My LinkedIn is full of recruiters who are afraid of AI and have started to fight it as if it is here to take their jobs. Since I am working on exactly this topic, I am very struck by this point of view, and I cannot stay quiet without making my own perspective clear. So I am writing this article to explain why they are scared, why they will not be replaced, and what they should do to use this technology to make themselves more valuable. First, I need to explain the context I am writing from, so my point of view is understood more clearly.
To start, I am building a platform where some of the features carry out processes that recruiters already do today, and this has made me run into their points of view every day. My experience is mostly as a company leader, and I have recruited hundreds of people before. Now my focus is on understanding human nature to help people perform better. I believe that every person is a genius who only needs the right environment to reflect that genius. I also believe that empathy cannot be made scalable by leaders once we lead more than 20 people. And I strongly believe that a human being is far more complex than a resume or a job description. Based on these beliefs, I will use everything I have available to create the right tools so that we, as humans, can move forward.
Why recruiters are scared
Right now, many tools are coming out like the one I have built that carry out different functions of human resources, and also of the leaders who interact with teams and collaborate every day. Some recruiters who have done certain processes for years do not understand this technology the way they should, and rightly so, because their focus is somewhere else. They do not see the whole picture of the phenomenon, only the parts that interest them most and rightly so. They work in a very challenging environment where the numbers themselves are alarming, and mostly they are not responsible for them.
For example, one of the most worrying numbers is that only 23% of employees are motivated. 59% of employees are quiet quitting. 72% of job seekers in the USA say that the job search has caused them mental health pain. They are not the cause of these numbers, but they are on the front line and are the first to face their consequences.
On top of this, the competition is fierce, and rightly so they cannot get into every detail of the tools that come out. On the other side, almost 100 new tools come out on the market every day, where the vast majority are created by people with no experience in these areas, who have simply made something symbolic that they think will revolutionize recruiting and the way they want to sell it is by saying it will replace recruiters. In such situations, recruiters see tools that do their processes most of them badly, but someone does something specific well. In their daily life, in the chaos of the noise, they cannot make sense of it. Some of the more innovative ones have tried a tool, and most of the time the results have not been good; instead of helping, the tools have made things worse. In such situations they face a client who says “I do this with AI,” and they either feel threatened or they feel sorry for the client who does not understand that they are simply making their situation worse with tools they do not know how to use. In such a situation, after an initial test, they either fight AI or avoid it.
On the other side, hundreds of entrepreneurs like me are trying to do some processes with AI or other very good technological tools, and some of them work so well that they are truly impressive. For example, I myself was surprised when 49 out of 50 people who did the initial interview with Teracrowd liked the interview as much as, or more than, an interview with a person. This increases the stress and the uncertainty among recruiters.
Why recruiters will never be replaced
Despite the fantastic results AI is producing, I and all work experts see that the human in this case the recruiter will never be replaced. There is a clearly meaningless noise online that, from what I can see, is created on purpose to attract investment for the leaders of Claude and OpenAI, saying that people will be replaced. A noise that is not new it has appeared with every new technology people have made. But like every new technology, it has not replaced the need for people; it has replaced the work processes that these people do.
This time they say AI is different, but in truth there is nothing different. First of all, we do not work because we are intelligent we work because we need or want something that someone else needs or wants. Intelligence is not the reason. Some people like self-service places, some want a person to serve them. Some read physical books, some want to be in book clubs, some want to read online. If intelligence does something better than us, this does not stop us from continuing to do that thing.
The concrete example is the game of chess: even though in 1997 Deep Blue beat Kasparov, and later in 2017 AlphaZero played beyond any human, people still keep playing and play more and more chess. In 2017 the skeptics came out and said this was the end of chess. Meanwhile, from 2020, when there were 35 million players on chess.com, by 2026 this number reached 260 million.
Now let’s come back to the recruiter. The reason a recruiter is hired is to find the right candidate, not to do interviews with candidates. If, in a world where only 23% of people are motivated at work, someone is deluded enough to think that simply doing the right interview once is the solution to this problem, then this is a source of that number’s problem.
Until now, recruiters have been limited to one interview and the analysis of a resume that shows almost nothing. If part of this process is automated and done better, the only thing that will happen is that this recruiter will have time left to do something more. For example, to understand better the culture of the company they are hiring for, instead of settling for a job description that shows so little about the culture. They will have time to prepare the right candidate so they are half-onboarded by the time they arrive and start day 1 better at work. They will get to know the candidates better and improve the current process that, with its own time limits, has limited their action.
Hundreds of other directions will open up that will improve both the recruiter’s work and their impact. But they need to change their mindset, because if they get stuck on the initial interview and the resume, it is the same as accountants resisting doing mathematical operations by machine instead of by mind they gave up doing the calculations by hand and transformed themselves from human calculators into Finance professionals, and later into CFOs. That is why some actions need to be taken.
How to benefit from these tools
First, you should know that it is true most of the companies coming out now are noise and not productive. So if you are going to choose a company today, that company must be flexible to your needs. To answer you, to talk with you, to dedicate the time you need to adapt the solutions to your way of working. If companies do not have this flexibility, do not waste your time.
The other aspect is that we should not automate only the process we do today. Because today we do certain things because of limitations. We have used the resume because we had no other options, but we all know that the resume shows almost nothing of value. Most tools and ATS today automate resumes and add tags with the words a resume contains. This is the best method to automate something that did not work in the first place and to amplify the problem we have already had.
The other aspect is that recruiters must understand that human connections are the most valuable thing we will have in the coming century. Building communities with specific people whom you will help get hired, and building relationships with clients, should take up more than half of your work those are processes that no intelligent being can replace, because they are human relationships, not mathematical calculations.
And the last, and most important, is that we must get to know ourselves better what we like, what we are looking for. I assure you it is not a job description, nor a better resume.
