The Future of Recruiting: Autonomous Agents | Burn the Box with Anthony Onesto

Are you thinking about the impact of AI on recruiting? I have some thoughts and some looks into the future. Everyone, my name is Anthony Honesto and this is my burn the box drop for this week. Of course we are talking about AI OpenAI, one of the highest valuations. It feels.comish a little bit. I mean there's value, there's revenue, which obviously wasn't thing during the dot com boom. People would just invest in things that had no revenue. So good news is that there's actually revenue. Is it overvalued? Maybe. But my conversation here today, or at least my thoughts will contradict that statement. Um, so let's imagine you're a company, you're a startup, or you're a larger company and you have to search. You just open a job for a data science engineer. Yeah, shocking. Talking about AI, talking about data science engineers. It's all sort of together these days. So normally what you would do is put together a job description, work with your hiring manager and figure out what you're looking for. Um, actually Laura Hansen, who runs recruiting for Susie and I've been working, working with for quite a while, always says, give me Google address. Right, the job description, where am I searching, where am I going? You put together that job description, you identify some target companies, Sorry, everyone out there, everyone does it. We target your companies and then we go out and start sourcing and advertising and posting that job. Now let's say what I'm excited about, especially with OpenAI and why I think they're not over valued right now is that there has been speculation that on November 6th they're going to introduce autonomous agents. And I have been really excited about this capability because it scales so many different things. And so today's post is the idea of what does the future of recruiting look like and the role of autonomous agents in that future. So let's now flip the script. We're gonna, we're gonna Fast forward to November 7th. I don't know how advanced the autonomous agents are gonna be, but let's assume they are pretty advanced. Instead of that process, you're gonna go to something like chat.OpenAI.com and you're gonna put in the following prompt, looking for a data science engineer with X years of experience with these technologies to interview with our company. And instead of getting what you would get today, which is a bunch of prompts or maybe a job description or some sort of text back, you're going to activate the autonomous agent in OpenAI and it's going to respond back. I'M on it. Now, arguably that might not be the way it responds. Maybe, who knows? It's fairly playful. But the idea is that it's on it, meaning that what you have just kicked off is the new recruiting autonomous agent that will scour the earth to find your data scientists. Based on the prompt in the job description, they're going to go out and they're going to scrape all these different sites and find that individual. And then not only are they going to find that individual, because it's fairly easy to do that with some Boolean searches and LinkedIn. They're then going to ping that individual. Hey, I'm a recruiter from Suzy and I'm really interested in your profile for our job. Take a look at it. Apply here. Would you be interested, yes or no? Yes. Great. What are your qualifications? And it'll start doing what sourcing has been doing for years now. My little secret here. Everyone thinks about recruiting as this, as some sort of magic silver bullet. It is not. It is a ground. And if you're a UFC fan and it's a ground in town type of operation, it is like sales. You're going in and looking for and sourcing the right people to talk to and having conversations with them. So does this sound like science fiction? Yeah, of course it does. Who knows what's going to happen on November 6? Maybe the autonomous agent will go out to a website, say hello and come back. Who knows? But the idea here is, let's call it version three. We're going to be able to then automate all these things. Now, I know what you're thinking. If everyone's automating, what's going to happen? Yes, like email, we before email, we used to have to send mail. And then when email came out, it was so inexpensive, you send out an email or became so inexpensive expensive that everyone started doing email marketing and stopped doing direct or, you know, things that you get in the mail. Now the direct is actually becoming more unique. But yes, if there's a ton of autonomous agents that are out there emailing and reaching out, it is going to be a really interesting time. If you're a candidate, you're going to get pinged with what feels like a recruiter reach out. You're not even going to know that you're talking to a chatbot. And there's just so much, so much if you look at in recruiting specifically where artificial intelligence is most useful. Survey by Statista in 2023 said sourcing candidates, screening candidates, nurturing candidates are the three main areas that recruiters see most useful. So this autonomous agent can clear all of those. In theory, of course, I haven't used it. I don't get first access to these things. So what do we want to think about? Well, the pros of this kind of approach is efficiency, scale. Now you can scale your recruiting department. It's been one of those things that's been very difficult sourcing, candid. It's been a major part of what recruiters do. What if we're pulling that off and they're building relationships, we're building communities, they're more strategic, can reduce bias. Now remember that if it's a system that already has bias in it, it's going to scale that bias. We have to be very careful and make sure that we're auditing these things. What are some of the concerns? Ethical? Of course, there's this robot going around and it's not a human. And frankly, if you don't position it as a human and someone finds out, I think they're going to be quite pissed off. And I have some data, actually we ran a survey on Susie on this that I'll share in a minute. Of course, we absolutely dependent on all the data. And then it's that transparency. Am I talking to a bot or am I talking to a human? You'd have to understand what that