know it may be that this takes years to shake through it maybe takes months and I think that’s the complicating factor of this.

It’s very difficult to give a kind of defined timeline and you know the technology has, without doubt has evolved far quicker than even people I know who work in a I thought it could ever do. But as we know, you know when you try and look at sort of business adoption and all these kind of things there are you know there are barriers to that. There are kind of unknowns to that. So we just don’t really know the time scales are which I think is probably the most challenging part of this.

Hannah

And to go back to that point, you made or the question you asked, can a machine do this better? Yes. And the point around actually a lot of the time, yes, it can.

Hannah

Is there a particular challenge do you think for folks in HR who often get into HR because of the people element? And I think take pride in that and in in in the fact that they know people, they get people, they understand people.

Hannah

And so it can feel, I imagine, quite a jump to then go. The machine could make a better decision about people than I can.

Matt

Yeah. And I think it can’t always do that. I think that’s the thing and you know as long as there are still people in jobs, then those people things are really important. But it’s just I think from an individual perspective, there may be things in your job that you kind of hold on to dearly that actually you know, you should probably let go of because it will be automated or whatever.

Hannah

Can you give me an example of what that might be?

Matt

I mean It’s a good question, isn’t it? I think it’s a very individual thing. It might be someone who really likes going through CVS or something like that. I don’t know. I think that’s kind of quite an individual thing.

Hannah

Personal umm.

Matt

What I would say from a from a kind of leadership level, I think it’s difficult because people have to look at their sort of talent acquisition function and try and make these decisions on a function basis. And I think that there are what I call sort of 4A’s in terms of how you think about this.

So it’s like the first one is automation. You know what repeatable, easy task could we automate straight away or are we like to be able to automate in the future?

Matt

The second one is augmentation, which is where are humans and AI going to work together brilliantly to do things better and faster, and that’s probably 1 area that we haven’t really kind of explored as much as we should because the focus has been on automation and that’s just a kind of an adoption thing.

I think that’s probably the next big conversation in terms of what happens and I think anyone who’s used some of the more advanced version of these models, so ChatGPT, 4.5, deep research, all those kind of things can see the value that AI can bring to strategic thinking or those kind of things.

So there’s the augmented factor of it.

Matt

And the third one is amplifying the amplification. So what is it that only humans currently can do really well?, and we should dig in and focus on that because I think, and this is on a podcast discussion that I got going live next week, I think one of the problems is as you know, people were recognised that automation is coming to various aspects of recruitment. That means additional capacity. And what do you do with that capacity, and a lot of the time the answer that comes back is quite generic. We’re going to focus on high value activities and the human stuff.

Matt

But very often people can’t actually give an explanation about what that means.

Hannah

Yes.

Hannah

Does that mean?

Matt

And it’s important to know what that means. And again, it’s gonna be different by company, by company.

Matt

If you have extra capacity in a business, people start asking questions about that capacity, and I think it’s important to be able to do that. So that augmentation, that amplification bit is an important thing to think about. What is it that it is those human relationships.

Matt

And let’s not forget, you know, we’re dealing with recruitment. It’s all about humans and they need to be persuaded and comfortable to take a job, a new job because it’s a life changing thing and it’s probably something that people don’t want to leave to a machine or anything like that.

Matt

So I think that this kind of persuasion and that relationship building is still such a big thing and it’s kind of like almost old school recruitment from 20 or 30 years ago. That’s what recruiters used to focus on before technology. So yes, that amplification bit is kind of important.

Matt

Then the 4th one is, I probably call this archive, which is with this AI revolution, are there things that we do or steps in the process that we take, that actually, we don’t have to do anymore because AI is giving us the ability to kind of sidestep that or do that in a different way, or think about recruiting in a different way so you know they kind of go up in order of difficulty in terms of the thinking around them. But I think that’s probably a good sort of pathway to think along to try and you know get some, get some answers.

Hannah

I love that model Automation. Augmentation, Amplification and Archive.

Hannah

That feels really simple.

Matt

Yes. Yeah, It feels simple in theory.

And it is simple in terms of the way it’s structured, but there’s obviously some kind of deep thinking and difficult kind of decisions in there. But actually I think if you just have to take a step back and look at it, you know be as detached as you can and think of it logically and then it is simpler but obviously, that’s kind of difficult because you know, there’s so much emotional involvement in, you know, in in all this kind of thing. So yeah, it can be quite hard.

