Meet the AI Candidate

This is a true story, and it's not an isolated one. A candidate contacted me about a role we were working on, and he seemed to align perfectly. In hindsight, a little too perfectly. A look at his CV showed that he ticked every box - every requirement for the role.

Now, historically, recruiters see this as a hallelujah moment. Here they are! Here's THE ONE.

With time, you develop a spidey-sense with these things, but we're generally very happy when we find a candidate who ticks every box, especially in a high-specification market where candidate volume is high and clients can pick and choose.

So, as all good recruiters do, we probed. And on probing, it all fell apart. The candidate had, in fact, zero experience, zero skills (or at least, zero skills relevant to the role), and indeed had never even been in marketing.

The next day, their LinkedIn profile disappeared from view completely, as if they no longer existed. Or as if they never existed.

How on earth did this happen? Meet the AI candidate...

And we think we've worked out how it happened. Or at least, part of it.

It is now phenomenally easy to create bespoke CVs for every job. We have heard of candidates who have (cleverly) built Large Learning Models that read job posts, create bespoke CVs for that job and that job alone, automatically write a cover letter, and automatically send the application. There is the story of one candidate who scaled this to hundreds, if not thousands, of applications a day.

And he was getting interviews. I assume not very good ones.

Even if you're doing this on a smaller scale, it is hugely disruptive to recruitment processes, especially to those processes that are heavily reliant on job boards. It doesn't take long to ask ChatGPT (or similar) to rewrite your CV based on a job description, and then to produce a cover letter bespoke to that role.

It's even just as easy to have ChatGPT feeding you answers on a second screen, so that when. you're interviewing for a role, you can produce answers on the spot.

The implications are actually pretty serious:

• Do you trust the CVs you're receiving any more? How many are going to be time-wasters?
• Do you have time to screen everyone?
• Do you even trust what they're saying during the interview?

It's hard to find recruiters not talking about AI these days - after all, we've all now got AI notetakers transcribing interviews, pulling out items of data & even creating to-dos for us on the basis of our conversations. The advances in the last 12 months have been huge and the value has been significant in terms of time-savings and efficiency.

But on the flip-side, AI is taking a wrecking ball to traditional recruitment processes.

What's the knock on?

You're going to need more networks

I know I'm obviously going to say this, but recruiters who have networks will obviously be useful here. For instance, if you need someone in digital media, we know hundreds of people who will know hundreds of people. We interview them all the time, and we've done their jobs ourselves - and the same goes for other recruiters (the good ones). The truth is, you're going to need some kind of trust & validation that the CV you're looking at isn't made up.

You're going to need someone to screen

We have a hard and fast rule - if you haven't had a video interview with us, you won't get in front of a client. Now - you may have a talent team with the time to spend 30 minutes with every candidate, you may want to do it yourself. But if only 20% of these make it through to interview, that's a lot of screening calls. The emphasis on verification of quality is going to be huge.

You're going to need to call people out & trick the AI prompts

I noticed a candidate reading from a second screen a couple of months ago, and it threw me a little. The answers did come across as generic, and I was starting to get a little bored. So I started getting more personal. What do YOU think? How did YOU react? And then even deeper - WHO has had the biggest influence on your career? Things that AI cannot answer. We really do need to be on our best game when screening.

Job Boards must change or die

In our world, job boards are worthless, mainly because it's so easy to use & abuse them. A single job can get 500 candidates within a week, and frankly - who has time to go through them all? The majority will be in a different country, too. With AI, it becomes even easier to use and abuse. There are industries that are well-served by job boards, but in marketing, project management & client services? Not in the slightest.

Most likely, the way for them to adapt is to introduce processes that make it harder to apply. Assessments may well become part of the application process, and in more creative roles, portfolios will be mandatory.

So what's the takeaway, other than the self-serving you must use a recruiter message which, I'm quite sure, you were expecting.

I think it's this: who are you going to trust? Because in recruitment, you have to trust someone. You have to ultimately trust that the person you're going to hire is going to do the job. Walking back through the process, you have to trust the candidates you're speaking to are being truthful when they say they can do the job. You have to trust the person or the platform bringing you those candidates.

And ultimately, you can only trust people. That probably means a return to more traditional recruitment methods, more face-to-face, and I can just hear the rumble of AI start-ups trying to solve this very problem.

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