There’s something missing in the hiring process. All of us can feel it—it’s the wound that won’t heal. We make small improvements, but small improvements only take us so far when the core is broken. That broken process looks something like this:
- With the clock constantly looming, recruiters—through sheer willpower—hastily filter through hundreds of resumes to find the proverbial needle in the haystack. But those resumes are inherently inadequate: they lack evidence of the soft skills and behaviors that would give the hiring manager a sense of cultural alignment. 89% of mis-hires are due to cultural misalignment, which a resume simply can’t predict.
- Unstructured interviews with variable interview styles are breeding grounds for personal bias, skewing sound decision-making. But even structured interviews lead to inconsistent assessments, because teams lack objective frameworks for what “good” means. For all the time spent on quality-of-hire, only 15% of companies have defined what a high-performing hire looks like.
- This often means that candidates become indistinguishable from each other, leading to a great deal of uncertainty about who to extend an offer to. This puts new hiring managers, who may be looking for extra assurance, in an uncomfortable position. As for experienced hiring managers, they may be so entrenched in their views that personal bias enters the decision along with “gut feel” and guesswork.
- Despite research showing that most interviews have no correlation with post-hire outcomes, we still depend on a 30-minute conversation to tell us whether a candidate is right for the job. Hiring decisions grounded in interviews are less accurate than a coin flip: we get nearly half of those decisions wrong.
- Teams typically default to a “mindset of more” to solve the problem: more candidates, more interviews, more process, more criteria. But this only exacerbates existing problems while drawing out the indecision. The result? Poor candidate experiences, and bad business outcomes: more interviews mean more time and money spent by the business, missed hiring goals, and ultimately, missed business objectives.
None of this is talent acquisition’s fault. Recruiting leaders face the heavy task of meeting headcount goals, often with minimal resources, by scaling and repeating existing processes that frankly shouldn’t be. The fundamental problem is that businesses either don’t know what will truly predict success in a role, or they do, but don’t have access to that data on a candidate.
Enter AI.
AI offers a fundamental reinvention of a process that has mostly failed us. We don’t need to “clean up” the traditional hiring process; we need a new paradigm altogether—with data-driven signals on what’s actually meaningful about talent as they relate to your organization. Behaviors, attitudes, soft skills, and cultural alignment are things candidates can’t necessarily tell you about themselves, and things you can’t necessarily sort for. After all, they require thousands of data points on post-hire success. The human brain simply isn’t up to that task.
AI’s superpower is that it can rapidly ingest magnitudes more data than the human brain can, finding patterns that lead to great hire. These patterns allow teams to identify best-fit candidates quickly, with confidence, and without bias—ushering in a new age of quality hires with diminished employee attrition.
Replacing the Interview
AI has ushered in a new era; one where hiring teams can effectively replace parts of the interview loop (which, as we all know, has become unmanageable and unreliable) with quick insights into facets of a person that interviews could never surface.
In our eBook, Replacing the Interview, we go over the multitudes of ways AI can restore some sanity to the hiring process. Time is our most precious resource—wouldn’t it be great to get some of it back?
Download the eBook today—it won’t cost you a penny and it may just be what you’ve been missing.
