There are now tasks in recruiting where AI genuinely outperforms humans. Holding multiple evaluation criteria in mind while scanning hundreds of applications, spotting relevant experience described in unexpected ways, and ensuring no qualified candidate gets overlooked through fatigue, overwhelm, or shortcuts. These aren’t things recruiters actually do badly, but there are things humans can’t physically do at scale that the current market requires.
For many recruiters, that reality feels threatening. However, those who embrace AI as a partner rather than a replacement find they have more time for meaningful candidate conversations. Hiring managers get better-matched shortlists. Candidates finally feel seen and understood. Everyone wins.
My guest this week is Dr Ali Raza, CEO at Bytespark.ai. Ali is a former academic turned recruiting AI pioneer. In our conversation, he uses his hands-on experiences to explain exactly what AI does better than humans in the screening process, and why recruiters who adapt will thrive rather than disappear.
In the interview, we discuss:
• Quality candidates are being drowned out in a sea of applications
• Where AI will always be better than humans
• Mixing the best of AI and the best of human recruiters
• Enabling a high level of candidate conversations
• Data-driven thinking
• Increased transparency with hiring managers
• Should recruiters be worried about being replaced?
• What does the future look like?
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Transcript:
00:00
Matt Alder
We’ve reached that stage where AI can now do things in recruiting that humans simply can’t. It’s going to be uncomfortable for many recruiters to realize that, but those who are adapting to the shifting technologies are discovering a win situation for everyone. Keep listening to find out how support.
00:23
Matt Alder
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01:27
Matt Alder
Hi there. Welcome to episode 761 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. There are now tasks in recruiting where AI genuinely outperforms humans. For example, holding multiple evaluation criteria in mind while scanning hundreds of applications SC spotting relevant experience described in unexpected ways and ensuring no qualified candidate gets overlooked through fatigue, overwhelm or shortcuts. These aren’t things that recruiters actually do badly, but they are things that humans can’t physically do at the scale the current marketplace requires. For many recruiters, this reality is going to feel threatening. However, the those who are embracing AI as a partner rather than a replacement find they have more time for meaningful candidate conversations. Hiring managers get better matched shortlists. Candidates finally feel seen and understood. Everyone wins. My guest this week is Dr. Ali Raza, CEO at Bytespark. AI Ali is a former academic turned recruiting AI pioneer.
02:41
Matt Alder
In our conversation, he uses his hands on experience to explain exactly what AI does better than humans in the screening process and why recruiters who adapt will thrive rather than disappear. Hi Ali and welcome to the podcast.
02:57
Dr Ali Raza
Hi Matt, thank you very much for having me with you.
02:59
Matt Alder
It’s an absolute pleasure to have you on the show.
03:02
Matt Alder
Could you just introduce yourself and tell.
03:05
Matt Alder
Everyone what you do?
03:06
Dr Ali Raza
Okay, so as an introduction, I’ve been in the tech space for over 20 years. I worked in the telco and cybersecurity industry for maybe about 10, 15 years and then I moved on to the world of academia as a professor. Long story behind that huge pivot in life. And after 10 years as a professor, I decided to pivot again and move to the world of entrepreneurship. And now I run a company which is bytespark AI. And we are quite unique in the sense that we are a recruitment agency, but we build our own AI recruitment tech. And that’s what I’m doing now.
03:42
Matt Alder
Yeah, absolutely. And it is a really interesting story in terms of how you sort of came to do this. So talk us through it a little bit in terms of why did you decide to leave academia and build an AI recruiting system?
03:57
Dr Ali Raza
The real reason is because I had a lot of my top star students, my bright sparks. And that’s the reason the name of the company was Bite Spark, coming back to me after graduating and saying, professor, we can’t find a job, right? And I used to worry that, am I actually a bad professor or is there something else wrong? So I decided to do a little bit of research and speak to people in the recruitment industry, talking to talent acquisition specialists, talking to, you know, chros, people that are senior up in hr. And what I began to realize, actually is that a lot of the problem is not because my students don’t have what they were looking for, but mainly because the whole recruitment process at that time was not really working out.
04:44
Dr Ali Raza
So there was a lot of noise being created by a high volume of applications. And I think that problem was maybe quite unique to the region we live in. So especially in the uae, if a job is posted, you’ll get thousands of people apply. And what I noticed is that the people who had the true merit were actually drowning in that noise. And that’s when I realized that, okay, you know what? Maybe one of the things we could do is use some of the AI algorithms that I had developed as a professor to evaluate my students in the world of recruitment. And I decided that, okay, I need to. I can’t focus on this as a professor. I need to do this independently. So I resigned or retired from the world of academia.
