As you may have heard, there’s a pretty big internet search company that organizes itself around a certain motto:
“Don’t be evil.”
If it weren’t already taken, RecruitBot would have used that motto for ourselves. It’s snappy! It’s concise! It speaks to our desire to be good corporate citizens!
Recently, the relentless growth of artificial intelligence has been a pretty hot subject. Congress is pushing legislation designed to speed up the arrival of self-driving cars. Pretentious art snobs are having difficulty distinguishing art generated by AI, and art created by human hands. Welsh police just made the world’s first arrest on the basis of facial recognition software. These technological advances are only going to continue apace, and many believe that they’re going to put a lot of people out of work.
When we first conceived of RecruitBot, putting recruiters out of work was the last thing we wanted to do. Nobody wants to be responsible for the loss of somebody’s livelihood, after all. More personally, many of our friends work in the industry, and we wanted to make sure we did right by them.
So we consulted them about RecruitBot, asking them pertinent questions about how it might affect them, as well as whether they could get any use out of it. Because barging ahead with a product without considering its social consequences is irresponsible. Even—dare we say it?—evil.
Thankfully, our initial conversations proved overwhelmingly positive. Our friends in the recruiting industry all felt that RecruitBot had the potential to improve their daily lives, especially because it addressed one of the key pain points of their jobs: the slow pace of the screening process. (It’s not just our associates who consider this a problem—any list of the worst aspects of recruiting inevitably includes it.)
Screening is a mind-numbing process, even at the best of times. Recruiters have to look over thousands of resumes for a particularly in-demand job, and even if some recruiters can review an entire resume in 5-20 seconds, it’s still a days-long job. For every opening. In every position. In every company.
RecruitBot eliminates this drudgery, because its proprietary AI-based algorithms allow it to evaluate and rank thousands of resumes instantly. That alone potentially saves days of time for talent acquisition experts, and those days saved will let recruiters focus even more on the part of the job they love most: interacting with people.
After all, that’s the most important part of the job, and it’s something that can never be done by a computer.
