GenAI takes temp recruitment back to the future

Generative AI (GenAI) is rapidly changing many aspects of recruitment in ways that would have been hard to envisage at the beginning of the decade.

At RCSA’s SHAPE 2024, held in Noosa last month, SEEK’s group executive of artificial intelligence Grant Wright (photo#, right) said that SEEK’s technology was currently detecting the use of AI in around 20% of resumes submitted for vacancies posted on SEEK. Wright predicted this percentage would rapidly accelerate to around 50% within just six months.

Wright also shared that more than 50% of current applications for vacancies posted on SEEK are driven by candidates acting on AI-generated personalised job recommendations that prod candidates to apply for specific vacancies.

Contemplating what this means for recruiters collided heavily with this week’s post from Recruiting Brainfood creator Hung Lee, AI is Finally Going To Kill The CV, which is an absolute cracker and one I highly recommend you read.

Here’s some of the gold:

“…the job market remains hugely challenging, and candidates are highly motivated to do what they can to get an edge. AI clearly provides this – it enables better quality applications, at lower human energy input, with far greater volume of output.

Indeed, today’s job seeker would be foolish not to use AI in some form in the job search because it provides such a significant competitive advantage compared to those who don’t.

Now tailoring applications per job advert is something recruiters and job search coaches have long advised job seekers to do, thinking that personalisation was a good proxy for motivation.

We might not even have a problem with job candidates using ChatGPT to improve their CVs and application responses if they did it on a per application basis. However, where we recruiters come under untenable pressure is when this optimisation is done at scale, where services like LazyApply or LinkedIn AI Hawk or any number of AI-powered job seeker apps provide both personalisation and mass apply.

The effectiveness of this mass-apply approach is seen in this example (thanks Recruiting Brainfood) in which a post on Reddit claims to have secured around 50 interviews by creating an AI bot that “..analyzes candidate information, examines job descriptions, generates unique CVs and cover letters for each job and answers specific questions that recruiters ask.” The post concludes, “The tailored CVs and cover letters, customized based on each job description, made a significant difference.”

It’s not hard to foresee the consequences for recruiters whose primary source of candidates is posting a job ad on their favourite job board. These recruiters will be overwhelmed with volumes of applications, most of them AI-adapted to maximise the likelihood of a human or a screening bot selecting that candidate for the next stage in the process.

If the next stage in the process is a phone screen or remote interview, the AI-savvy candidate has the advantage of an AI-generated prompt that produces well-crafted answers (or at least bullet point talking points) unseen to the interviewer to maximise the likelihood that the candidate draws upon the most relevant aspects of their employment history to answer the interviewer’s questions effectively.

What does this mean for agency recruiters?

I liken it to a return to the pre-Internet way of recruiting, the type I experienced for the first eight years of my career.

If you reached the end of my blog last month about my early 1990s manager, Bronwyn, you would have seen a photo of me at my desk with no computer in sight – client records were index cards on a lazy susan in the middle of the temp desk, and resumes were attached to paper application forms.

Until SEEK started in 1997, the primary form of candidate sourcing was posting a classified ad in the Position Vacant section of Saturday’s edition of the local paper, in my case, The Sydney Morning Herald. The ad copy was required to be phoned into the paper by 10 a.m. Friday at the absolute latest.

The lag, typically three or four working days, between needing more candidates and having interviewed and verified the bona fides of these new candidates meant I was focused on maximising my existing candidate pool.

Improving my results as a temp recruiter meant using advertising as a last resort, as doing so cost me time and money. I quickly learned that my competitive advantage was in the quantity and quality of my relationships with my active candidate pool. This was the foundation for my candidates called me first and why I was the beneficiary of quality referrals.

The advent of job boards (SEEK commenced business in 1997) provided the ‘miracle’ of new candidates via a job ad that could be posted any time of the day or week, within minutes of receiving a vacancy for which you needed fresh candidates.

It’s hard to overstate how much job boards changed temp* recruitment.

Of course, this ‘miracle’ of an easy-to-turn-on tap of candidates was quickly taken for granted. As a result, many temp recruiters lost, or never gained in the first place, the mindset, habits and skills necessary for building and maintaining an active candidate pool.

Twenty-seven years after SEEK started business, things have almost turned full circle. The benefits of rarely having to advertise for candidates will (or already do) provide a huge competitive advantage for temp recruiters who have the mindset, habits, and skills to build and maintain an active candidate pool.

The cost of advertising for candidates, in terms of time invested and uncertainty of candidate quality, will mean that temp recruiters who can place the same temp multiple times have the significant productivity advantages of assured candidate quality, greater candidate loyalty, more quality referrals and greater candidate advocacy of the recruiter to the hiring manager (and other relevant contacts).

Of course, these have always been the advantages of an excellent temp recruiter. However, these advantages will be substantially compounded by the huge rise in costs borne by those recruiters who continue to rely heavily on advertising to generate candidates.

# photo credit: RCSA

* or any other label you may wish to assign to a non-permanent worker (eg contractor, casual, on-hire worker etc)

Photo: a pre-Internet temp recruiter, circa 1993, waits for ad response from his temp accounting vacancy run in Saturday’s edition of the Sydney Morning Herald, 

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