The development of self-learning programmes like IBM Watson has opened up the potential for the automation of many traditional human tasks. The loss of jobs to technology has been with us since the advent of the Industrial Revolution but the latest leap in cognitive computing puts whole swathes of professional jobs at risk.
The Doctor Is In
Since 2013, IBM’s business agreement with the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and American private healthcare company Wellpoint has made Watson available for rent to any hospital or clinic that wants to get its opinion on matters relating to oncology. Watson’s successful diagnosis rate for lung cancer is 90%, compared to 50% for human doctors.
In May 2016, the world’s first artificially intelligent lawyer, ROSS, was hired at law firm Baker & Hostetler, which handles bankruptcy cases. ROSS, another by-product of Watson, is able to mine facts and conclusions from more than a billion text documents per second.
So, if doctors and lawyers can be replaced by artificial intelligence, where does that leave the recruiter? Computer algorithms are already involved in matching and parsing job application data and clever, self-learning programs will soon be able to take that matching to a whole new level of sophistication and accuracy. It seems only a matter of time before AI gets better than human recruiters at analysing the vast amounts of data gleaned from application forms, CVs and social media profiles.
Quick Learners
The more data that these recruitment algorithms can analyse, the more accurate their assessments will become — and they can learn from previous successes and failures. In addition, AI can also identify personality traits from the subtle ways jobseekers have expressed themselves on paper and online.
One of the supposed advantages computers have over humans is that they are free from bias and racial/gender prejudice. However, there is also a danger that self-learning without any human intervention at all could, unwittingly, create biases in the algorithm. If the machine recognises that white males are being more successful at getting jobs, then it will logically conclude that white males are the best candidates. Algorithms trained to spot correlations and patterns may also reject non-traditional candidates and miss the maverick geniuses among the mountain of applications — though, perhaps the fallible human recruiter is just as likely to miss that brilliant maverick?
Putting these caveats aside, the financial case for using self-learning algorithms in recruitment is compelling. The need to deliver more results at faster speeds and for less money is a spur to innovation. Staffing firm margins are relentlessly under pressure and headcount is the largest component of a traditional agency’s cost base; so which executive team can afford to dismiss the potential afforded by developments in artificial intelligence?
Foot in the Door
If you think the virtual staffing firm is a vision of the future, you may be surprised to find that it is already here. So-called “just-in-time” staffing firms like ShiftGig and Wonolo in the US, Staff-Finder in Switzerland, and Sidekicker in Australia are essentially web and smartphone-enabled staffing services for on-site blue-collar work. They provide the services of a traditional industrial recruitment via two-sided digital labour marketplaces, enhanced with ratings systems and algorithmic recruiting and management. They are able to automate the recruiting process by letting workers more or less freely choose their assignments and use data to steer jobs toward the best workers. And these fast-growing “people-less” staffing firms are operating at pretty attractive margins.
Irreplaceable You
Tony Martin, chairman of UK-based staffing firm Empresaria and recipient of Staffing Industry Analysts’ Peter Yessne Staffing Leadership Award, believes that recruiters will never be replaced by software because the role of the recruiter is to make the “imperfect match”. They don’t find square pegs to fit square holes but play an important mediation role getting the hirer to compromise on the imperfect candidate and the candidate to compromise on the imperfect job.
Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggest there are still many categories in which humans perform better and one of them is social interaction. Robots do not yet have the kinds of emotional intelligence that humans have, such as being sensitive to the needs of others.
Today, there’s no software that has the subtle negotiation and empathetic attributes that a recruiter embodies. In the distant future, well, can we be certain one way or the other? The exponential improvement in computing technology is already confounding many people’s expectations. The world of work is changing fast. In May 2016, Foxconn, which builds iPhones for Apple, cut 60,000 workers and replaced them with robots at a single plant in China. So, perhaps in the distant future we’ll see robotic recruiters finding work for robotic workers. See you at the beach! A much more likely scenario is one where human recruiters are enhanced by the addition of cognitive intelligence to do their jobs better and faster.