05:24
Dr Ali Raza
And when I actually retired, my department chair said, can you help us hire you a replacement? And I said, yeah, sure, I’ll help you. Two weeks later, he calls me and he says, where’s your help? I said, what do you want me to do? He says, There are some CVs on Google Drive. Can you at least have a look at those? So I logged onto Google Drive and I see 500 CVs. And I was like, there’s no way I’m going to do my students know me and they would know that I would never do that. So that’s when really I decided that, you know, what the challenge is here, it’s facing it right now.
05:53
Dr Ali Raza
So instead of going through these CVS and not really, you know, giving them the justification that they need, why don’t I actually see if I can retrofit some of those models, use them and see how they work out? And it just turned out to be an amazing output because I was able to get three very highly scored cvs. And when I actually read through them, the signals, you know, what I could see was that they were actually very close to myself as an individual in terms of background, technical skills, teaching philosophy, research philosophy. So I submitted them and I found out later on that two of them were hired. So that was a great successful outcome. And I thought, you know what, I need to get into the recruitment world and try and see if I can fix this for other recruiters as well.
06:36
Matt Alder
You moved into the recruitment world from being very much outside of it. What was the thing that surprised you most or what surprised you when you started working in recruiting, talking to TA people? What was it about the way that recruiting treatment thinks it works that surprised you?
06:53
Dr Ali Raza
So I think the, maybe the very first experience I had was I met with a recruiter who was working on a role and I was talking to her about the AI capabilities that I wanted to showcase. And she was taking me through the process that she follows. And she mentioned to me that she has posted a role on LinkedIn and they had easy apply, they had around 700 CVs come in. And I said, okay, before we even go to AI, can you just tell me what you would do with these 700 cvs? And she said, well, what I’ll do is I would take randomly select 20, I would go through them and then I would see if they are a good fit for my client. I said, but what if those 20 are not a good fit? She goes, no, that’s my skill.
07:35
Dr Ali Raza
I’ve been recruiting for a very long time. I will make them fit. And I, I was actually surprised because I was thinking to myself, what if number 21 was actually the perfect fit for your client? And you missed that. And I think that’s what I began to realize is that the overload is really causing them to, you know, forcing them really to take shortcuts. You can’t blame them because it’s something that is actually beyond human capacity. Right? But I was surprised at that and that was a real turning point. So now I know why I applied for so many jobs and I never got a Call back.
08:10
Matt Alder
Yeah, absolutely. And we can sort of talk in a second about how what AI can do to fix that. But sticking on this theme, I mean, what. What have you. What do you think the biggest challenges are at the moment for, you know, employers, anyone recruiting?
08:24
Dr Ali Raza
So I think the biggest challenges right now is, first of all, the. The volume of applications that are coming in. There is. There is a lot of tooling out there that candidates have access to. A lot of candidates have the skill set to build automation as well, to help them in terms of applying for jobs. So I think the volume of applications that are coming in now compared to what we had, maybe, I would say 10 years ago, is significant. And then we can also see that in things like Easy Apply, you know, So I say Easy Apply equals easy death for a recruiter. Easy for the candidate, but not for the recruiter.
08:56
Dr Ali Raza
So that’s a huge challenge because you are now being fed with a whole load of data coming in, but you are still starving for insights, because it’s not possible to really be able to go through that and get the insights or the signals really from those CVs.
09:12
Matt Alder
Absolutely. Talk us through the way that you work, because I find it a kind of a fascinating combination of human and AI. And we actually met up a few weeks ago in Dubai, and you sort of talked me all through it, and I was really keen for you to come on the podcast and talk about it. So how do you mix the AI with the human in terms of what you do?
09:33
Dr Ali Raza
The way we work is our platform actually helps us define what are the rubrics that will help us to objectively evaluate every candidate that comes in. So whenever a new role comes in, I take the briefing from the client. I have my own capabilities on the platform, and they will create the job description. They would actually create the evaluation criteria in a very objective manner to help me really discriminate the people with who have the real merit versus those that don’t. And that’s it. I post the job online. Now the job’s posted, and maybe within 24 hours to 48 hours, I’ll have a good volume of candidates that apply. And the system then tells me, who are the candidates and across all the evaluation checkpoints, how they have scored, what is their overall average score?
