So Facebook developed two robots and set them up negotiating with each other. The robots quickly developed their own language to make the negotiation more efficient and the Facebook technicians shut them down pretty damn quickly fearing the apocalyptic consequences.
This got me thinking, how far are we away from ‘recruiterbots’? Most of us of a certain recruitment vintage had a training session on objection handling in our first week on the job. A month or so later we learnt the nuances of the SPIN questioning technique. Objection handling is a matching process; objection A is handled with this response, B with this one etc. Provided the AI’s voice and intonation sounded human enough, that could be done by robots and cold call sales bots are used extensively by other industries already, incidentally, did you know that August next year is the government deadline for PPI claims?
Over the course of my career, I have worked with very few recruiters who really and truly hit the phones relentlessly. This is not a criticism, none of us like throwing ourselves into a situation where there is a realistic chance we will embarrass ourselves. Most recruiters need time to psyche themselves up for a sales call, some actively avoid the phone altogether. Virtually every recruiter has spent 15 mins psyching themselves up for the call to the client who it turns out was in a meeting / on holiday for two weeks / had just retired. What if we could eliminate this dead time? Some recruitment companies I have worked with have data suggesting that a connected phone call is more than 80 times more effective than an email or LinkedIn mailshot campaign. So what if an experienced recruiter had a team of recruiterbots that sounded realistically human enough and they ploughed through the initial part of a call that ascertains interest i.e. the objection handling and the SPIN questioning, all of the information being added to a database through voice recognition software, and then the experienced recruiter could pick things up? What if the recruiterbots voices were modelled on that experienced recruiter’s voice so that the person calling didn’t even realise they were being handed over? The AI saying ‘sorry can you bear with me a second while I pop you on hold?’ would give the recruiter time to skim read the info. The tech for all of this already exists. In fact, the tech exists for the AI to trawl through all historical interaction between your business and the client’s and press articles about the contact and client in a split second and then use the information on the call. AI can also learn from each conversation and will share the information with other recruiterbots whereas we have all worked with consultants who are uncooperative and hide information from their colleagues.
Once you embrace this as a concept you identify the areas of the job that are a bit of a numbers game and then you start to see other areas of application: initial candidate registration phone calls, head hunt calls, etc. If you are following the ‘recruitment factory’ model then surely recruiterbots are a God send? Recruiterbots don’t leave for a competitor and then go out for beers with your remaining recruiterbots telling them all how wonderful life is at their new gig and how it was the best decision they ever made.
To some my suggestion that their job could be done by a robot is up there with wearing a white dress to someone else’s wedding or Kanye West interrupting Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the VMAs as the height of bad manners. Am I suggesting that one of the UK’s largest industries and the sector I have devoted my career to should just be automated? Well, no. People generally don’t like dealing with robots (probably due to the fear that robots will eventually overthrow us). As recruiters, relating to people is our key weapon, continually developing our network and our specialisation so that we have a strong understanding and strong relationships will keep us ahead of the bots (until of course, the people we recruit are replaced by robots). Over the last few years, we have already seen technology radically reshape the way recruitment works, it is not going to stop; we need to evolve our role accordingly. How close are we to having recruiterbots? Too close to ignore.