As AI sweeps through workplaces and across the U.S., one thing is clear: the old rules are gone, and the new ones are still being written.
The technology has the ability to curtail mundane administrative tasks and transform the responsibilities of HR professionals. But job-seekers and hiring managers alike are also caught up in unintended consequences: the total upheaval of the traditional recruiting process.
What used to be a mostly straightforward undertaking between recruiters and talent has become a kind of AI arms race inundated with new challenges. AI has made it easier for job-seekers to apply for positions more quickly by using chatbots to create resumes and cover letters. For their part, recruiters are getting overwhelmed with thousands of applicants for a single job, using AI tools to help sift through them all.
But the AI-led talent acquisition changes we're seeing now may only be the tip of the iceberg.
Fortune spoke with experts to see how they think how the job application and recruiting process will transform, and what it will look like in the future. They say AI will only become more integrated into the candidate selection process, job-seekers will have to prove their abilities in new ways, and the role of recruiter as we know it could be phased out entirely.
"This is the next evolution of technology," Robert Ployhart, a professor at the University of South Carolina's School of Management, tells Fortune. "And a fairly disruptive one."
Hiring managers are already using AI to compose emails, filter through applications, and create job postings. But experts say that the tech will also make an appearance in the most critical stage of talent acquisition: final selection, or when a candidate is picked as the new hire.
There are a few reasons why employers may opt for AI-enabled selection -- the tech may reduce human bias when trained correctly, and zero in on a final choice faster.
"Recruiters and interviewers are notorious for being overly influenced by factors that don't really make any difference to the success of an organization, like, 'Oh yeah, you played football, I played football. You were in the sorority, I was in a sorority,'" Tom Davenport, professor of information technology and management at Babson College, tells Fortune. "People probably aren't going to put those kinds of criteria into an AI-based decision process. And so in general, the processes can become more rational and data-based, as opposed to subjective."
Some companies have tried tech-enabled final selection already, but with little success. Amazon, for example, famously scrapped an AI talent acquisition tool back in 2015 after briefly using it to select final job candidates. An employee said the company "wanted it to be an engine where I'm going to give you 100 resumes, it will spit out the top five, and we'll hire those." But it encountered a fatal flaw: the AI trained off its own worker success data favored men.
Amazon's failure highlights the danger of bias in AI-enabled hiring, and a few U.S. states, including New York, Maryland, and Colorado, have sought to counteract that by forcing companies to deploy risk strategies when using AI in talent acquisition. Far-reaching legislation, however, has failed to keep up.
"It's the Wild West," says Ployhart. "It's not that AI can't be used effectively for selection in a legally and professionally appropriate way. It's that we don't know yet."
Employers are already using AI to sort through resumes using keywords and picking the best matches. But job-seekers are fighting fire with fire.
Candidates have been optimizing their applications with AI like ChatGPT to match the wording on their resume to job postings. In doing so, some applicants are adding skills that they know the tech will recognize and favor, even if they don't actually have those capabilities. About 73% of Americans say they would consider using AI tools in 2024 to help them embellish or lie on their resume, according to a 2023 report from StandOut CV, a London-based career resources company.
Wary that candidates are flubbing the truth in order to get through to the next round, some hiring managers are already feeling an increased responsibility to further verify applicants' capabilities. Josh Millet, CEO of Criteria, a talent testing company, tells Fortune that this, in tandem with a rise in skills-based hiring, is pushing recruiters to assess candidates through more rigorous, personalized methods. That means examinations for specific skills during the recruitment process, and an increased emphasis on niche credentials like apprenticeships and certification programs.
"Assessments are one way to [analyze candidates]," Millet says. "There's a whole ecosystem of companies thinking about credentialing and micro-credentialing. If you're trying to get a multi-dimensional view of a person, and you're doing that based on resumes, that's a fool's errand."
Many U.S. workers are worried that AI could take over their jobs, but recruiters may be justified in breaking a sweat. Experts who Fortune spoke with all have a dismal view of how many people will continue to play a big role in the talent acquisition process.
"The human resources budget has been squeezed for 30 to 40 years. And maybe in the last 10 years or so, it got noticeably worse," says Cappelli. He adds that as companies seek to cut costs and reduce headcount, recruiters are next on the chopping block. "Now they're saying, 'Why do we have these recruiters?' And then the labor market got tight, and it involves having to spend money on hiring managers, and they don't want to do it."
Companies are already seeing how new tech can expedite recruiting. Google Cloud says that AI-enabled candidate matching finds quality candidates in minutes -- a process that previously took recruiters hours or days to complete. And about 90% of CHROs agree that the role of the recruiter is morphing into more of a talent advisor as AI takes the reins, according to a report from iCIMS, an HR and recruiting software company.
"HR generally has not been an early adopter of these kinds of tools, but I think that's starting to change," says Davenport. "People are an expensive resource. My sense is that we may have fewer of them than we do, and the job will be very different. They will be working with AI as a close colleague."
Cappelli adds he's already seen the shift -- in an effort to cut labor costs, employers have largely shifted talent acquisition responsibilities onto general managers, phasing out recruiters in the process.
