Beware of AI resume scanners.
You’ve written the resume and it’s a killer. You’re perfect for the job. Education. Tick. Training. Tick. Referees. Tick. You’ve even got a short testimonial from the head of HR when you did a workplace for the company you’re applying for. Big Tick.
You send it off and there’s a spring in your step. A week passes. Two weeks pass and you ring up the recruiter. She says, ‘sorry but the AI resume scanner dumped your resume. It didn’t like the testimonial or the format.’
That’s a real story. AI software is dumping the resumes of the best candidates.
AI resumes scanners are spiking the strongest resumes because they don’t conform to a bizarre pre-set notion of what a resume is. If a resume does not have the appropriate key words, it’s spiked. If it has non-standard formatting or structure, it’s spiked.
While I’ve had serious reservations about the ethics and competency of some recruiters, at least I can call them on the phone. Not so with a resume scanner.
Experience, education and merit, plays no part in the magical symbiosis of big data and resume screening software. Organisations who sell this software call it ‘disruptive’. I call it dangerous and deluded.
Australian businesses are on the cusp of using body-language analysis, vocal assessments and gamified tests to hire people.
Job applicants are already facing a wall of chatbots and a battery of machine prompts. AI will decide whether they’re a good match or not. The software doesn’t even tell them how they’ve been evaluated.
This is an appalling state of affairs which is harming job applicants, the companies who foolishly installed the AI-driven recruitment platforms and the Australian economy.
The promise is AI scanners will save businesses money by eliminating the human element, i.e. recruiters. So they’ll take the humans out of the equation from a profession which is all about humans?
It’s a bizarre state of affairs when AI can write a resume and have it accepted by an AI resume scanner yet a highly experienced candidate who, draft-after-draft, crafts her resume and has it rejected.
Even worse, the data used by AI screening businesses is prejudiced against women, migrants and the disabled.
There is no escaping bias except to understand how bias works and that is a human issue.
Some software companies are pushing flawed products on to the market. They’re not going to say ‘sorry, our tool didn’t work’. Do you think tens of thousands of people – candidates of merit – will stand by and watch their careers spiked by a robot with sand in its gears? The risk of a class action is real.
Another issue is job seekers sending out thousands of job applications produced by AI slop. My business now works with job applicants to rewrite their AI- generated resumes in the active voice and include achievements.
We must jettison AI from the hiring function as it’s a disaster on a monumental scale.
It’s not only ruling out the best candidates, it’s robbing the business of their expertise and brains.
In America some recruiters (and job seekers) are going old school. They’re giving the finger to chatbots, online applications and AI-enabled form-filling.
Hard copy resumes and in-person interviews of top applicants ensures that a real human remains in the recruiting loop.
My advice to businesses is if they want the best candidates, kill the robots.