Hannah

And just thinking as well about some of that kind of high value people focus stuff and defining that, the point you make on persuasion and relationship building being some of that kind of high value people related stuff, the stuff of the old school recruiter. Yeah, coming back to the floor I think is a really good one. And I think starts to solve some of the newer problems that certainly some of our clients are seeing around declined job offers, reneges as well, once offers have been accepted, and that’s where you can really make a difference, the machines not going to do that for you, Is it?

Matt

Yeah, I think that’s a kind of really important point. It’s that whole, you know, that marketing that branding, that one-on-one persuasion. That’s what recruiting used to be about and I think this is a great opportunity to kind of really focus on that and I think that the technology just gets us to that place quicker and whether that’s a one on one conversation or even things like within recruitment marketing, I think that you know we’ve had sort of new tools and technologies for, for years but as an industry, we’ve always been really bad at implementing them, so it’s, you know, the ability to send nurturing emails to people. It’s just like we’re just spamming people even more than we were spamming them before. And I think just taking a really deliberate view on , “what’s the journey here?” “How are we talking about what we do?” “How are we kind of building that rapport first digitally, and then personally?”, I think that’s just incredibly important. And I think it just takes the candidate experience conversations to a whole new level. So rather than just talking about can we give people feedback?, How quickly can we go through the process, all that sort of stuff we can actually talk about? How do how do we want people to feel when this is this is happening?

Matt

And how is that kind of working for us and is that helping with some of those challenges that we have? So you know my hope is that it takes these conversations to a much more interesting and deeper level because the technology can deal with the things that should just be table stakes. Like, you know, getting back to people quickly and giving them a sense of where they are in the process and giving them feedback and all that kind of stuff.

Hannah

Definitely. That good old “people don’t remember what you say. They remember how you made them feel.”

Matt

Exactly.

Hannah

Matt, you gave a really nice example of what I think would probably feed into your automation. So that first stage of the model earlier around fully automating that first screening part of the process which I thought was really interesting.

Hannah

Have you seen augmentation done really well? or amplification done really well?

Matt

Yeah, it’s a good question. I think that they are related. So I had a podcast interview, I think it was like a couple of weeks ago with Adeco, actually Adeco in Belgium.

Matt

And they were talking through how they were using AI agents to automate that front part of the process. So they were able to, you know, match and score applications, do a kind of a first screening and then when they got to the sort of the recruiter call, they were able to, you know, dive into much more detail.

Matt

Because they didn’t have to go through the background check stuff or the basic stuff and it’s kind of an augmentation because it’s the AI has taken away, it’s taken away that piece and it means that there is more room and more time for conversation.

Matt

I think that it’s a question of, I think you have to be quite careful about this sometimes. I mean it might be going off at a slight tangent, but I’ve heard of people doing things like just putting CV straight into the publicly available Large Language Models and using that to augment their workflow. And that’s a really bad idea for lots of lots of different reasons.

Matt

Well, I think it’s just kind of really sort of thinking about how AI can help me to do this so you know one area that we haven’t talked about is data. You know, we’re moving to a world where AI can look at lots of data, you know, very, very quickly we hopefully we’ll be at a point where we can look at data across the organisation.

Matt

And I spoke to a couple of companies that are kind of at this point or close to this point where they can actually see what happened to the people that they hire and loop back to optimise the way that they recruit, and obviously AI and data is facilitating that, if that makes sense.

Hannah

absolutely. And why shouldn’t you be putting CV’s into LLMs?

Matt

Well, I think this is the whole bit around ethics and risk and all those kinds of things. There’s obviously quite a few, certainly one in particular kind of highly publicised court case at the moment around, allegedly, AI, you know, making decisions about people and all that kind of stuff.

Matt

And I think that the software providers who are doing this to the highest ethical standards and all those kinds of things are anything around matching. They are putting so much effort into it to ensure that it’s explainable and it’s transparent.

Matt

And there are firstly, ethical reasons why that’s important, but there’s also legal reasons why that’s important, so you know, we’re seeing new legislation come in around the world the whole time. The EU AI acts and certain kind of American states doing various things, we may one day understand what the UK’s going to do. But and that’s still very much under discussion.

