AI Sales Interviewer

Long in the tooth enough to have been around when contacting customer 'service' call centres seemed suddenly to reach agents on another side of the crackly, echoing, muffled world?

If so, you know how that ended. If not, how much do you like the auto chatbot as the modern-day first port of call?

In both cases, the hypocrisy is glaring. Which as I can bear witness myself, has lost companies business of which they'll never know. Because nothing proves how little 'the customer comes first' truly means like ignoring the very people who pay the bills, especially when they are in distress, by denying them the chance to speak with an actual human being.

'When someone shows you who they are, believe them.'

And when they do not value their clients in this way, take your business elsewhere.

So I've been horrified yet sadly not surprised to see similar play out in the current job market.

Yes, who is not busy? A chair to fill, any help in wading through the deluge of applications surely welcome.

Why not enlist a helping tech hand? How much harm could an instant sprinkle of AI initial screening do?

Well, as in the examples above, plenty.

'People are our most important asset'. 'Without our people we are nothing'. 'Putting people first is just good business'.

'Human capital is the heart of our strategy'. 'Cultivating a high-performance culture with a human touch'. 'The talent in our company is our greatest equity'.

The kind of equity such people seek delivers the precise opposite of what they claim to pursue.

These supposed 'people-centric' corporate platitudes are exposed by AI-driven hiring as empty slogans. If they afflict your sales recruitment, second prize is the best you could ever make. And in our world, that is nowhere.

From proponents, I hear such AI deployment is merely the norm now. The younger generations embrace it. Don't be a Canute.

This is rubbish. Wholly misguided. And seriously undermines your Sales ambitions.

We've got to the stage where job seekers are using AI too. Sometimes a step ahead of those trying to fill jobs. So you all you get is one AI assessing another AI. Your prospects will applaud that, hey. Your competition will love it.

Unsurprisingly, nefarious actions bleed in from the edges. Like 'zombie jobs'. Advertised to merely make the recruiter look busy. Or gain sneaky market intel.

Given how important 'people' are to them, strange how they ghost applicants. Or send a hollow, vapid and often irrelevant 'rejection'. But hey, a step up from 'your details remain on file'.

Now I learn of a new scourge tipping point; the AI initial screen video interview.

For once more, you know how deeply an employer cares about that vital trait of personal interaction - which allows for someone to rub along, click, and fit in - when to try gauge it they don't use an actual potential future colleague. Humans R Us.

I'm not saying you can't have such tech. It's that the blanket use will crush you. A rebalancing is required.

There are roles for which some kind of automated screening can apply. Selling however, does not feel one of them.

I've long recommended that it's the candidates at the edges that we ought find. Which AI ignores. You could tell your bot to pick these out. But does it truly understand the attractive quirky outlier? Or does it wallow among even slightly above-average probabilities?

Over twenty years back now I came across a tool that could scrape docs for keywords. Just as spiders trawled web pages, we could pick out CVs with certain words or phrases. Today's AI maybe a tad more sophisticated, but such starting point to narrow down to your longlist still holds. Why oh why then leap onto auto virtual interviews? Why not be done with it and have an AI salesrep.

That may be a future (!), but it is not our here and now.

Lastly, what do you do when everyone seems to use AI here? Yes there's the if-you-can't-beat-'em-join-'em pragmatism. "Genuflect to the AI gatekeepers", one mature job hunter battered into submission suggests. Apply for everything whilst using all their key terms back aplenty is another steer.

It's with us for now. If you're sucked into its vortex, good luck. But know that the real winners will not sit within its core.