Candidates get more flexibility, recruiters can handle more

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As most of us know, whether you’re hiring or seeking to be hired, job hunting and screening is an onerous, nerve-wracking process. Adding artificial intelligence to the mix may provide some relief to both side of the process.

That’s the word from Cliff Jurkiewicz, head of strategy at Phenom. I had the opportunity to sit down with Jurkiewicz at the company’s recent annual conference in Philadelphia. “The traditional hiring process consists of ”human beings having to manage a lot of the process that doesn’t help focus on finding the right person and connecting them to meaningful work.”

AI is disrupting the onerous process of search and interviewing for positions, he continued. Jurkiewicz and I also talked about the work of Richard Nelson Bolles, author of What Color is Your Parachute?, who urged people to create their own jobs by researching company needs, versus expending energy answering publicly posted job ads.

AI will help with that process, he predicted. “You’re going to see more initiatives to create your own job. Every industry is moving towards skills-based, allowing us a dynamic way of looking at work and redefining work. You create a blueprint of work based on skills and outcomes, proficiency levels, and soft skills. It’s an ontology, based on the organization of information, and the relationship with information itself.”

Those ontologies represent infinite amounts of combinations that AI can sift through. “People want to work dynamically,” he said. In particular, millennials, genZ, and gen Alpha "don’t want to be siloed into just one definition of work. They want the ontology to say 'I can move up the organization with these skills to add value, and I’m building my own value in the organization, regardless of what my job title is.'”

A survey of 1,005 U.S.-based hiring managers from Insight Global found that 99% of hiring managers used AI in some capacity for the hiring process. At the same time, 93% agreed that it is no substitute for humans in the hiring process. Some of the most common uses include scheduling interviews (86%), establishing talent strategy (73%), creating ads for other open roles (72%), and taking notes during virtual interviews (72%).

This is where current tools and technology are making a difference. “We’ve gone from file folders to systems that help us organize and process people,” Jurkiewicz said.

We’re already seeing AI ease the process immensely when it comes to gig work – and, potentially, not just for requests outside enterprises, such as DoorDash or Uber. “You’re going to see that come to inside the enterprise, with gig ecosystems being built inside," he said. "You’ll have three or four different roles, and you’ll work ten hours over here, five hours over there, ten hours over there. Because that’s what people want."

From the job candidate’s perspective, be it for production floor or even CEO openings, introducing greater AI and automation into the process means interviews can take place at times that are convenient for applicants, without all the phone tag or attempts to conduct interviews during business hours if one has a current job.

The most popular time for such interviews, Jurkiewicz finds, is 10 a.m. on Sunday mornings – not a time when recruiters or interviewers are available.

Plus, with an online AI-driven interview, people “get to review their answers before they submit them,” he added. “The agent will do the screening, and you can either keep that answer or change it.”

The information a candidate is able to present may be more complete than what may be put forth in a live-human, and perhaps intimidating, screening. “The candidate wants to feel a sense of agency for themselves, and such tools allow candidates to fully represent themselves through the process.”

For the recruiting side, the availability of agentic AI tools means time saved. An organization may need to interview hundreds of candidates, which means a considerable time investment for overstretched recruiting staffs. For example, a large hospital system may need to process 1,500 candidates coming out of nursing school at the end of a semester.

Simply scheduling interviews “takes a high amount of time for a human recruiter, : he said. ”It takes no time for an automation to do it." By alleviating the burden of reaching out to perhaps hundreds of candidates, AI and automation “puts 11 hours back into a recruiter’s schedule – that’s 25% of their time.”

That provides recruiters and interviewers more time to connect with prime candidates, “talking about meaningful work, culture, values and purpose.”

There is the advantage that data and intelligence provides. For example, onboarding “has never been seen as a goldmine of intelligence,” he illustrated. “It has just been a checkbox. Here’s the paperwork, fill it out, give the paperwork back, we do a background check, everything’s good. But what if you could turn that into an intelligence-gathering effort? Because during that process of onboarding, you discover new things about the person.”

This AI-driven job-market system parallels the e-commerce system that has evolved in recent decades. “You can’t imagine a world today where you shop online with a thousand choices, and the system is helping you decide which one is the best for you. We’re doing that for work. Like where you best fit, where you’re going to get the most value out of it," he said. An AI-driven system helps you determine where “you’re going to increase your market value, and you’re going to be a great contributor to the enterprise.”