Matt

But also, as we’ve kind of seen with some of the issues that have come up the existing discrimination laws apply to this already. So if you just put stuff straight into a publicly available system that has no kind of guardrails. You’ve got no idea how it’s making decisions. You know, that’s a really bad thing to do. And also, I know people who’ve done research and experiments on this, and actually the results aren’t very good anyway. And so, you know, designing systems that can do that is a really complex thing.

And there are some great providers out there doing that and they are, you know, they’re, they’re audited, they’re trying to sort of be as compliant as they could possibly be, so some of these things are really specialised tasks that, because LLM’s are always programmed to be helpful and polite, you may think that you’re getting, you know, great information out of them. But actually, you know, there are all kinds of risks with this.

Matt

So I think that’s the downside. You know, around this when you’re sort of trying to learn about it.

Hannah

Absolutely. And so, as a TA leader, what are the things that you should be thinking about or the questions you should be asking?

Hannah

If you’re worried about the ethical part of AI use in recruitment especially, maybe that kind of linked to bias, so wanting to avoid bias.

Matt

Yeah, I think that if you’re using a particular vendor, you just have to ask them, very sort of deep questions around the explain-ability of what they do, the consistency of what they do, what they have put in place to mitigate bias. Can they prove that? Have they have they had that system audited?

I think as time moves on it will be easier to do this because it’ll be a bigger understanding. I think one of the things about the Workday, alleged age discrimination process that’s going on at the moment is that as it stands and there are lots of reasons why this may not sort of continue forward. But as it stands the court that’s kind of looked at this to start with, has said that actually the software vendor is liable for this rather than the employer or not just the employer. And I think that’s sharpening a lot of people’s focus around how they talk about their AI and how they make sure it’s ethical and legal.

So I think it’s a situation that will become clearer and get better as we move forward. But it’s just important to, you know, ask some kind of very searching questions about where this is coming from and how it works.

Hannah

And to go back to your earlier point around noise and marketing spin, how do you make sure that the answers that you’re getting don’t fall under that category?

Matt

I think it is again a question of keeping yourself up to date and educating ourselves. I think asking for independent evidence is an important part of this, and we’re seeing a rise of companies who are actually auditing these systems and you know, coming back and giving that kind of data.

Matt

So yeah, I think it’s just kind of important to sort of be on top of everything that’s happening. I mean, there is no end of discussion about it and resources around it to look at. I just think it’s something that you just have to really sort of focus on and think about.

Matt

At the same time, and I think again this is the problem with the speed that we’re moving at, particularly you know HR is very risk averse as we know there could be a temptation that I know some companies are doing this to stand back and say, “you know what, we’re gonna wait for legislation, we’re gonna wait till this is perfectly clear”, but unfortunately this is moving so quickly and there are companies that are already getting competitive advantage and competitive talent advantage over others by doing it. It’s not something that we can wait and see, and also some of this legislation, some of these court cases could run for years before we have a definitive picture around it.

So I think it’s understanding the risks, asking the right questions, but at the same time, moving forward with this because I don’t think that organisations can afford to stand still.

Hannah

Absolutely. How is AI changing the way organisations assess for talent beyond CV reviews?

Matt

Yeah, I think that’s, I suppose there’s a couple of aspects to this I think the first one is it’s changing the volume of applications, so you know we know hearing countless stories of companies being kind of overwhelmed by applications because candidates are using the tools they have available to either applied to lots of jobs you know very quickly, to tailor application very quickly, to do all the things that we’ve told them to do for years very, very quickly.

So I think that causes a massive issue. That means companies need to think about assessing in different ways. So I think that just the CV review and the interview are being shown up for what they are, in terms of, you know, outdated and not appropriate. So my hope would be that it’s driving people to look much more broadly assessment and really understand what’s going on. So I think that’s one driver for it.

Matt

I think the other aspect to it is it’s great to see assessment companies kind of embracing technology in terms of being able to move faster and being able to, you know, if we look at a scenario where we can push assessment further up the funnel. So people are doing assessments much earlier than they would have done. You know previously, right at the final stage or further down and I think that technology is helping assessment companies do that at scale which is phenomenal.

