Hung Lee on AI & The Future of Talent Acquisition

The AI revolution is set to impact every industry, and recruitment isn’t exempt. Utilising AI gives Talent Managers to opportunity to gain back vital time in the hiring process. LinkedIn’s recent survey found that 62% of talent professionals were optimistic about AI’s impact on recruitment, with the main efficiency gains seen in writing job descriptions and automating mundane tasks so you can focus on more fulfilling work.

With the growth of AI tools in the market, Talent Managers need to keep up with their competitors and adopt these tools with the rest of the market. However, only 27% of talent professionals reported using or experimenting with generative AI, and in the UK that was even lower at 6%. Mercer’s 2024 report listed the top barriers to using AI tools were a lack of system integrations and a lack of understanding about the efficacy of tools available.

However, we should do so cautiously and consider the downsides and ethical repercussions of utilising AI in such a people-led function.

We’ve teamed up with Hung Lee, curator of Recruiting Brainfood, the community and weekly newsletter for 30,000 talent professionals worldwide. We’ve quizzed Hung on the future of AI in talent acquisition and the steps Talent Managers should be taking to keep up with the AI revolution.

In this Q&A, we cover:

• The most exciting innovations and implications of AI in talent acquisition

• The challenges and moral considerations of utilising AI in hiring

• Actionable steps for Talent Managers to prepare for the changes from AI

"Considering the rapid advancements in artificial intelligence, which recent innovations in talent acquisition excite you the most?”

GenAI has had a huge impact on recruitment technology. It's no exaggeration to say that product roadmaps across the vendor landscape were changed when Open AI released the application which broke AI into the mainstream, ChatGPT.

The most exciting stuff for recruiters is paradoxically at the most mundane parts of the workflow - interview note-taking, interview scheduling, candidate updates and so on. We're seeing technologies in these areas really mature to the point where we can confidently predict that they will make manual tasks redundant post-implementation.

Which one will most significantly reshape the future of hiring? Probably AI in CRM. We might finally be able to really reactivate the candidates we collect but never manage to keep from going dormant.

"What are some of the main concerns companies should be aware of when heavily integrating AI into their recruitment processes?"

Responsible companies already understand that untrammelled use of AI in recruitment might have negative consequences.

We know about bias in the training data, how attempts to hard code mitigations end up producing equally biased outputs and how AI might learn to become more biased through its interaction with biased human users.

It is extremely difficult to navigate and for practical reasons, it is probably a good thing that governments are rolling out legislation to govern and direct our use of AI. Whether we agree or not on those rulings becomes moot, as we must stay in compliance once they have been made. This will make it easier for users to put guidelines in place for the usage of AI and in the procurement of products with an AI component

"What are the critical moral considerations talent managers need to address when implementing AI technologies in their processes?"

We know from ethnography that there are very few universal values which translate across all individuals, companies, countries and cultures. Perhaps one of the few is a sense of fairness which seems inherent in all social creatures - we all seem to believe that everyone should be treated fairly and are outraged when this doesn't occur. We should and hopefully will apply this as the primary guiding principle when implementing AI in our hiring process. Are we giving everyone a fair shot at the job?

"How do you see AI being used effectively to promote diversity and inclusion within talent acquisition processes? What can talent managers do now with AI to help improve D&I?

AI can be a plus or minus when it comes to D&I.

We can argue that it is already non-inclusive, given that almost all the key producers of LLM's and their applications are concentrated in a small part of the world. We are all using US products, made by US companies, which are governed by US laws. It is also trained mainly on US data - Common Crawl is mostly American, most of the Internet is American and of course mainly in English.

Hence it is difficult to argue that we can ever hope to have a bias-free application layer. We should support NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang's idea of the 'sovereign AI' where each country must create their AI. By extension, this also means companies, groups and individuals should likewise move to create sovereign AI which they control and manage.

I didn't answer the question but we need to contextualise where AI sits in the bias debate

"How do you envision the role of AI and new technologies evolving in the realm of talent acquisition over the next few years? What trends or developments should talent managers be preparing for now?"

We can go through bullet points on this

• Sourcing will obviously be automated. In fact, the distinction between searching for information vs getting matched recommendations will be erased as technology improves to such an extent that the distance between input/output effectively disappears for the human user

• Interview Intelligence - the recording, transcribing and data mining of online interviews will become mandatory. The software simply works and will be a huge improvement on an unmonitored human-only experience.

• AI will support/take over job design, especially if it is configured with company objectives in mind. As we move toward 'smart organisations', AI will be able to identify skills/resource needs within the business and begin the assembly of job descriptions based on both internal performance data and external talent intelligence. We can then anticipate AI conducting an automated acquisition process, perhaps also creating a hiring plan and coordinating the human stakeholders into interviews, assessments and pitches.

What should talent managers prepare for? We should be past preparation - we need to take action and aggressively apply AI to those tasks which can predict will be disintermediated by AI and progressively move our time and work to those areas which are AI-insulated - parts of the workflow which cannot be captured diagrammatically, that are not recorded or documented, that are understood but not articulated.

“Recognising all of the above, what are the practical and actionable steps Talent Teams should take right now to stay ahead of the curve”

Consider 'AI enablement' to be a priority task in everyone’s jobs in the department. That means everyone needs to audit their work and separate out the tasks which are AI exposed and take steps to apply AI to them. We then need to expand the scope of those areas which are AI-insulated so that we can offer and add more value to our employers and customers

Thank you so much to Hung Lee for giving us his time and insights on this. If you’re not already one of the 30,000 subscribers to Recruiting Brainfood, sign up here to receive the weekly newsletter.