Question
I’d love to hear your take on LinkedIn’s new AI (Artificial Intelligence) assistant for recruiting and hiring.
Nick’s Reply
They call it Artificial for a reason.
And I’ll let Mark Cuban back me up. Asked in a Wired interview about how AI is being used in screening job applicants and changing hiring, Cuban responded, “I think smart puppies are smarter than AI is today or in the near future…and I don’t think that’s going to change for a long time.” Pressed about how long, he said, “Ten years. Because wisdom doesn’t come with text.”
It seems Cuban heard the pitch about AI in human resources (HR), steepled his fingers and said, “I’m out.” If you want a blow-by-blow account of why AI in HR is a scandal that corporate America is carefully ignoring, read investigative journalist Hilke Schellmann’s stunning book, The Algorithm: How AI decides who gets hired, monitored, promoted and fired and why we need to fight back now.
GitHub eats LinkedIn’s breakfast
AI in the service of HR is so pitifully impotent that multi-million-dollar systems to automate recruiting and hiring are easily neutered by free code any job seeker can find on Microsoft’s Github.
Jason Koebler, cofounder of 404 Media, reports that, using Auto_Jobs_Applier_AIHawk he “applied for 17 jobs in an hour on LinkedIn.” Chewing automatically through one job posting after another while Koebler eats his breakfast, AIHawk enters his biographical information and creates custom resumes and cover letters for 2,843 jobs and submits them.
LinkedIn’s AI Hiring Assistant: It’s all in the family
There’s no need to agonize over how to engage the uber-automation of recruiting that drives job seekers to depression and despair. Koebler reports that AIHawk “is actively being used by thousands of people to use AI to automatically apply for jobs on LinkedIn at scale.”
This by itself is all you should need to know to avoid any kind of AI-based recruiting campaign on LinkedIn (or anywhere else) no matter what the company or job is. Code jockeys smarter than you have already exploited the AI’s pathetically fatal weaknesses.
Microsoft, which owns both LinkedIn and GitHub, just announced it has entered the AI agent race with LinkedIn Hiring Assistant — thereby pitting two of its businesses against one another. It’s “all in the family.”
My take is, Microsoft is promoting mutually assured destruction by triggering a ludicrous and very costly escalation of “HR technology” that, as Mark Cuban puts it, isn’t the equal of a smart puppy. For a few years, HR had the upper hand. It deployed the equivalent of an AI dog with a note in its mouth to “recruit.”
But once the code jockeys that live on GitHub figured it out, they sent their own dog with a note in its mouth to meet HR.
“A growing AI battle”: One HR consultant’s fantasy
Josh Bersin, a long-time apologist for HR’s shameless misapplications of technology to “people management,” gleefully eggs on the AI robo-dogs while they tear each other into millions of little digital pieces:
“There is now a growing AI battle between recruiter and candidates. As AI helps recruiters source and screen candidates, the candidates are using AI to ‘power-up’ their resumes. One of our clients told me that almost all their job applicants now submit resumes that look eerily similar to job descriptions. Why? Job candidates are using AI also!
“This means is that tools like LinkedIn Hiring Assistant are more essential than ever. As job seekers tweak their identity and even use AI interview assessments to game interviews, HR has to beef up its tools to better differentiate candidates.”
Translation:
Guys like Bersin make more money when HR and job seekers are encouraged to throw bigger and bigger digital dogs into a fray that no one wins except HR tech firms and HR consultants. (See New Recruiting: Let’s just hire ChatGPT)
Do we really need Mark Cuban to explain that his puppy is smarter than HR’s AI — and will be for at least another 10 years? Does HR really need pundits like Bersin to egg them on to keep spending billions on AI that is, well, Artificial?
Mark Cuban’s puppy
So, what do I think of LinkedIn’s AI Hiring Assistant? I think it’s just more BLAH BLAH BLAH. You’re better off being interviewed by Cuban’s dog.
Corporate boards of directors would do well to take a look at what HR is blowing their company’s money on. If that billion-dollar HR technology worked, code jockeys on GitHub wouldn’t be nuking it in their spare time. It doesn’t help to tell HR and job seekers that they each need to “beef up” their “AI tools” so they can really fake each other out.
Some advice to job seekers: While it may seem cool to “beat the AI” with more AI, consider that this AI war does nothing to get you the insider’s edge on getting hired for the right job at the right company. The notes in those robo-dogs’ mouths are…blank. Go around the barking dogs and learn to talk shop with people who do the work you want to do at the companies where you want to do it. That’s where jobs come from.
Advice to employers: Learn to recruit. That means get off your duff and go out to meet the people that make your industry go ‘round. That’s where talent comes from.
The Intelligence in LinkedIn’s AI Hiring Assistant is Artificial, so can we just make things simple and call it what it is — LinkedIn’s Stupid Hiring Assistant? The only real intelligence I see in this cockup is Mark Cuban’s puppy.
What’s your experience been with AI in your job search? Have you tried AI tools for job seekers? Is your puppy smarter than LinkedIn?
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