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Podcasting at events and conferences is one of my favourite things to do. I love the joy of seeing people face to face, and you get the opportunity to access a broad range of views and expertise around the topics shaping the industry.
At the beginning of May, Recruiting Future was an official media partner of The HR Technology Conference Europe in Amsterdam, the first time the event had been held outside of the US.
AI was a central theme in the discussions, and I was eager to gather insights on the current use cases of AI tools, as well as the potential future implications.
The first voice you will hear is Rebecca Carr, CPO and acting CEO of SmartRecruiters, talking about AI as a co-pilot and its potential to enhance the very human aspects of recruiting.
Next up after Rebecca is my friend and co-author, the ever-present Mervyn Dinnen, talking about his concerns about the impact of AI on employee experience and creativity
Finally, I spoke to Norwegian entrepreneur Eivind Arnsten about the AI employer lawyer his company is building and the potential for widespread automation throughout HR processes and activities.
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00:00
Matt Alder
Hi, this is Matt. Just before we start the show, I want to tell you about a free white paper that I’ve just published on AI and talent acquisition. We all know that AI is going to dramatically change recruiting, but what will that really look like? For example, imagine a future where AI can predict your company’s future talent needs, build dynamic external and internal talent pools, craft personalized candidate experiences, and intelligently automate recruitment marketing. The new white paper, 10 Ways AI Will Transform Talent Acquisition doesn’t claim to have all the answers, but it does explore the most likely scenarios on how AI will impact recruiting. So get a head start on planning and influencing the future of your talent acquisition strategy. You can download your copy of the white paper and at Mattalder.me/transform. That’s mattalder.me/transform.
01:21
Matt Alder
Hi there. Welcome to episode 616 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. Podcasting at events and conferences is one of my favorite things to do, as well as the joy of seeing people face to face and in person. You get the opportunity to access a broad range of views and expertise around the topics shaping the industry. At the beginning of May, Recruiting Future was an official media partner at the HR Technology Conference Europe in Amsterdam, the first time the event has been held outside of the us. AI was the dominant theme in discussions and I was keen to get people’s view on the current use cases of AI tools as well as their perspective on where AI is taking us in the future.
02:07
Matt Alder
The first voice you’ll hear is Rebecca Carr, CPO and Acting CEO of Smart Recruiters, talking about AI as a co pilot and its potential to enhance the very human aspects of recruiting. Next up after Rebecca is my friend and co author, the ever present Mervyn Dynan, talking about his concerns around the impact of AI on employee experience and creativity. And finally, I spoke to Norwegian entrepreneur Ivan Ansten about the AI employment lawyer his company are building and the potential for widespread automation throughout HR processes and activities.
02:48
Rebecca Carr
My name is Rebecca Carr. I am the Chief Product Officer and Acting CEO at Smart Recruiters.
02:53
Matt Alder
What are the uses of AI that we’re seeing happening in recruiting right now?
02:58
Rebecca Carr
Most commonly I see two big ones. The first is around efficiency. There’s a lot of what I’d call AI copilots that exist that are helping recruiters to take certain action across their applicant tracking system or HR tools faster. That could be writing a job description that could be Identifying bias in a job description that could be writing an interview scorecard that could be generating content so that you can actually source and nurture candidates in your pipeline. These would be your standard gen copilots that I think are helping recruiters do a lot more with less, given that they have fewer resources within their organization. The second is that of AI within analytics. When you look at a dashboard and you’re looking at trend lines or benchmarks, to a certain extent that dashboard is AI.
03:53
Rebecca Carr
It is learning from your behavior and making recommendations on what you should be doing differently. So, though a much less overt use case, it is a use case that is woven into so many HR tech platforms today.
04:05
Matt Alder
And do you think that people in Talent Acquisition particularly are really aware of what I can do right now, or the fact that they might already be using it and not actually realize?
