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June 18 2019

The issue with recruitment chat bots casting a wide net

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a rising trend within the recruitment industry. Whether you are an in-house or an agency recruiter, your success is dependent on quickly and effectively identifying, engaging and ultimately, hiring the best possible candidates. AI recruitment tools are often used to reduce hiring bias in instances where a human recruiter may be prone to unconscious bias. These tools are also believed to improve processes, making them more efficient and overall, they are seen to enhance the recruitment industry.   

However, issues can arise when the human element of recruitment is removed, as Amazon found out to their cost.  Amazon’s AI tool automatically discounted female applicants for technical and developer roles.  While Amazon cannot be fully blamed - the tool used 10 years’ worth of recruitment patterns within the tech industry, which is typically male-dominated - the lack of human intervention made it a costly mistake as the tool had taken over a year to develop.

More recently, LinkedIn has been criticised for its use of recruitment chatbots. A nonsense LinkedIn profile was created to see if something fishy was going on with their automated recruitment tool.

Despite living in an underwater pineapple, and bearing a profile picture of a fish, ‘Mr. Sea Bream’ was offered a job due to his “impressive background” in software development.

Such cases only highlight the importance of the human element in the recruitment industry.  As Garry Kasparov, the chess grandmaster who became the first world champion to lose to a computer when IBM’s Deep Blue beat him in 1997, arguesa human with a machine would always beat the strongest machine”.  After all, the industry is led by people for people, and a recruiter’s role is to build relationships that are focused on human-to-human interactions.  At Verifile, we’re committed to ensuring that every one of your employees is everything they claim to be and nothing fishy is going on. Trained humans are checking every single case we verify, and often more than one individual reviews each case.