AI CV Fail

How can your salesteam live with AI?

I know that's a question that (albeit perhaps slightly less so mid-23 compared to earlier in the year), vexes many a sales leadership.

I have come to believe that how a salesteam handles AI for recruitment may well betray your approach to excellence, your customers, and working life in general.

Here's the hiring scenario.

I remember the days of sifting through literally a hundred sheets of paper sent in for a job opening. People really did use a rubber thimble to speed through, rejecting using the most arcane of criteria such as address.

Now, I learn the spread of AI-powered applicant tracking systems (ATS) is already complete. Universally in use across FTSE100 and Fortune 500 companies.

Where are you on the consummate candidate continuum? Applicants who quickly tick all your "boxes" are surely not run of the mill? Those who'll really sparkle for you cannot possibly be residuals, those on the edges beyond where you can be bothered to properly look?

I know where I stand.

And not solely because I myself am forever at that fringe.

Yet such 'outlier' superstars do not in reality take longer to find.

I'm in part reminded of the CCTV operator not wanting to spend ages skimming through a long night's footage seeking a perpetrator. Yet all over it when being shown how you can do so in literally two minutes. (Yes, a take on Zeno.) You simply take a point half-way through. Has the disturbance occurred? Whether it has or hasn't, you just move halfway forward or back in the relevant direction and look again. Repeat. Keep doing so as required. Remarkably soon you'll arrive at the precise point of note. And be the hero.

The point being, there's an equally swift way to make that spectacular hire.

Here's the AI slant.

You've trained your bot to spot each town, sector label, trait keyword in 'goldilocks' occurrence.

Fair enough, you might think.

Yet what about all those rejected in this initial screen?

I wholeheartedly guarantee your preferred candidate sits within this pile of discards.

Where's your secondary scan?

This is a classic case of AI being 'trained' to give an answer that whilst in one sense 'accurate', is not optimal.

As with all these things, the better the question, the better the answer.

And asking such like who hails from whichever town is totally not the better question.

You likely sell yourself on being a thinking-outside-of-the-box company, so how about here you 'walk-the-talk'.

I urge you not to leave your career, quota or standing in the hands of anyone - whether well-meaning or bureaucratic commissariat - in thrall to the latest 'ready-to-use' tech without building in the actual, real, revealing parameters it needs to shine.

Now that I read ATS spurn CVs with a picture on it, two-column format, slightly atypical font, a single 'flowery' word, and anything but generic previous job titles, if I were a corporate sales head recruiting with one to hand, I'd absolutely instruct its prompter to filter separately all those featuring any combo of such.

These are way more likely to contain the gold. Go dig for yourself.