04:16
Rebecca Carr
I think that most recruiters believe that AI will take over their jobs and they’re very fearful of what that will do. I actually see AI though, as a tool that empowers you to do your job better. And so when most people think about AI and technology, they think about it first. Finding candidates faster, and as a result, identifying and supporting a decision to hire someone that doesn’t require them to be in the middle between a hiring manager and a candidate. The reality is that is a true use case, and there are several industries that are embracing a fully automated hiring process. And I do think that will be a prevalent use case in the future. But the reality is that doesn’t have to be your first use case.
05:03
Rebecca Carr
There’s actually a lot of opportunity to leverage AI to help you do your job better by letting it tell you what you’re doing wrong or what you could be doing differently, and letting AI actually adapt your workflow to what the market and your organization needs. And that isn’t necessarily making a decision on who you should hire. So it is both seamlessly integrated today, but also available in, I’d say, more conservative use cases than the extreme that most people go to.
05:32
Matt Alder
And if we have this conversation again in one year’s time, what’s going to be possible then?
05:37
Rebecca Carr
Well, first of all, in one year’s time, I think the role of the recruiter will be to humanize AI experiences, to bring connection to the candidate and the company so that it is not a cold and touchless process. I think AI will, from start to finish, be an agent that works alongside you to help you move faster, to help you make better decisions, to help you take more manual tasks and make them move faster. And it will be your job to build a relationship with the candidate, not process a candidate. And that’s very different from what most recruiters do today.
06:18
Mervyn Dinnen
My name is Mervyn Dinnen. I’m analyst, author, content creator around HR technology and talent trends. I’ve co authored two books with Matt. I run a podcast called HR Means Business and I’m here speaking to vendors and seeing what the latest trends are in hr.
06:38
Matt Alder
How are you seeing AI being used right now? What do you think people feel about it?
06:44
Mervyn Dinnen
I think a lot of people are still working out how to use it. I mean, we’re used now to writing emails, to writing updates on LinkedIn and seeing a little note underneath saying rewrite with AI. Click on that and oh, that’s a better way of saying it. I’m kind of seeing people trying to be quite creative with it, possibly not realizing that if you go into ChatGPT and ask it four questions about how the evolution of technology will change work, you’re going to get four answers that sound much the same and don’t really read together as if it’s something you have created.
07:32
Matt Alder
How do you think it might be used in the future? If we’re having this conversation in one year’s time, what would we be talking about?
07:38
Mervyn Dinnen
I think the, that in one year’s time we would be saying, you know, this AI thing, has it been an employee engagement enhancer? Has it really made life better? Has it made our people happier? Has it made our people more content and more engaged? Or has it actually damaged employee experience and employee engagement? And I’m thinking of three or four ways AI. In one way it shifts the focus on almost efficiency and performance. It’s kind of, I’ve recently written something about putting the humanity back into human resources and I think there is a potential that it could be kind of devoid of humanity, devoid of human meaningful experiences, should we say? The other thing is it almost takes the journey, joy inverted commas out of automating some of the day to day tasks that our people actually enjoy.
08:39
Mervyn Dinnen
It gives them satisfaction, a bit of gratification, they enjoy it. And now, well, you don’t need to bother yourself with that. AI is doing that now. And if we use it too much to replace creativity, then we’re at risk of killing or stifling creativity, I think, rather than enhancing it. So I’m kind of, you know, it’s kind of, I suppose that the overriding thing is human connection. We know the workplace is all about human connection. It’s that’s what people come. That’s part of the debate of remote, flexible, asynchronous working is people need some time together to connect. And you know, this could be weakened through AI. So I think those are four of the things that could be positives and could be negatives.
09:28
Eivind Arnsten
Okay, so my name is Eivind Arnsten, I’m from Norway and my background is as a lawyer actually. So I’ve been working with the unemployment law for nearly 20 years. But over the last years I’ve been doing a lot of teaching, elearning and so forth. And lately we’ve been applying that to AI, or rather applying AI to the teaching and built basically an artificial employment lawyer. So that’s my main focus.
