Volume recruiters are toast*
AI will inevitably eliminate 90% of human recruiters in volume recruitment within five years.
Having watched the McHire Jobs presentation at ATC 2024 earlier this week by Robert Hunter, the manager of local employee experience at McDonald’s Australia and Ian McCreery, the head of strategic solutions at Paradox, it was clear that volume recruitment is already vastly more effective with Olivia by Paradox (that I first wrote about six years ago) compared to human-led recruitment.
McDonald’s uses Olivia to handle all their store-level recruitment. For many jobs, resumes are optional, same-day hiring is happening, candidate satisfaction is climbing, and employee attrition in the first 90 days is falling.
Volume recruitment is the mass hiring of unskilled or low-skilled roles where a candidate’s work experience, if any, is largely irrelevant.
Whether it’s a job in hospitality, agriculture, a factory, a warehouse or at an event, the jobseeker’s work rights, proximity to the job location, availability and willingness to undertake manual and rudimentary work will all be more significant factors than existing skills or experience in the selection of a suitable candidate.
For employers of such workers, each worker is mainly interchangeable with another. AI more easily and quickly assesses then progresses or terminates a jobseeker’s application for such a job.
Most applicants for these jobs are younger workers used to technology underpinning many aspects of their daily lives. These job seekers don’t need or want human recruiters slowing down the job-seeking process. If technology allows a job seeker to apply for a job at 11 p.m. and then have an interview confirmed for the next day, why wouldn’t they prefer that to wondering whether their application will be acknowledged, let alone whether they’ll be granted an interview?
A significant advantage of AI in volume hiring is that it learns in real time. The success rate of each offer made, followed by the subsequent performance and tenure of that worker, is a data point in the system that helps strengthen the algorithm. The AI’s learning is applied immediately, it requires no human decision-making or other intervention.
Another huge advantage for a volume hiring business like McDonald’s is that when the hiring process is the same for all stores, any significant differences in employee turnover in comparable stores will help regional managers accurately identify those stores needing attention.
Addressing leadership and cultural issues quickly in targeted stores significantly increases the likelihood that ineffective leaders are improved or removed, with a commensurate reduction in the company’s risk of facing Fair Work action or legal claims for bullying, harassment, and discrimination (or worse).
It may be difficult to accept, but recent research suggests many recruiters and hiring managers are terrible at assessing skills from a resume, are reliably racist, don’t respect candidates’ time, ask discriminatory screening and interview questions and are biased against the minority gender for an occupation group so it’s no wonder about half of job seekers already think AI will only help improve hiring practises.
When you combine these factors with the increased speed, reduced cost and improved retention of AI-driven hiring, as evidenced by McDonald’s Australia, it’s not hard to see why human recruiters will largely disappear from volume recruitment in the not-to-distant future.
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