what is the role of humans in the future of AI recruiting?

Major advances in traditional and generative AI tools in recent years have had a serious impact on the recruitment industry. Human-AI collaboration is already helping companies and candidates hire or get hired, and some organisations are embracing its capacity for automating and streamlining common recruitment tasks.

Today’s AI tools can understand large amounts of information and generate novel content in a surprisingly human-like way, and they’re improving every day. This raises an important question for many companies and recruiters — what role will humans have in the AI recruitment process in the coming months or years?

In this article, we’ll show that human recruiters won’t be going obsolete any time soon. The impact of AI on recruitment is huge and AI can make recruiters more effective, but it won’t replace them entirely.

only humans can build a strong candidate-recruiter relationship

Recruitment is an inherently people-focused industry. In many cases, a recruiter needs to truly understand the wishes, perspectives, and wider motivations of the companies they work for and the candidates they recruit. A strong relationship built on clear communication is essential here — and it’s often the case that these close relationships between individuals lead to the most successful recruitments.

Even in cases where the candidate-recruiter relationship is strictly professional, most people would agree that a friendly face and some human connection leads to better outcomes. This is even backed up by science — in a study published in the HR journal Personnel Review, researchers were able to prove under laboratory conditions that talent reacts better to a friendly recruiter.

The findings showed that test participants faced with a friendly recruiter in a simulated interview “were more attracted to the recruiter, perceived the employment opportunity as more desirable, and were more willing to pursue the employment opportunity.”

AI tools may reduce a recruiter’s manual workload, but they’re not capable of creating the human connection that improves recruitment outcomes — which brings us to the next point.

candidates trust human recruiters more than AI systems

One of the main reasons people aren’t willing to build a long-term relationship with an AI recruiter is simple — they don’t trust AI. This has been shown in a number of surveys, notably ‘Trust in artificial intelligence’, a global 2023 study conducted by KPMG and the University of Queensland.

According to the survey, three in five people are wary of trusting AI systems, and 67% of respondents reported a ‘low’ or ‘moderate’ acceptance of AI. The vast majority of respondents acknowledged that AI technology does come with a string of benefits, but only half believed the benefits outweigh the risks. In terms of AI usage in the workplace Randstad’s annual employer brand research recently revealed that a quarter of the workforce regularly use AI, with 10% using it daily. Over half of those surveyed also believe AI will affect their role in the next five years. 

The KPMG study also looked at levels of public trust in different AI applications. Most respondents were fairly relaxed about using AI to improve medical diagnoses — but the least-trusted AI use area was HR. 

The survey report didn’t look at the causes of this scepticism towards AI hiring, but the numbers show that applicants and companies are unlikely to want to work with a recruiter that relies too heavily on AI — headlines about advanced AI tools that discriminate against certain candidates are unlikely to repair this lack of trust in the near future.

AI will struggle to build the expertise needed for specialised recruitment

The reason today’s popular generative AI tools can do so much is because they’re ‘trained’ on truly massive datasets built from content scraped from the internet, books and research journals. When faced with a question, they can instantly draw from this enormous bank of detailed knowledge and provide a useful response to almost any query.

However, the kind of knowledge required for effective recruitment in specialist or niche roles usually isn’t found in any dataset. Information about a company’s unique needs, the goals and desires of the candidates and employers involved and in-depth details of a company’s specific products, services and business strategy can’t be gathered up and structured by a large language model (LLM). 

The future of AI in recruitment is in streamlining the recruitment workflow, handling repetitive tasks and providing a source of instant feedback and inspiration. Human-AI interaction is a great way for recruitment professionals to get support in a demanding environment. However, the work of building relationships and creating the best possible matches will still require human recruiters. 

As AI progresses in the long term, the recruitment profession may become less about administration and more about using deep knowledge to guide companies and candidates in the right direction. We see signs of this already — according to figures from HR analysis firm Aptitude Research, 42% of recruiters believe that AI will help them focus on strategic recruitment and planning work, rather than on day-to-day operations.

learn more about attitudes to AI in the labour market

AI is having a significant impact on recruitment, just like in other industries. But companies that approach it responsibly don’t need to fear its effects on their workforce. Download our condensed position paper on AI and the labour market to get the facts on talent attitudes to AI, potential AI use cases in recruitment, and our recommendations to employers who want to start using AI to its full potential.