Matt

The issue that I have is why I’m telling you this. You know this, you know the best assessment companies have peer reviewed science behind them that’s been there for decades. It’s always been a very confusing thing to me that we know how to hire people and scientifically we know how to do that, but we don’t do it. We just stick to gut feel and CVS and all that sort of stuff.

So I think it’s important because there are things creeping onto the market where people are designing their own crazy assessment process using AI and all those kinds of things. And actually, we already have science that knows how to do this. So there is a kind of a risk I think of, you know, new science coming into the market that’s not being kind of robustly assessed as the science that we already have, so you know, I think there’s a number of things going on.

Hannah

Why do you think people haven’t always adopted the old science?

Matt

I think there’s a couple of reasons. One kind of structural, one cultural. I think that over say the last 20 or 30 years, it’s not necessarily been accessible for everyone. So particularly smaller companies just in terms of, perhaps the cost, but also maybe the time it takes to actually design things and do things.

So I think that there’s been some barriers to entry. I also think that one of the biggest problems that we have with recruitment is that the cultural norms that sit behind it, so everyone who has a job has been through a recruitment process, which means everyone has an opinion on how recruitment works.

Matt

And I think that whenever we sort of try and disrupt that opinion, it seems to cause eruptions everywhere because this is not how recruiting has always been done. So I think there’s just this ingrained thing about you need to CV, you need to send your CV, someone needs to give you an interview and that’s how it works. And it doesn’t work.

So I think it’s just this embedded thinking that it kind of really holds it back sometimes and I would hope that we’re now seeing that challenged and if we see better outcomes then you know thinking moves on. But sometimes it’s a challenge to do that.

Hannah

So if we struggle to get them on the old science, How do we get them on the new science?

Matt

I think that to me, the catalyst for this is the way that candidate use of AI is breaking existing processes because…

Hannah

You can’t not do anything.

Matt

Exactly. You can’t not do anything about it. Now, it you know it’s not. Again, it’s not evenly distributed. I made a huge error the other week. I was on stage conference in Norway talking about this and I didn’t realise that Norway has a massive problem getting anyone to apply for jobs. So when I say “who’s getting more applications because AI” everyone looked at me in a really blank manner. So however, I think that it’s something that people recognise is happening to a lot of companies and I think the first phase of this was companies trying to ban people using AI or using detectors to try and find AI.

Matt

And you know you can’t ban people using AI cause it’s everywhere I turn my phone on. It’s using AI to do things. And also I think the amount of false positives that come back from some of these, you know, some of these systems that are allegedly detecting AI causes huge causes, huge issues and they can’t possibly keep up to date with everything that’s going on.

Matt

Also, a CV has so little text on it compared to I know a book for example or something. There isn’t that much data to actually go on to work out whether AI has been used to create it, so I think that is a total non starter. So when you when you get to that point you’re like well, how do we fix this problem?

Matt

and yet, do we blame the candidate? Well, we can’t blame the candidate that’s using the tools that are available unless they’re using them in a fraudulent way. And that’s a different issue. Do we blame AI? Well, 100%. But we can’t do anything about it.

Matt

So we have to blame ourselves. We have to look at the process. We have to do that differently. And I think that, you know, different ways of assessing people earlier, using AI to create work scenario, you know, whatever it might be, it just has to be the way forward. I think it’s kind of an obvious step to take.

Hannah

Have you seen any examples or are you at all concerned about a potential over reliance on AI in assessment?

Matt

Yeah, I think that there are issues around fraud and cheating and all those kind of things. I mean I don’t know whether I’ve seen examples of kind of an over reliance on it necessarily. I’m sure there might be some out there but again, it’s that kind of balance in the process. You know, we still need humans in the process to kind of adjudicate over things and check things aren’t going wildly off track. So yeah, I think it’s always a risk. I think there’s a balance to all of these things. But to be honest with you, in most cases I’m seeing it underused.

Hannah

Yeah, but I guess the over use case there is kind of full automation, isn’t it? Which I mean I’ve never seen any example of at all. I think we’re probably far, far away from that, but that I guess that’s probably what it would look like.

Matt

Yeah. And, you know, there are some stories about full automation, you know, in things like temporary roles and factories and things like that where people are not meeting their boss until the day that they turn up, or their boss is a robot.