09:56
Matt Alder
Now my question is what can HR use AI for right now? And obviously your product is a great example of that.
10:05
Eivind Arnsten
Yeah, I mean, it’s very interesting times. And I think that you can apply AI to many different functions within hr. It’s just a matter of your capacity and your imagination. I think no matter. I mean, here at the conference we’ve seen and we heard about a lot of stories. For instance, the lady from Schiphol talking about how they’ve been using personalized adverts to get the right recruitment when they were in dire need of staffing up. You can use it throughout the recruitment process. Our firm are very focused one part of the HR daily chore and that is, I mean, it’s best to give you an example of typical workflow. So let’s say you work within hr, you are in a large company, some thousand employees, maybe a lot more.
11:05
Eivind Arnsten
Then you will also have like a lot of managers in that company who will constantly come to the HR department with a lot of questions. They have cases, they have questions, they have whistleblowing, they have all sorts of things, big and small. And all of these cases or questions, they need to be handled. And it takes time because then you have to analyze the query, you have to apply the correct legal regulations and you need to give answer. So that is what we are solving is to say you get an email from a manager with a question regarding some employee, you can just put it into the AI and it will analyze it for you and it will give you answer, at least a draft for answer.
11:51
Eivind Arnsten
And of course we are at the stage where you still need humans to do the correct assessment at the end,.
11:57
Matt Alder
I suppose, because this is law, it’s kind of legal. There’s obviously lots of things about AI making stuff up and being reliable. And I Think this is just be interesting for people who are listening. How have you got around that? How have you made sure that the AI that you’re using is compliant with the law?
12:18
Eivind Arnsten
That’s a, that’s a brilliant question and to be honest, it’s a question that has, it has of course been a challenge for us because like many people have experienced, when ChatGPT came at first you were amazed on how it seemed to know everything. But lately we’ve seen that there’s actually a lot of mistakes that it’s making. So for instance, there was a paper published by Stanford in March this year who goes through how the LLMs are actually quite bad at giving legal advice because there’s quite a lot of hallucination going on. So the way we approach it, of course some of this is internal things that I do not want to speak too much of, that’s a company secret.
13:05
Eivind Arnsten
But generally I would say that it’s all about the data and that’s a general principle that you can apply to everything when it comes to AI, that you need a good set of data. So in our case we have put huge resources into making sure that we have our own curated and quality approved set of data that we depend upon. And then we also narrow in the AI. So it’s not allowed, we give it these guardrails, it’s not allowed to go without its domain and if it’s unsure, it’s not allowed to try to make things up.
13:39
Matt Alder
The final question, what’s going to be possible in a year’s time? If were having this conversation again, what would we be talking about? What’s your view on that?
13:47
Eivind Arnsten
Well, you know, these are, I don’t know, these are incredibly exciting times because we are seeing a new technological platform. So to me it’s like when the Internet first came. I mean, you were able to get today’s news digitally updated all the time, etc. And that was the first part. Now we’ve seen many generation iterations and of course see the same within this field in a year’s time. Of course, obviously I cannot talk for the whole technology. I think you have the good old, I mean people overestimate what you can do in a year and then underestimate what can happen in 10 years. I think that will be fully present here.
14:28
Eivind Arnsten
But this way we are aiming is that you can do more than just getting your questions answered, that you can have more complete follow up on case, so you can upload a lot of more documents, you can analyze that. Let’s say you have a whistleblowing case. And then you can have all the documentation, all the testimonies from the witnesses, all the legal evaluations, everything. You can put that in a space where you have AI that can help you to sort everything out. For instance, just. Just an example.
15:01
Matt Alder
My thanks to Rebecca, Mervyn and Eivind. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts on Spotify, or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also subscribe to our YouTube channel by going to Mattalder.TV. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to our newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast and get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
Transcribed by https://fireflies.ai/
