Artificial Intelligence and Recruitment. Threat or Opportunity?

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There has been a lot of press coverage over the summer about robots and more generally Artificial Intelligence (AI) taking over the world of work. BBC news has recently run a special feature on it which included an interactive test to check if your job is at risk (Will a robot take your job?).


What is AI and how will it affect recruitment specifically?
Artificial Intelligence is the science of how to make machines that can think for themselves according to Stanford University. Increasingly, machines have been able to learn and improve their own performance to produce results that until recently was only thought possible to obtain using human intelligence and social experience. It is this achievement which has thrust AI as a concept back into the mainstream press, along with all the sensational headlines.

AI as a concept is not new. Computer scientist Alan Turing, famous for breaking the japan phone number library Enigma Code, wrote a paper speculating about a thinking machine in 1950 and the term "artificial intelligence" was coined in 1956 by Prof John McCarthy at a gathering of scientists at the Dartmouth Conference in that year.


Will a robot take over recruitment?
Probably not, according to the research, but it is clear that the answer is much more complicated than that. Roles requiring people to think on their feet and come up with creative and original ideas, or occupations involving tasks that require a high degree of social intelligence and negotiating skills are considerably less at risk from machines.

Recruitment as a profession is therefore not directly at risk but even if recruitment requires skills that AI would find difficult to replicate, other roles may well cease to exist due to automation, so there will be no jobs to recruit for anyway.

In the UK, a report by Deloitte estimated that in the next twenty years low paid, unskilled and repetitive jobs are five times more likely to be taken over by AI algorithms than high skilled, well paid jobs.

Angus Knowles-Cutler, London senior partner at Deloitte, said in the report: “Technological advances are likely to cause a major shift in the UK labour market in the coming decades, creating both challenges and opportunities. Unless these changes coming in the next two decades are fully understood and anticipated by businesses, policy makers and educators, there will be a risk of avoidable unemployment and under-employment. A widening gap between ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ is also a risk as lower skill jobs continue to disappear.”