AI? PISH POSH, MARY POPPINS!

Recently there has been a change across social media providers as these companies move into areas where the space is not just “social”.

Many of the sites are introducing their own “jobs” sections. Company Facebook accounts have been able to post their current job vacancies for a year or so now, LinkedIn are already there too and others are following.

It was obviously an interesting move by Facebook, coming as it does after their reiteration that they are a social enabler and that this is what their users want….

Their users want their working life to encroach totally on their private lives?

Well, maybe they do. But this raises another issue:

Posting jobs to job boards – and the same across any social media - can, and usually does, result in a deluge of CVs in response. The vast majority being from wishful thinkers - as anyone on the receiving end will attest - or those with a devil may care attitude to clicking "send" without most, or any, of the attributes needed for the job.

As an employer, being on the receiving end of this CV mountain can be hugely problematic, particularly for smaller & medium sized organisations who do not have a large HR department dedicated to recruitment. 

When you're trying to find ‘that someone’ to fill a gap in your company, as well as continuing your everyday role & responsibilities, how do you deal with this CV mountain?

Do you put your faith in those automated processes that screen CVs - mostly now given the disingenuous name of AI. Sometimes I think that those clever folk who have written the algorithms and software believe that we all loathe the applicants and candidates.

One of the marketing pieces for just such software had the phrase: "....because it automates a low-value, repetitive task that most recruiters hate to do anyway". 

I'll just run you through that again: looking through applicants CVs is now seen as "low-value".

And, of course, this is before we even consider the CVs themselves. Any recruiter will tell you that CVs come in all manner of shapes and sizes; that every candidate's much sweated-over final CV will never tell the full story.

Key word searches and the like, no matter how "intelligent" the system, are just that. As one puff piece puts it: "sifting out those resumes without the requirements and qualifications". So, if the CV doesn’t have certain specific words then, *bang* that’s dead.

The software searches exactly what is on the page and all further meaning - any human recognition & inference - is deemed non-essential. CVs do not all fill in the same blanks, do not all follow the same routes to a job because people don't.  

Anyway, let's see what happens. How the promises of “Just load your CV onto our job board and you’ll have the perfect job by Tuesday” pan out.

 Intelligent?

I look to the future with renewed optimism for the role of non-artificial recruiters.