Two Cents: Can you be more AI friendly?

I had an interesting chat this week with recruitment consulting firm Korn Ferry to find out more about how they use AI when it comes to sourcing candidates for their clients. They are working with companies that need anywhere from 200 to 4,000 hires a year. That’s a lot of resumes to go through. Pip Eastman, Managing Director, APAC Solutions, at Korn Ferry RPO told me how they use AI to help find the right candidates for the roles they need to fill. Not just at the screening stage, but at the initial sourcing stage too. It helps them sort out the passive from the active candidates quickly and efficiently, and then engage with them.

When you are dealing with such high volumes, leveraging the latest technologies to find suitable candidates makes perfect sense. It got me thinking that AI is being used on us on a regular basis by companies (not just recruitment firms), and judgement calls are being made by machines without us even knowing it. Of course I’m not suggesting that we are told every time our details are run through a database, but it does make you think how you can make yourself ”AI friendly”. Should you put ‘’ambitious’’ in your covering letter, smile more in your pic profile or write a quick blog about how great the company you are applying for is? Will AI rank you higher as a result when it trawls through all your data online?

This question is not an easy one to answer, but what we do know is that AI is increasingly being used within the HR function. The more it is used, the smarter it will get (like machine learning) and the more HR will use it, like a self-fulfilling prophecy. And maybe we will see a big spike in the introduction of AI after two of the technology industry’s heavyweights sang its praises recently in a live debate. Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba and Elon Musk, the man behind Tesla and SpaceX, spent the majority of the debate waxing lyrical about AI. Ma said “I think AI can help us understand humans better’’ while Musk commented that the “rate of advancement of computers in general is insane”.

Musk being the great self-publicist that he is, made a shameless plug for his Neuralink Corporation. Neuralink aims to develop implantable brain-machine interface devices. Images of Hollywood movie The Matrix comes to mind, whose characters download software to their brains that can instantly turn them into martial arts masters. It makes you think how HR could use that kind of technology, scrapping the need to train and upskill its workforce. Just upload the latest banking regulation changes to your employee’s brain and they no longer need to go on a course to get updated. It’s just a matter of time.