According to job market surveyor, Capterra, 58% of all job seekers (across the globe) use AI to either locate relevant job openings, write or refine their résumés, or craft compelling cover letters. These may seem like relatively innocuous uses of AI, but the situation is not going to look pretty when AI becomes the tool dujour to make up qualifications the candidate doesn’t have.
Capterra reports that…
- 29% of the job candidates they surveyed (which was close to 3000 candidates) have used AI to complete a pre interview assignment or skills assessment.
- 28% have used AI to generate answers to interview questions.
- 26% have used AI to mass apply to jobs.
Ever wondered if the candidate you are interacting with on Friday is the candidate who will show up for work a week later?
Keep in mind that not all candidate uses of AI are intrinsically bad. If a candidate uses AI to build their resume to help them better portray their actual work experiences that makes them the right fit for a particular job, we might chalk it up to just a better presentation of the facts. If a candidate uses AI to whittle down the number of jobs they apply for, that can be a good thing for employers who often have to wade thru 100’s of resumes from wannabes before they get to the 1 or 2 people who actually have the qualifications you’re seeking. Its when AI is used to create skills and experiences that are mostly made up, that hiring managers run into challenges.
Unfortunately, most employers are not likely to notice an inaccurate or misleading resume until after the employee is hired. If a company relies on any resume, not just an AI generated one, to predict on the job performance in their work environment, they are guilty of the same mistakes traditional hiring processes have been making long before AI was involved.
Resumes have always been notoriously poor predictors of a candidate’s future performance, and AI has simply made that issue worse by taking the inherent issues of any resume, its ability to misrepresent a candidate’s skill levels or work experience, to a new level of distortion.
FINAL THOUGHTS….
As AI continues to play a role on both the candidate and employer side of the hiring process, its going to be more important than ever to build “verification’ practices into your hirig process. We recommend that recruiters and hiring managers 1) increase their use of verbal work history reviews as part of their base screening and evaluation processes; and 2) conduct relevant skill assessments as needed to ensure the candidate actually has the skills they’ve claimed.