10:20
Dr Ali Raza
I look at that and then I schedule a call with the candidates, and then the real recruitment game begins. Right. So the value that I get is that I have a lot of that input that helps me make the discussion with the candidate very engaging. So they know that, okay, the person I’m talking to really understands my area and understands the value. And I think one of the great things is that because I spend a lot less time now doing the heavy lifting of reading or rereading cvs, that basically means that I can spend a lot of quality time with the candidates and engage with them. And in some cases, you know, if I even see that, okay, for a particular role, I’m getting a very large volume of candidates that are scoring well in certain areas, but not in other areas.
11:11
Dr Ali Raza
I know it’s mainly because they’ve not updated their cv. So I also have time available now to engage with them, give them some feedback. I share my screen with them. So overall, I think it becomes a very positive experience because they are talking to a human being at the end of the day and they know that this person has actually been able to pick up my potential, understanding what I’m about before calling me. And, you know, it’s a lovely conversation.
11:37
Matt Alder
And how do candidates respond when you show them how that AI has scored them against the rubrics that you’re using?
11:46
Dr Ali Raza
So, so far I think it’s been an amazing experience for the candidates because they, what they have said. In fact, I got a call today from a candidate and, you know, I said, look, I’ll be happy to get you on Google Meet and let’s. I’ll just share my screen so you can see. And I think he was quite surprised that he has been trying to get in touch with recruitment agencies, companies he’s applied to. He can’t talk to anyone, right? And instead he’s talking to me and he’s having such a fruitful conversation and I’m sharing the screen with him. I’m showing him exactly why he got seven out of 10 here, why he’s got three out of 10 there. And then he’s looking at it and saying, yeah, actually that score is accurate because I haven’t done that.
12:25
Dr Ali Raza
And the score here, maybe it can be approved because I haven’t mentioned certain things in my cv. So that allows us to create this feedback loop with the candidate and we are able to then give them an opportunity to update their cv, put their best foot forward and really be able to project their merits to our clients.
12:43
Matt Alder
How does AI change the relationship between recruiters and hiring managers in all of this?
12:51
Dr Ali Raza
So I think that’s a very good question, actually. I think for hiring managers, it really tools up the hiring managers to be able to have a system where they can actually set the objectives for their recruitment. Right? And they know that, okay, I am able to, instead of me now giving a, you know, a mandate to a person in my team, in my recruitment team, or give them a briefing and hoping that they’ve understood everything that is needed, I can set the objective, the job description in a system. And the recruitment team now knows that we can trust the system to be able to evaluate. And the shortlist that we create is something that will match what the hiring manager has asked for.
13:34
Dr Ali Raza
And if the hiring manager starts to see some profiles coming in that are not really matching, they know that they need to fine tune or adjust a couple of things on what they’ve asked for. So I think the relationship between the hiring manager and the recruiter actually starts to become a little better in terms of collaboration. There’s going to be less finger pointing in my case. So for me personally, I don’t have, I never have a client come back and say, oh, the profiles you sell sent are very bad because they actually see me setting it all up in front of them. They normally would come back and say, ali, I’m sorry, but the goal post has changed a bit because of our internal priorities.
14:13
Dr Ali Raza
But they never come back and say to me, oh, you sent me CVS that are not relevant because they know there is a way to audit that now.
14:22
Matt Alder
And from a recruiter perspective, there’s obviously a fair bit of skepticism that AI can be as good as a recruiter at matching. And you sort of, you kind of hinted at that when we, earlier in the conversation when you were talking about the recruiter sort of taking a selection of all of the CVs, what is it that AI does better than humans at that stage of the recruiting process.
14:47
Dr Ali Raza
I think this is something that recruiters would really appreciate. So if I have about five or six different criteria that a hiring manager wants me to look for me to be able to go through a large volume of cvs, scan through the CV and be able to pick out whether each of those six items are there or not, and then have a mental memory of that. It’s not that easy. I have to reread the cv, I have to go through a large batch and then maybe few to the side, come back to them again, revisit them, reread. So I think the value that AI will bring to the recruiters at that stage is that it will do that heavy volume or skilled reading for you.
15:23
Dr Ali Raza
It will make sure nothing is missed out and it will be able to objectively evaluate based on the evidence that is there in the cv. So there are times When a hiring manager, and I think a very good example of this that I’ve seen is in the world of it, we have a technology called containerization, right? So anyone who’s recruiting in the IT field would know about this. Now, a person in their CV might put in a particular containerization technology like Docker or Kubernetes, they might not mention the word containerization, but because this is not something that the hiring manager has shared with the recruitment partner, they would not be shortlisting people that have mentioned Docker or Kubernetes. So those kind of people would be skipped out.
