Recruiters - AI Made Recruiting Better Or Just Bigger

Did you see that Bill Gates published a 6,000-word essay this week arguing AI needs real limits, that it'll be either the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice? He's calling for jobs deliberately reserved for humans, and for taxing automation the way you'd pay payroll tax on an employee. Reading it, I kept thinking: I've seen this movie. When recruiting was automated years ago. Over a decade ago. We know that story. The efficiency was real. Screening 500 applications went from a week to an afternoon. Nobody oversold that part. It worked. But the cost landed on the candidate. Resumes disappearing into a void. Qualified people filtered out because a parser couldn't read their formatting. Applicants reverse-engineering keywords instead of describing their actual work. The employer got the savings. Somebody else absorbed the damage. Then the failures showed up. Amazon scrapped a screening tool that had taught itself to penalize resumes containing certain words. Not because anyone programmed that, because it learned from a decade of who'd been hired before. Then employers automated screening, so candidates automated applying, so volume exploded, so employers needed more automation. Everybody working harder to end up exactly where they started. And the oversight arrived roughly fifteen years late. NYC now requires bias audits of automated hiring tools. Fifteen years after deployment. That's the pattern. Not "the robots took the jobs." Something more boring and harder to fix: Deploy fast. Measure the savings. Push the cost onto whoever has the least power in the transaction. Discover the damage years later. Regulate a decade after that. Which is precisely what Gates is warning about. I'm not saying don't automate. I've posted showing you how. I'm saying we have a case study, and the lesson isn't about job counts. It's this: ask who's absorbing the cost of your efficiency. If the answer isn't you, find out who it is. Because in recruiting, I would argue that even though we have the automation, the recruiting processes are broken. I'd like to hear from you. If you work in recruiting, did the tech make the job better, or just bigger? I genuinely don't think there's one answer. Something we should be talking about. Part of a series on real AI use at work. Including the uncomfortable parts.