Yesterday I had the pleasure of being invited by Fruition IT to take part in a panel discussion on AI in Recruitment.
Hosted by Sarah Pawson, I joined Matt Comber (CEO, SourceFlow), Victoria Bond (CEO, TenSpace) and Aidan Halliday (CCO, Jobdeck™) in a really insightful conversation.
One thing we spoke about was not going overboard with AI, as candidates still want to talk to recruiters.
I questioned this, and made some points about candidate experience. Are candidates willing to accept long waiting times, post application, for the sake of talking to human recruiter?
I posed a question back to the audience member who asked this...
"When you pop out for your meal deal lunch, do you choose a shop that has long lines at manned tills, or do you choose the shop that has self-checkouts?"
"Ah", they said, "but that's a low value purchase. What if it's a £6000 holiday?"
So I asked the audience to put their hands up if they've booked a holiday in the last 2 years. The majority raised their hands.
I then asked them to keep their hands up if they booked it by speaking to a human travel agent. Every hand went down. All of them.
My point is, we need to design our processes thinking about the experience our candidates expect as modern consumers. You can't assume, you can't treat applicants as some sub-sect of the human species.
They want convenience, immediacy and agency.
What you thought you knew about what a candidate expects is wrong.
Applying for a job is seen as a very transactional process, and when designing the experience, you need to think of it like this. The old fashioned mindset of a job for life is gone and with it, the experience changed. They're not buying a house, they're buying a holiday.
Design for that.
Don't design to (think) you are preserving the human element and your job.