AI will continue to play a role in recruitment. Its adoption spread like wildfire, with 65% of companies using it in their hiring process. Certainly, there are benefits for employers to automate filtering candidate lists and save time.
But make no mistake, AI is like a rogue gunslinger hired by recruiters to give you an edge over job seekers in the job market of the Old West. Meanwhile, job seekers continue to look for jobs, build resumes, and handwrite cover letters. As a result, many may feel they are missing out on top jobs.
To level the playing field, job seekers have adopted their own AI gunslingers in the form of ChatGPT and other generative AI. It’s a powerful, free, and easy-to-use software that allows you to create customized resumes, cover letters, and all kinds of data. It’s been featured in the media and even school kids use it to write their homework.
The problem is that both sides have gunslingers to fight. As any western fan knows, this scenario leads to escalations and shootouts. When recruiters compete through the hiring process and job seekers can apply for many ads at similar speeds, both sides end up fighting for control.
The Real Problem: A Broken System
The real problem here is not the AI itself. It’s the fact that there is no sheriff to rule the Old West. It’s a chaotic and broken system without the rules it needs to function properly. To illustrate this, let’s consider how recruiting activities typically work. It starts with a job advertisement from an employer. These are often poorly written and untargeted. This is problem 1.
This forces job seekers to apply with resumes and cover letters. The resume was first invented 400 years before him and has changed little. They come in all shapes and sizes, and 63% hold misinformation. They also list the names of schools, colleges, connections, careers, and portray social status rather than fixating on skills. It begins to bias the situation. Problem two.
Then there’s the review process, where advertisers judge applications based on skill, but also other less relevant factors. Problem three. Interviews then take place, often with one side making more judgments about the other based on intuition or cultural fit. Problem 4.
Finally, employers make references to see how others feel about applicants, and also to see if applicants are telling the truth. Problem 5. It’s a process full of luck, misinformation, misunderstanding and prejudice, akin to a frontier town lacking the rules of modern society. The impact is that her one-third of hired employees will leave within her 90 days.
bring the gunslinger
Add AI to the mix and things get even worse. The employer tasks her AI with automatically creating and posting job advertisements. It’s not better targeting, just more ads showing up in more places. In response, job seekers apply at scale using generative AI. McKinsey says the software is error-prone and can generate inaccurate responses to queries. There is currently no built-in filtering process to catch or question this misinformation.
Employers then have the hard work of wading through piles of potentially inaccurate resumes. So they reintroduce AI to reinforce and industrialize prejudice. For example, machine learning (ML) experts at Amazon AMAZ.O revealed in 2018 that the company’s recruiting software discriminated against women.
The company’s experimental recruiting tool used AI to observe patterns in resumes submitted to companies over a 10-year period and gave job seekers a 5-star rating. Most of it came from men, thanks to the industry’s historical dominance. As a result, Amazon’s system has learned to prefer male candidates. This penalizes resumes that contain the word “woman”.
A highly subjective interview is then conducted before the referral process. Again, AI is used to interrogate hundreds of databases to capture every detail about the applicant in an automated process. Relevance to work, let alone privacy, is not considered.
Overall, the speed of the system has improved, but the problems inherent in the hiring process have not been resolved. That could have made them even worse.
Web3 Sheriff is Coming to Town
As employers and job seekers continue to engage in the increasingly fast AI-driven Wild West era, solutions are needed to calm things down. A sheriff who enacts laws and ensures that the actions of gunslingers are protected.
Adopt Web3 technologies such as digital identity, decentralization, and verifiable credentials. It has the power to solve the problems inherent in recruitment and enable AI to function within a framework of trust and fairness.
Web3 can offer job seekers a smart CV held securely on their phone in a decentralized app-based wallet. This can grow with your career and hold verified evidence of your qualifications from educational and skill institutions.
It removes irrelevant information commonly found in traditional resumes and eliminates inaccurate or misleading information thanks to a reviewer-verified process. The bottom line is that people shouldn’t be allowed to lie about what their qualifications are, but given recent news about a woman who forged her doctor’s degree certificate and worked as a psychiatrist for over 20 years. , which can be disastrous.
This smart resume is easy to share and allows employers to find candidates based solely on the skills they need, not their status. Meanwhile, employers will have access to an open, skills-based hiring platform built on verifiable credentials.
Employers will be able to approach qualified candidates instead of posting job ads. Also, the qualifications and skills are certified by the awarding bodies and do not need to be referenced.
There is a growing need for Web3 to rethink the hiring process and introduce skill-based hiring that keeps AI trigger-happy and honest. It will form an impenetrable ecosystem where qualifications are validated by public bodies and where candidates cannot seek medical attention. Web3 The sooner the Sheriff enters Old West Recruitment Street, the better.