looks like. So there's already folks using AI in recruiting. There's no one really thinking about the autonomous nature of these things. And again, I see that based on the Statista survey here, where nurturing, screening and sourcing candidates are the three main areas where recruiters see artificial intelligence being so impactful. So there's. But there's a bunch of companies that are using AI already and I think there's going to be more and more as we move forward. So, you know, the rise of autonomous agents and recruiting is paralleled by this, these, all these advancements in the natural language processing with OpenAI launching, then the ability to actually go out and take action. Because essentially, if you talk to anyone in data science, these large language models are just spitting things back out at you based on your prompt or your, their understanding of your prompt. Where this takes the autonomous nature of AI and really exemplifies where I think the power of artificial intelligence is and it can be applied to anything onboarding. I want an autonomous agent to make sure that our employees are creating a great experience right now. Our employees, humans have to do that. What if we pulled that out of their, their remit? And there it's more about building relationships. And I think the more and more we add autonomous agents or AI into our worlds for what I'll call the back back of stage processing is making sure that those are flawless. That front of stage, the theatrical presence in all your experiences becomes really, really incredible. So I talked about some Suzy data that we ran. So if you're unfamiliar, Suzy is a consumer research platform. So we go out, we ask questions of proprietary audience of US consumers and I kind of pivoted what we normally do which is more consumer insights and did a HR recruiting type of insight. And when I asked the Susie specifically is range of questions around the interaction of chatbots within recruiting. Now remember, this is split male, female, US based, employed part time or full time folks responding. So the first question was given the choice would you prefer to interact with a human recruiter or a chatbot during the initial stages of the recruitment process? Because now I'm going to contradict because this is my prediction as a head of hr. Autonomous agents are going to be very popular with recruiting organizations. We're going to send out autonomous agents to look for different people and qualified folks for jobs. The respondents, 73% of them said they prefer a human recruiter versus 27% who said they prefer the chatbot. And of course, you ever been on a customer service call? 0000 Operator Operator, operator. We've all been there. It's also where we're kind of asking folks to predict what this future looks like. So I'll take it. It's valid, it's a concern. It's something you got to think about when implementing these things. And we asked on a scale of 1 to 5, how would you feel interacting with a chatbot as part of a recruitment process? And this is where it gets very, very interesting. So what we look, we looked at the scale was not at all comfortable, which was about 13%. Very much comfortable was 18%. But it's really in the middle where it's 3, 4 and 5 which is I'm fairly comfortable, I'm more comfortable and I'm very comfortable. We're looking at potentially it's 32%, 25% and 18% which is saying that there is a level of comfort in the recruiting experience for folks to interact with a chatbot. Only about 26% rated as 2 or below not being at all familiar with comfortable with a chatbot in their experiences. And we asked how effective would a chatbot be in understanding your job qualifications and job fit. And again, what we see here is the same trend. A lot of folks are in that middle to very much in terms of thinking that a chatbot could understand their specific qualifications where only a few. And here it's a little bit higher. It's 31% rated 2 or 1, meaning they're not at all. They don't think that the chatbot would at all be effective in understanding their qualifications. So again, seeing some of the opportunity here for recruiting and recruiting departments and we asked, do you have any privacy concerns regarding interacting with the chatbot? Simple yes or no question. And this is really, really interesting. So here what we found out, it was almost a split. 56% said no, they don't have any privacy concerns. Which means majority of the folks when we surveyed them said, nope, there are no privacy concerns. And then 44% said yes. So there is an element of a candidate experience that are concerned with chatbots and privacy. So what does this all mean? First of all, anything you do around things that interact with folks outside your company, you want to be really extremely thoughtful about how that operates. It'll be very difficult just to spin something up. You want to really think about the experience. You want to understand and be transparent, letting folks know. Even though that first survey question, would you prefer to interact with a human or a bot? 73% said human. Something to think about if you're transparent and say, hey, if it creates a better recruiting experience. How many of us have submitted our resumes and then we don't know where the heck it is. Where if I order a domino's pizza, I know it's in the oven. Say that all the time. So if this enhances the experience, maybe people will become more and more comfortable with it. Then understand that there is a comfort level that exists right now. Majority of folks are comfortable with having a chatbot as part of the recruiting experience and there's slightly concerned around privacy, but majority of folks aren't concerned about privacy, particularly around the chatbot. But there is a general concern. So you have to think about the privacy of these things. And a lot of state and local governments are already putting in place things to make sure that privacy is is being considered. Bias is being considered. So that's my somewhat quick drop for today. Wanted to drop some futuristic knowledge about autonomous agents in recruiting, provide some Suzy data and tell you an entirely different story on both ends. So thank. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.