Did AI Reject Me? How Recruiters are Currently Using AI and Automations

How is AI impacting your application? I get this question all the time now and it's fair. It's on everyone's mind. Obviously, AI is pretty much making headlines every day and a lot of our people in the community and candidates I work with are nervous about what's going on with AI and should they be doing anything different, how is it impacting them? What's going on in the applicant tracking system? So today we're going to go into that and I'm going to tell you a little bit about how it is and isn't impacting you and what you can do to put your best foot forward, whether it is a human or a robot. Reviewing your resume I'm Karina Klingman, scientist.

Turned CEO of a talent strategy consulting firm. I've helped over 85 biotechs hire and develop thousands of amazing employees. So I know what works and what doesn't work when it comes to landing a job and then excelling in it. I created the Biotech Career Coach Podcast to give you simple, actionable, step by step strategies to help you land your dream biotech job, then move up the career ladder. If you are exploring career paths, looking to learn about biotech, or simply striving to be the type of person who makes an impact and gets promoted, you're.

In the right place. All right, so let's tackle this from the beginning. Is AI reviewing your resume? The answer is probably not, and yes. So it's kind of a bit of both. We are seeing that more and more applicant tracking systems are rolling out AI features. As of yet, we're not allowing AI to make any decisions. So what we're seeing the applicant tracking systems help us to do with AI is to maybe score a resume or bring it higher in the list or maybe make a light touch recommendation for who seems like the best fit for the role in a rank order. And what I can tell you is that it's not very good. So for science, it's not great yet. And I'm not saying it won't get better, it probably will and I'll do an updated podcast episode when that happens. At the moment, we're not seeing that it is highly accurate. In fact, many of the candidates that I've hired recently have had very low scores in the applicant tracking system and their, I don't know, resume fitness or job fitness score, whatever the ATS is calling it. And that's a little disheartening because I worry that some recruiters are taking that more to heart or they're putting More stock in that score. But the recruiters I've spoken with are not yet. So I think we're all aware we sort of have spot tested. We're like, okay, well this person scored horribly. But they have seem to have the right experience, like what's going on there. I think we've all noticed that. So I wouldn't worry at this moment, probably for the rest of this year, that AI is ruling out your resume completely. The other thing is that there's legislation in certain states that was put into place quite quickly that says that AI can't make hiring and firing decisions. And so at this moment, you know, if we are not reviewing a resume and if it's automatically rejected by an AI without us reviewing it as a human, that's not legal in a lot of states. So for that reason, most applicant tracking systems just don't do it. In fact, I don't know of a single one that does have a total AI review system. Some people though get mixed up with the difference between AI and automations. And these are different. We've been using automations in recruiting for a very long time. Automations might look like having a set of questions when you apply and one of those questions being a knockout question like, we can't as a company, for instance, hire someone who requires an H1B visa transfer because we're too early stage. And so as a corporate policy, all candidates requiring an H1B visa transfer might be knocked out. That's just an example. We've had other examples where we've had like salary knockouts where we have just decided, you know what, we're very budget constrained. We're going to list the salary and if someone comes in with a salary above that, we're just going to knock them out. They knew what the salary range was, they told us they wanted more. We don't want to consider them because there's no way we can hire them if we like them. So in that case, those are automations. That's not AI. It's very simple. The user inputs a value and we've told the computer, okay, if this value is X, they're out, if it's Y, they're in. So that is something that candidates I think have gotten confused about. We don't have any knockout capability for like missing keywords or having, you know, the wrong keywords or anything like that. That is where the AI is coming in. If the AI is scoring your resume against the job description, it's going to be looking for keywords and context. Like I Said in science, it's not very good yet. Science context is hard, so it's getting better. And actually I see ChatGPT is pretty good when I ask it to help me write job descriptions and things like that, but it's still pretty not good. If I have a great candidate and I ask it to look at both the resume and the job description, I still don't get a great answer. So I don't know what it is. In the comparison, the comparing the resume to the job, it seems to understand the context enough to help me write a job description, but not really score candidate. So hey, that's fine with me. We're still doing our thing. That means that recruiters still have jobs, right? So I'm going to count it as a win. But that's the main fear people have. The next thing I want to talk about though, is how candidates are using AI in the application process. So we do have some tools on the market that are infuriating to us recruiters. One of them, for example, is called Lazy Apply. It is just like it sounds. You can be really lazy and it'll apply for thousands of jobs for you. Are they the right jobs? No, they're not. So you basically upload a resume and it goes and it just applies to every single job it can find. It's really obvious when candidates are doing this and we're getting a flood of applicants as a result. So many more applicants since these tools rolled out and they're not high quality. So in