Would an AI-generated script from your database be an advantage or an embarrassment?

Talent X AI panel (L – R): Natasha Saccuzzo (SEEK), Nick Gabrielidis (Chandler Macleod), Luke Howes (Six Degrees Executive), Brendan Tremble (Frazer Tremble) and Mark Pritchard SEEK),  (Photo courtesy of the RCSA)

How does artificial intelligence (AI) support, and extend your competitive advantage?

I came away from the Talent X AI panel with this question ringing in my head (courtesy of Brendan Tremble, I think).

Recruiters think the human connections they make and develop provide a key competitive advantage and that’s right, except…..that advantage is rapidly being eroded by AI.

In his most recent blog Ethan Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, who studies entrepreneurship & innovation and AI, said,

“No matter what happens next, today, as anyone who uses AI knows, we do not have an AI that does every task better than a human, or even most tasks. But that doesn’t mean that AI hasn’t achieved superhuman levels of performance in some surprisingly complex jobs, at least if we define superhuman as better than most humans, or even most experts. What makes these areas of superhuman performance interesting is that they are often for very “human” tasks that seem to require empathy and judgement. For example:

• If you debate with an AI, they are 87% more likely to persuade youto their assigned viewpoint than if you debate with an average human
• GPT-4 helps people reappraise a difficult emotional situation better than 85% of humans, beating human advice-givers on the effectiveness, novelty, and empathy of their reappraisal.
• GPT-4 generates startup ideas that outside judges find to be better than those of trained business school students.
• 149 actors playing patients texted live with one of 20 primary care doctors or else Google’s new medical LLM. The AI beat the primary care doctors on 28 out of 32 characteristics and tied on the other four, as rated by human doctors. From the perspective of the “patients,” the AI won on 24 of 26 scales of empathy and judgement.

There are other examples, but these serve to illustrate the point. For some tasks, today’s AI already exceeds human performance, which is astonishing, but,…the abilities of AI are uneven, even within a single job.

This is why, for now, AI works best as a co-intelligence, a tool humans use to augment their own performance..”

What struck me in considering Tremble’s question and Mollick’s assertion about co-intelligence was how important it is for recruiters to ensure all communication with each prospect, client and candidate resides in the database.

Consider the power of AI in the scenario of a recruiter posing the following questions to their proprietary data AI: “Please write a script for me to make an offer for job W from company X of $Y  to candidate Z? What are the most likely questions Z will ask? How should I respond? What reasons may Z give for declining the offer? How should I respond?”

The AI then reviews every communication between the recruiter, the client and the candidate and offers (within seconds) an effective offer script, rejection reasons, and accompanying rebuttals.

The smart recruiter spends ten or so minutes polishing and rehearsing the script to ensure they don’t sound scripted and then calls the candidate to put the offer (or maybe the recruiter has asked the AI “What communication channel should I use to maximise the likelihood of this offer being accepted by this candidate?”).

The effectiveness of an AI-generated personalised script will largely depend on the quantity and quality of captured communication between the relevant parties.

Would your database be a competitive advantage or an embarrassment if you could use such an AI tool today?

I suspect the honest answer from most recruiters would be, “Hmmm, closer to an embarrassment”.

How are you using AI (or at least thinking of using AI) as a co-intelligence; one that will augment your own performance, especially in those critical conversations with candidates and clients?

If you aren’t pondering this question you can be sure your competitors are.

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