16:04
Dr Ali Raza
So I think for recruiters, they know now that with the power of AI, they can actually get good, accurate and precise profiles that they can shortlist and give to their hiring partners.
16:15
Matt Alder
And we say dealing with that volume thing, it doesn’t matter really if there’s 10,000 CVS or 10 CVs, does it?
16:21
Dr Ali Raza
That’s right. I mean, we’ve had one role where we’ve actually had 20,000 CVs come in. We were able to pick up just one person and hire that person.
16:30
Matt Alder
Fantastic.
16:30
Matt Alder
What number CV were they?
16:32
Dr Ali Raza
Just.
16:33
Matt Alder
Can you remember just out what number.
16:35
Matt Alder
What number application were they? Because obviously if there were 20,000 applications and they applied towards the end of that process, they probably may not have ever been seen by a human.
16:47
Matt Alder
Do you remember?
16:48
Matt Alder
Or is that. Is that a bit difficult?
16:53
Dr Ali Raza
It was quite far back. This was in 2023. So what I remember is when I look at the candidate count, it was around 20,000 or just over 20,000. And we had a very specific. Because this was a role with a national cybersecurity defense team. So it was very clear, even in our job description, that only people with this passport and this nationality should apply. And I think nobody bothered to read that, right? Nobody bothered to check what are the criteria. So everyone applied, right? And all we did is we just went and did a filter based on the passport that they’re holding and it was one person.
17:29
Matt Alder
So because of all of this, a lot of recruiters, TA professionals, you know, are quite afraid for their. Afraid for their job, afraid for their career, because there are aspects of what AI is doing that are taking away core things that they’ve always done. Should recruiters be worried about the future or is there a role for them working alongside the AI technology?
17:53
Dr Ali Raza
I don’t think AI in the world of recruitment, I don’t think AI can replace recruiters because recruitment is a very human connection activity. You have to engage with people, you cannot. So I’ll Give you an example, I send WhatsApp messages sometimes to candidates because they are in my shortlist and in case maybe they’ve typed the wrong email or something of that sort, I send them a WhatsApp message and an email. I then get responses from them saying that I didn’t reply or I’m not sure if this is actually a bot or a fraud or anything of that sort. So, I mean, just on the. A person has applied for a job, they’re expecting somebody to reach out to them, but when they get that outreach, they’re worried that is this somebody, is this a bot or is this some kind of automation tool?
18:37
Dr Ali Raza
So you can imagine how much that human interaction is still needed. So what I would say is that the world of recruitment, the only way it’s going to be really impacted by AI is that AI is going to take away all that repetitive work, make life a lot more easier for the recruiters. Right. They would be able to elevate themselves to conversations now where they would be able to talk to the hiring managers based on the data and actually presenting that data to hiring managers to talk about what the market is actually saying right now. I think with the overload that they get, I don’t think they would have even the mental capacity to really have those open discussions. So I think AI is going to change what kind of value they bring, but it’s not going to remove them.
19:24
Matt Alder
And as a final question, let’s just dive a little bit more into the future. Where do you think we’re going in terms of the technology, in terms of the way that recruiting works? You know, if were talking again in three years time, what would we be talking about?
19:37
Dr Ali Raza
So I think in what we would definitely be seeing is there would be a lot less noise, you know, in terms of CVs being created by this high volume of CVs, because there would be capabilities for AI to, at a very early stage, engage and understand and filter out the signals that are noise and then present what is actually valuable. I also see that the decision that companies are going to make is not going to be now based on finger in the air. This is my gut feeling. A lot of companies are going to see a huge return on investment because now they’re going to be making a lot more informed decisions. Right. The support that they’re going to get from the AI systems means that their hiring will be a lot more smoother.
20:24
Dr Ali Raza
I feel in the near future we are not going to see 60 to 90 days in terms of the time it takes to close a role, it’s going to probably come down. I mean, in our case, I could say on average it’s around two to three weeks if the goal posts don’t change. So I’m seeing that the time to hire is going to definitely come down significantly. The engagement between companies and candidates who apply to these companies is going to get better. So that’s what I see the future really bringing in.
20:50
Matt Alder
Fantastic. I’m all for all of those things happening. I think it’s going to be a very interesting few months and a very interesting few years.
20:57
Matt Alder
Ali, thank you very much for talking to me.
20:59
Dr Ali Raza
You’re welcome. Thanks for having me, Matt. Lovely talking to you, too.
21:02
Matt Alder
My thanks to Ali.
21:04
Matt Alder
You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts on Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can search all the past episodes@recruitingfuture.com, or on that site. You can also sign up for our weekly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast and get the inside track on 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.
