I recently read an article about how Unilever is saving time and money from using AI to assess job interviews and thus replacing human recruiters. It's the buzzword these days and it seems like AI/ML is taking over the world. Or is it?

The automation of hiring processes is something I've been looking into. On the surface level, it solves a few problems.

Bias

It's common these days to see companies utilizing video based interviewing at the start of the funnel. A candidate is assessed based on their response to a set of questions and through ML / AI, a prediction is made using data points such as facial feature and intonation to surface the best talent. We can assume that the algorithm is neutral in a sense that it won't discriminate people based on their name, gender and ethnicity. Through this method, a company can be assured that they would receive a highly diversified pool which could have been easily filtered out from unconscious bias if a human is doing the selection instead.

Availability

Isn't it appealing to know that a machine can respond to candidates 24/7? They function just the same all day and night without any need for rest.

Scale

When hiring at volume, a machine can help a company scale their recruitment process. And they're unlikely to miss out on anybody. You don't have to worry about hiring more recruiters and overworking them to meet the demand.

The claim about saving time and money is as real as it can get. But that doesn't mean that we should remove human out of the equation. Unless your company is run by automatons, you are still dealing with people after all.

Don't forget that the function of AI/ML is to help companies make decisions based on pattern, correlation and prediction. If an algorithm is written by a human, it's hard to tell if there's any inherent bias to begin with. Even the quality of data and variables matters in this case. A machine can be cold and objective based on hard facts but it doesn't have the capacity to factor in the complexity of human nature.

Can it detect motivation? Beliefs shaped by environment? Culture? Not yet, at least.

As a recruiter, I can see where the industry is heading. Should I be worried about having my job replaced? Perhaps. But I do know that a machine can never replace my imagination, creativity and the human touch.

Although, it would be a different story if the machine goes sentient....