AI is dominating every tech offering in HR and recruiting. Every vendor at HR tech has some reference to AI in their name, offering, or future. This alone seals the advance of a technology that will change everything about recruiting and HR.
From AI Agents that intelligently find, engage, assess, and make offers to candidates to basic tools that will augment every aspect of recruiting.
If I came away with one learning: we are sleepwalking into the future and do not fully appreciate the power that has been unleashed in AI.
This was reinforced at the Recruitment Processing Outsourcing Association Conference (RPOA) in Chicago a day or two ago. Vendors who last year were skeptical about AI's impact are now aware and struggling, like everyone, to learn how to harness AI for the benefit of their clients and their candidates.
I am not trying to be negative at all. I am simply stating what I believe is the future we must accept and deal with. Jobs are already being lost to AI Agents. Anthropic, the parent company of Claude AI, has said that programmers will be replaced with software robots. Many other firms are in the process of augmenting or replacing people with Ai solutions.
The U.S. job market grew beyond expectations this past quarter, which seems to contradict what I am saying. But this is the surge before the storm. Employers are dealing with increased demand for services or products in many areas and are using people to fill the gaps. At the same time, they are investing in technology to reduce those numbers. As I mentioned earlier, Anthropic says it can save millions of dollars by reducing headcount and replacing it with AI. AI is coming.
While jobs will boom temporarily while AI catches up, there will be a period when more jobs are lost than gained. Economies and politicians will struggle to deal with this. New jobs will for sure emerge and employ some excess talent, but not all of it.’
We already face the fact that we have more educated and talented people than current, non-AI jobs. This is why people with advanced degrees are driving Ubers. We only have jobs for the elite, narrowly educated, and skilled people with specific skills in programming, data science, AI, and related fields. We do not need people with other degrees or credentials.
I think you've highlighted something very important here, the lack of preparedness that exists. I recall a year ago chuckling as a keynote speaker and industry leader told the audience that talent would still seek out the human connection (does that include the 70%+ that get no response to an application?), while I myself expecting the kind of results we see recently where 80% of applicants would prefer to work with AI if it helped them get a job faster.
The reality is that the world has already changed.
I have been here before, at this inflection, in the mid 90's - when email adoption hit a (much smaller) tipping point that caused a cascade of change across recruiting in under 18 months, making and breaking teams and companies in the process.
We are privileged as a generation to have lived through so much change. Our parents lived the transport revolution, we lived the communication revolution and our children will live the work revolution.
So perhaps not a good time to get into recruitment ? Or just you need to adapt to keep up?