Matt

But it’s not a widespread thing. I think that a lot of the companies I’ve talked to on the podcast who are down this automation route are very clear about where their humans fit into the system, and they’re very clear that actually the human aspect of this is very important because ultimately people have to work with, with teams, with other humans, with all those people and it’s important to take that into account, you know, along with everything else.

Hannah

You mentioned briefly there, sort of candidates using AI fraudulently.

What does that look like?

Matt

I think we’re starting to see all kinds of cases of people sending fake video avatars to do interviews for them, misrepresenting everything from the skills that they have, to all the way through to fraudulently inventing individuals and, you know, there are lots of motivations behind that. It could be someone who’s just trying to find a job, but I think we’re in a very sinister cyber warfare period, where people could be putting employees into corporations to hack systems and cause huge amounts of damage. And we’ve seen some horrendous sort of cyber-attacks recently on organisations. So it I think it can look like a lot of different things, but I think it’s just things like fake videos, fake voices, fake CVS, all those kinds of things potentially a big issue.

Hannah

And what should we be doing about them? How do we mitigate against those risks or the risks that that presents?

Matt

Yeah, I think it’s a conversation that I’m seeing ongoing at the moment. I’m seeing more examples of people talking about it that I’m seeing solutions coming to it.

I mean, at the moment there’s some simple things you can do about getting people to put their hand in front of their faces when they’re video interviewing and all that kind of stuff.

Matt

But eventually, the technology kind of outpaces that. So it’ll be interesting to see how that develops really, but I think it’s going to be something that is important whether it’s in some kind of more rigorous background checking or you know whatever it is you know it’s something that people need to be thinking about.

Hannah

And is this where the augmentation helps as well? Because if you’ve got a human then coming in post automation, are they going to be better able to pick up on what might have happened in a process to date where someone has tried to Cheat?

Matt

Yeah, I think that it is a good example. And I think that if we just talk about background checks, for example, the technology around that in terms of what you can find out about people and all those things it is incredibly sophisticated now. So I think that the tools are there, the humans can look at what’s going on and take that kind of view, whether it’s a fraud checker or a quality controller or experience, whatever it might be. I think that there is definitely a role for that in the future.

Hannah

And do you think AI will push more companies towards as skills based or skills first hiring model rather than experience credentials?

Matt

I certainly hope so. I think it makes logical sense to do that. I think there are lots of reasons why companies would want to do that anyway, other than, you know, other than just the technology. But from a technology perspective, a skill is like a unit of measurement that a machine can understand. And I think that is why there’s such a correlation between, AI and skills, and I think that this is where potentially, technology has an advantage over humans in terms of pattern spotting, so spotting people who work in completely different industries doing completely different things and being able to make a leap and say actually that person is going to be superb at this job because of all the skills data that we’ve got. And that’s where I think humans think they can do that. Some humans can do that to a certain extent, but there is just so much bias and so much subjectivity. I think that this is where a machine can really excel. And also I think that technology is pushing, is changing work and business so quickly, it means that skills are going out of date quicker, which means it’s forcing companies to look at things from a skills perspective rather than experience perspective, or credentials perspective because things are moving so fast. So technology is actually making this happen as well as helping solve it.

Hannah

Which is a good thing. Yeah, yeah.

Hannah

There was a moment on one of your recent episodes of recruiting future where you acknowledge that whilst what is already possible with AI is incredible, what’s even more incredible is what is going to be possible in the not so distant future. What do you think will have the biggest impact on talent acquisition in the next few years?

Matt

Yeah, good question. I think that I had an episode where we were talking about AI being under hyped, which is sounds strange. We’ve been talking about hype so much, but I think it is. I think that it has the capacity to fundamentally change the way that we think about recruiting.

Matt

So I think if you take. “What does that look like?” I’m not entirely sure.

However, if you take all the elements that we’ve been talking about. So we’re talking about, you know, faster automated things we’ve been talking about skills as a unit of measurement. If you kind of put them all together and in a situation where the technology is even better than it is now. I think it does some fundamentally interesting things. So, you know, the ability to have agents that can run all of these, you know, all of these processes, the ability to pull in data from sources we’ve not thought about before so, let’s look into all the HR data in a company and actually use that to inform our recruiting strategy in real time.

Matt

Those kinds of things are just game changers. They’re things that we can’t even think about. Do we get to a point where people don’t have to apply for a job at all jobs just find them based on their skills and you know, obviously companies are trying to move to that with internal recruiting at the moment.

