If you’re old enough to remember the early 2000s, as the internet really began to take hold and dot coms were still in the bubble and not the bust phase, then the fascination with AI might be a bit familiar. (If you are too young, find a YouTube clip of Today show hosts Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel trying to understand email. The @ sign was particularly perplexing for them.) One thing that may have faded from memory now is that this was a relatively slow adoption from analog life. Yes, by the 1990s, Amazon was an online bookstore. However, B. Dalton, a huge bookseller with hundreds of stores, remained relatively competitive well into the first decade of this century.
In other words, while excitement ran wild about the internet, email, online shopping and early chat rooms, actual use ran alongside our analog ways. We kept putting stamps on envelopes, going to the mall, and talking on the telephone (or in person!). We used email for low-risk activity or sent a confirmation by post. Online commerce for purchases of books was a low-investment, low-risk foray into the new world long before we managed our stock portfolios via touch screens.
It’s been a fast 25 years into the digital era. But full adoption was slower than you might remember.
AI deserves the same excitement (check – we are there.). But it also requires a similar second-tier implementation into our lives until it’s stabilized enough for first-line decision making. When I hear people discuss hiring and AI, it feels as risky as letting Couric and Gumbel manage the Today Show inbox 25 years ago. Human resources is exactly that – it’s the understanding and assessment of people as assets. In most cases the most valuable assets. And often amongst the most expensive. And the most impactful.
Hiring is part science, part art. It requires both deep experience and a leap of faith. Humans are irrational and the choices about which ones we invite into our boardrooms, our showrooms, our factory floors require a species-specific level of insight. We need to both be able to connect with our colleagues in order to be productive, collaborate and reinforce our shared corporate culture and values. Yet we also must fight the biases and tribalism inherent in human decision-making.
Hiring always requires a compromise. Across skill set and experience, personality and budget, timelines and circumstances, something has to give. Even if AI were to help you strike that balance, it needs an enormous understanding of the consequences of each choice. Nearly every hire will have some small question marks. Or some gaps we intend to accommodate or train up. That is a heck of a prompt for ChatGPT. (Truth be told, it’s a heck of an ask for a human.)
AI is only as good as the prompts we give it. And the prompts are only as good as the humans who write them.
Most importantly, perhaps, is that humans are, for now, the most reliable guardrails on AI that we have. We are the only check on each other when it comes to hiring decisions. Someone vets resumes, another does a first-round interview. Others weigh in on the shortlist. But the more we let AI influence the humans we choose, the more we have outsourced our ability to anticipate the decisions that person will make (including how they use AI).
How many times has someone had a great resume and been utterly disappointing in an interview? Or we take an informational interview with someone who is “clearly not the right hire” and they blow us away with other competencies we didn’t know we needed. AI cannot see potential or opportunity that isn’t written down. It rarely questions itself when sent down a path (and most of us are still learning to stop it from giving us perfectly worded renditions of bad ideas).
AI can help us with large amounts of data. But it shouldn’t drive the large decisions.
That doesn’t mean AI has no place in hiring. It can help us write job descriptions, it can cull existing job postings for skill sets and industry terms. It can certainly help with compensation baselines and compliance protocols. As long as the people who oversee its decisions are found, vetted and hired by… other people. Our deeply flawed, change-resistant, consistently inconsistent, emotionally-driven selves are a terrible burden of human being, literally. But, at this stage anyway, only we can manage those same qualities in others. Takes one to know one.
What drives people at work is as much about our own dreams and identities and personal narratives, as it is our skill sets and titles. Hiring and managing and developing people is far more art than science. Sometimes the less rational decision is the right one. Context is everything. Someday, maybe, we will be in awe that humans used to hire using their brains the way that humans used to build bridges with their hands.
But let’s keep our heads in the game, for now.