AI beats Recruiters: Candidates prefer being interviewed by a robot.

Hard to take results of a study, published by the universities of Chicago and Rotterdam. I stumbled across it via a blog post at the Personalmarketing2Null Blog of my good friend and fellow recruiting expert Henner Knabenreich (sorry, only in German language available, but here is the Link to the download of the study paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5395709).

Henner was so friendly to deliver a TL;DR of the outcomes:

• Clear vote for flexibility: 78% of applicants opted for AI, mainly because of its immediate availability, even though they found the interaction less natural.
  

• Significantly better results: AI-led interviews increased job offers by 12% and employee retention after 30 days by 17%.
  

• AI provided more comprehensive data than the recruiter.
  

• The efficiency fallacy: Despite initial time savings, the entire process with AI ultimately took longer because manual review of interviews by recruiters became a new bottleneck.

This is a clear wake-up call for us, fellow recruiters, if we want to avoid being part of the 99% of the roles that will become obsolete as predicted by some scientists.

To be clear: It's not "We or AI", it must be "We with AI". We can deliver something that AI can't: experience. It is easy for AI to learn facts and figures, and to perform some analytics and predictions out of it. But very often, real life does not work like predicted, and here is the thing: the human factor (aka intuition or gut feeling) is sometimes a value in itself. Not explainable, not replaceable. So let's combine the best of both worlds, and we will be part of the irreplaceable 1%. Do you agree?