this case, again, not using AI. But here's how I do my screening. I look for keywords. So if a job, let's say, is a computational biology job and it says that right in the title, and if I search for the keyword Computational biology or computational biologist, so I give some variations. If I search for that and it doesn't appear anywhere in the resume, I'm probably just going to eliminate the candidate. So what I do is I'll look at my biggest slew of resumes. I've got 200 resumes came in over the weekend. I will do some Boolean searches. And Boolean is just a type of search where we use and or not, and we use keywords with parentheses and quotations and all of these things. So I will do a Boolean search for all the resumes that do not have the essential keywords that anyone who has looked at the job description would have put in their resume. And I'll just knock all those candidates out at once and my pipeline will be cut in half. And it's wonderful. It's not AI, that's me. I'm making a decision to eliminate the candidates that clearly did not at least take the time to tailor their resume in the least. And we sometimes will put questions into the application that make you as a human, do a little work. And we can tell if it's not a human because lazy apply will fill in boxes with things like see Resume. See resume. When we've asked you just to what's your favorite thing you did at your last job? See resume, well, that's not really helpful. And that's clearly a bot. So if you see those application questions and you're like a little annoyed, that's why, because we're a little annoyed that there are hundreds of these bots applying for jobs and it takes our valuable time away from reviewing your excellent resume. So do us a favor, if you see those little questions that seem kind of trivial, just answer them. Prove you're a human. Maybe use a little humor like we appreciate that and it'll go a long way in your application. So that is how applicant tracking systems are using AI and how candidates are using AI. I want to go into a little bit more detail too about the interview process and the follow ups. So one tool that applicant tracking systems are starting to use more and more are AI bots that are little chatbots that help to qualify candidates. And again, we're not disqualifying candidates, but we are gathering more information with which to evaluate your resume. So that looks like this. You might apply and immediately get contacted via email or maybe even a little chatbot on the website. And there might be some follow up questions like tell me how you would rate yourself in this skill from 1 to 10 or can you tell me your favorite thing that you did in your past position and why? So we're just looking for personality. We're looking for your ability to speak positively of a past team. We're looking for your technical proficiency, or at least what you're rating your technical proficiency in one or two areas just a little bit to add some color to your resume. That again, we're testing are you a bot applying or are you a person? And when I go to review your resume, going to have more of a picture of the type of candidate you are in a well rounded way because most candidates don't have great resumes. So if I consistently am not getting the answers I'm looking for, I might ask for an AI to help me gather those results. You might see this as an email exchange where you exchange A few emails to get that information. And we might also ask you to do an asynchronous video interview that sometimes includes an AI asking some questions. Don't be afraid of those. They seem a little bit scary. But I can promise you, within the next couple of years, that's how all the companies are going to be doing them. They're incredibly time saving for us and they give candidates a really valuable opportunity to present more than what's on their resume. This is essential for those of you who are career changers and you want to stand out and show that you have great transferable skills. For instance, this is your opportunity to present those transferable skills outside of the confines of a resume. So it's scary, it's daunting. It feels like there's all this technology in the mix, but it is definitely the way it's going. And I really encourage you to get comfortable talking to computers, having those interviews that are asynchronous, because we're going to see more and more of those. And I've certainly had candidates that have refused. And some of the time our pipelines are so packed with other candidates, we're like, okay, well, we don't have time to get through all these candidates. So if you're not comfortable giving us more information through our little bot, then we're not going to be able to consider you. We don't say that to them, we just thank them and move on. But that's what's going on in my head is like, oh, come on. Like, we're all really busy here. Just give me a few answers. It won't be the end of the world. Many employers are using these. Sometimes you see them as the whole application process. I've seen a few companies where you go to their application page and it's actually all through a bot and you have a conversation, you upload your resume, whatever. But it's all driven by a bot, which is pretty cool if you're into that sort of thing. So I hope that was helpful. This is a real sticky topic. It's certainly evolving almost weekly. It's nuts how fast things move. I listen to a couple of AI podcasts to keep on top of all of this stuff. I have a specific recruiting website that talks about all of the new cool stuff, sometimes not cool things that are going on with AI in relation to recruiting. It's a lot to stay on top of. So if you have a cool tool that you've used and you want to tell me about, please do. We have these types of conversations inside the school community. So if you have something weird happen, you can always post a question in the community. Other people and me can weigh in on was that weird? Was it not so? If you're not in the community, please get yourself in there. I have the link in the description here and with that I will see you next week.

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