Hello from Wellington. Your usual recruitment raconteur is tormenting the eardrums of Fijian resort staff (and fellow holidaymakers, probably) so it’s down to me to jump back to The Whiteboard and keep our 13+ years recruitment blogging streak going.
I popped down to attend the Wellington Recruitment Meetup last night (thanks for the hospo Trade Me) where a panel of recruiter types discussed their thoughts around “tech tools for recruiters” with a small but impressively engaged audience. We’ve become increasingly immersed into recruitment technology for a few years now, with the building of JOYN, and more recently starting up a new venture, superHUMAN software, so the topic grabbed my attention and I had to get involved.
To sum it up, we had a bit of chat on what tools are good (Zapier, Smart Recruiters) and bad (Job Adder’s and LinkedIn’s automated candidate ranking and suggestion engines – although getting better) but naturally, most of the talk returned repeatedly to ChatGPT and its creeping influence on the roles of recruiters.
Sean has riffed on this topic already, and far more amusingly, in a recent blog post, so I won’t rehash too much of what has already been said. But it was chilling to witness the insouciance with which one panelist, when talking about ScaleXT, said “presumably the in between human will eventually be gone.”
Gulp.
That’s us recruiters he casually diminished and tossed aside. I’m not sure I like the idea of “being gone”. I very much like being here, to be honest.
Cue hand-wringing and teeth gnashing around the room. Some Government recruiters are struggling to balance up candidate privacy and data sovereignty concerns. Some agency recruiters are bullishly confident they will simply master this new AI influence and command it as another tool in their arsenal. But most are understandably remaining on the sidelines, watching, waiting, and hoping they don’t get noticed and become irrelevant.
There’s still some way to go but, it is clear, that the only way to remain relevant in the future of recruitment is to understand, embrace and make these AI tools work for you. There will always (in my opinion) be a need for human involvement in recruitment no matter how much tech is built within and around it. If you want to be one of those humans, you better start learning about how these tools can up your game.
There will be some more of this type of chat (gpt), along with all the usual recruitment networking high jinks, at the Winter PowWow on 27th July. We only set the event up yesterday and already half the tickets are gone, so grab yours now here, and we look forward to having some human interactions with you then.