Matt

So I just think that going back to my thing about cultural norms and we always see recruitment in a very linear way, it’s always been done like this.

Matt

It’s just going to blow that out the water.

Matt

Then I think we could be getting some really interesting places.

Hannah

Absolutely. And what are the barriers to getting there?

Matt

So the I mean, as I say, there’s the mindset barrier. We do need to think very carefully about adoption rates and legislation and regulation and risk and all those sort of things, I think they always kind of make things perhaps go slower than we think, also is the technology good enough? or even if the technology is good enough is it being implemented well enough for this to happen?

Matt

So I think that the problem with anyone who kind of pioneers this stuff, as we said right in the beginning, you know mistakes are amplified. So it’s kind of like oh, we put this system in, and it did this and this was terrible and let’s throw the whole thing out and burn it down to the ground. So yeah, I think that it’s those kind of sort of very structural things in human things that really sort of hold this back. But you know, as we know if someone does this and makes a great use case from it. Great case study, then things do move forward.

So I think one of the interesting things that we’re seeing at the moment is this whole sense of this agent workforce working within companies and I think it was Moderna a couple of weeks ago announced that their Chief People Officer was now in charge of technology as well as people.

Matt

And that sparked this furious debate about, you know, what’s the future of HR look like? is HR in charge? Is IT in charge? Are the robots in charge?

Matt

Which is staggering. I mean to think that 20 years ago, if you told me that HR was taking over the technology function of an organisation, I would not believe you. But now we’re talking about it. We’re seeing that. We’re seeing that happen. So it’s just these kind of, you know, massive sort of leaps of thinking that I think you know could make us think about this in a very different way.

Hannah

Absolutely.

So, Matt, before we finish up today, we’re introducing a new quick fire round to the deep dive.

Matt

Ah, OK.

Hannah

So question #1.

Hannah

In 10 words or fewer, what’s the biggest myth about AI and hiring?

Matt

I think is what I said before that your job will not be replaced by AI will be replaced by someone using AI. and if that’s 10 words or less but.

Hannah

We’ll count them later.

OK.

Hannah

Complete the sentence: By 2027, AI will automate X Percent of the hiring process?

Matt

2027?

Matt

50% across the board.

Matt

80% in some cases.

Hannah

Oh.

I wanna dig into that. Now. Go on. We’re gonna dig in. I know it’s supposed to be quick fire, but let’s just do a quick pause on Quick Fire to dig in 80% in some cases. What cases?

Matt

But I think we’re seeing already the cases that are using AI to screen to set those things up. They’re also using AI for onboarding and things like that or automating all those kind of tasks. I think if you look at recruiting as a set of tasks, I would say 80% of them are probably automatable or will be automatable, and I think that’s where that comes from.

Hannah

and do you think that’s across the board or is that more in volume hiring?

Matt

I think we see it spread out of volume hiring into other types of hiring. It’s always difficult to say anything’s across the board when it comes to recruitment because it’s just so different from industry to industry. The question is always like “what’s going to happen to exec recruitment and all those kind of things”.

Hannah

That was exactly where my mind was going.

Matt

So yeah, it’s difficult to generalise.

Hannah

If recruiters could master just one human skill to stay indispensable in an AI world, what should it?

Matt

Be persuasion.

Hannah

I like it.

Hannah

Cheap detection in online assessments: Essential safeguard or overkill?

Matt

Essential safeguard.

Hannah

Correct.

Hannah

Good. name one AI feature you wish every talent acquisition platform shipped tomorrow?

Matt

Oh, that’s difficult one, isn’t it?

Matt

One feature.

Matt

The ability to use company data to set recruitment strategy.

Hannah

Ohh, I like that. That’s a strong response. Yes please.

Hannah

Matt, thank you so much for your time today.

Hannah

A really interesting conversation. I’ve really enjoyed it. I hope you have too, and I’m sure our lovely listeners will have got a lot out of that. If our listeners would like to hear more from you or get in touch, what’s the best way to do so?

Matt

so check out my podcast.

Matt

Recruiting feature. Just search for a recruiting feature wherever you listen to podcasts and other than that you can find me on LinkedIn.

Hannah

Fantastic. Thank you.

Matt

My pleasure.

Hannah

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