There’s a fascinating collision happening right now.
Candidates are using AI to polish resumes, prepare for interviews, and even help with applications. Employers are using AI to screen and sort those same candidates. Application volume is exploding while human attention is shrinking. Indeed’s CEO recently described this as a “vicious cycle,” noting that applications per job have doubled since 2022 while the number of recruiters has fallen dramatically. LinkedIn is simultaneously rolling out more AI into recruiting, including applicant targeting and AI-assisted follow-ups.
We’re getting really good at automating the part of recruiting that was never the hardest part.
Finding 300 people who match the keywords isn’t the hard part. The hard part is figuring out:
• Who can actually do the job?
• Who will thrive in this organization?
• Who has the judgment to operate at the level required?
• Who is genuinely interested vs. who just happens to have a really good AI-assisted response?
• And perhaps most importantly: Who isn’t obvious on paper?
That’s the part that worries me, because when everyone has an optimized resume, everyone starts to look the same: Strategic. Results-oriented. Collaborative. Innovative. Excellent communicator ….
You get the idea.
As technology gets better at identifying the “right” candidate, we risk getting worse at recognizing the interesting one.
• The person whose background doesn’t line up perfectly.
• The candidate from a different industry who brings a perspective you didn’t know you needed.
• The person whose title isn’t an exact match, but whose career trajectory tells a much more compelling story.
• The candidate who doesn’t have every box checked but has the judgment, curiosity and ability to figure things out.
Candidates like these are much harder to find when your process is designed to find perfect matches.
Now, before I get emails, I’m not anti-AI. Far from it. AI can make recruiting faster. It can help surface people we might otherwise miss. It can take some of the administrative work off recruiters’ plates. But I don’t want recruiting to become so efficient that we eliminate the part that actually requires a recruiter including judgment, curiosity, conversation, experience, instinct.
The best hire isn’t the person who looks most qualified in a database. Sometimes it’s the person who makes you say, “Huh. I hadn’t thought about looking for someone like this.”
The danger isn’t that AI will find the wrong candidate. It’s that it will convince us we’ve already found the right one. The more automated recruiting becomes, the more valuable human judgment becomes as well.
Singh Hecht Executive Search is a national boutique search firm specializing in the areas of public relations, communications, and marketing.