In the last few months, the AI fervour has been growing. Everywhere you look, a tech system offers enhanced AI functionality. Job sites like Indeed and LinkedIn will even advise you on how to write job adverts and rank candidates accordingly.
At Creegan Talent we thought we could either fight this new technology and keep our authenticity 100% pure or embrace it in order to improve the actual recruitment process without losing a single drop of human empathy.
We have set clear parameters for where we believe AI can assist us and where we will choose never to go.
As our clients will know, unlike recruitment agencies, we follow a tried and trusted recruitment process for all our strategic hires and project work. This entails creating a first interview with a clear question set based solely on the current role, the individual and where your business has a gap. We have been doing this manually for five years and the hardest part of this process is formulating questions that have maximum impact. Well, not anymore! We now use AI to help us not only formulate questions but to also give us expected answers and specific red flags.
However, it still needs human input as this is only a starting point, and AI doesn’t know the ins and outs of your business at that specific time. But we do! Therefore, using this base, we now tweak this to fit each role, saving more time and allowing us to speak to more potential candidates – always a good thing!
We advocate meeting every person that we bring into a process and nowadays, that takes place on a Teams call. The benefit is being able to transcribe that call and capturing valuable information given by the candidate. This gives a much clearer picture of the candidate than a mere CV and allows us to judge the individual’s strengths against the main elements of that role.
Don’t forget – a CV is time stamped; it looks at the past, we prefer to look at the future.
Again, we will call upon AI assistance to take the transcription and highlight the key strengths and development areas of each person, in line with the job description and question set. It is worth remembering that 9/10 times we have created the job description with you using our job consultation assessment to correctly identify the right role as part of gap analysis – with no AI in sight!
Now, there are two key things to point out at this stage as you may be wondering about where AI sits with GDPR and whether it creates details that are factually correct.
Fear not. We do not upload any candidate details into our AI platform; this is a breach of data and something we would never do. Secondly, we are not scoring our candidates based on AI (although that time may come). So far, we have trialled this on three AI platforms, with different results each time, certainly not definitive in the slightest!
The idea behind the transcription is to be factual about the candidate strengths and weaknesses that do not relate to a subjective scoring system. We do, however, make a manual note of strong answers, as well as those short of the mark. Furthermore, transcribing the interview gives us time to actively listen to the candidate which also helps us identify cultural aspects such as drive, resilience and teamwork, based on the answers they give – essential elements when we are considering the retention of the hire.
The final AI element comes from creating new or deeper questions for the final interview. We will ask for assistance, but the important point to make here is the human input into our AI assistant. Generic questions based on the job description need to be removed and replaced with gaps based on first interview performances, possible cultural differences and making sure that we arm you, as the hiring manager, with the correct questions to see if this candidate is the one to make the maximum impact on your business.
The hiring process still needs to be human-to-human. Maybe in years to come that will change but not today, tomorrow or next year. Candidates are unanimously delighted with the process we undertake on our clients’ behalf and a fair few have alluded to the human element as the key differentiator.
We value people, not CVs – Humankind did not start from a piece of A4.
I’ll just leave you with this… As the great businessman, Stephen Covey, said: “The person who is truly effective has the humility and reverence to recognise his own perceptual limitations and to appreciate the rich resources available through interaction with the hearts and minds of other human beings.”