According to a self-serving media story by Employment Hero, three quarters of Australia’s workforce has experienced an appalling recruitment experience from companies which have installed AI recruitment screening software.
I write the word ‘experience’ loosely because in most cases the applicants hear nada, zilch, nothing.
But Employment Hero sells 360-degree AI recruitment software. You’ve got to have balls bigger than Hercules if they reckon they can get away with this.
The story is clever as it shows that AI is frustrating both candidates and employers with job seekers ignored and businesses hamstrung by slow, administration-heavy hiring processes.
Yet Employment Hero and a number of other companies flog the very technology which ghosts applicants, and which in many cases, selects the wrong people to short-list for an interview.
Employment Hero’s dodgy PR driven research, shows the most common complaint among job seekers is receiving little or no feedback after missing out on a role.
That’s due to psychobabble metrics and untrained recruiters creating extraordinarily tight presets programmed into the software.
They eliminate candidates of merit and fails to respond to people who have not been short-listed for an interview. That’s a HR and PR nightmare for businesses.
The software treats people like meat.
Of all the industries that AI is taking over, the last place you’d expect these days would be the ones that demand total human interaction. So much depends on it.
Here is the antidote:
Employment Hero’s spin suggests that young people are being rejected at twice the rate of older candidates.
That’s because AI has taken many of their career entry jobs.
Employment Hero’s Managing Director of Talent Solutions, David Holland, argued the findings show that recruitment is failing the people it is designed to serve.
“When recruitment breaks down, nobody wins: jobseekers miss out on work they’d thrive in, and businesses lose the people they need,” he explained.
The solution is to not install the dodgy AI software. The solution is to use a human to deal with humans.
This is a key reason why employers remain highly sceptical about the value of using AI to hire staff.
They say the human element in core to the recruitment process.
What both recruiters, employers and the public are witnessing is massive media spin promoting the adoption of AI in recruitment by the people who make the AI-driven recruitment software.
The Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has issued an AI and recruitment compliance checklist so systems comply with anti-discrimination obligations.
The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) expects transparency when personal information feeds AI systems, especially where the outcome significantly affects an individual.
AI is the most dangerous threat to human capital and business.
The solution to ghosting is to not apply to jobs listed by Employment Hero. Give Expr3ss! the heave-ho too as they’re just as bad.