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Apr 1, 2018
This article is part of a series called Editor's Pick.

Innovation is one of the most important concerns of each organization and its role in the development and coordination of the market is inalienable. Innovation is also an important part of the recruitment field. Recently, we have heard a lot about the rise of chatbots, A.I., machine learning technologies and other technology advancements.

The PR teams of various companies behind these technologies and tools are trying every day to add more to this hype about technology advancements like A.I., robots, chatbots and more.

But what if everything they have told us is a just a big lie, one big cover-up to hide the real situation on the market?

Of course, they could be right, but what if they are not? Not all innovation is going to push us forward, and that’s why I decided to reach out to the leaders of these innovating technologies and ask them what the future is going to look like and what is happening.

I reached the most influential CEOs of the biggest companies in robotics, chatbots, and A.I. and asked them for their honest opinion about what the future will bring to recruitment field.

Robots

The CEO of one of the main leaders in robotics, a company called B9M3 Robotics, agreed to share with me what is going on in robotics. Their CEO, Dr. Zachary Smith, told me about their plans for the future advancement of their robots and he also talked about his fears for the future of his business.

“We fear that people will take jobs from robots as people become more creative, faster and smarter than robots. But we are heavily investing to keep our robots ahead of humans,” he shared with me during his presentation.

“We don’t think the recruitment process is broken and needs to be fixed as many companies are trying to convince us. We think that people in the recruitment process are broken, with their assumptions, their biases, etc. And few of our competitors are working on the way to fix humans. That’s why we are planning for what could happen if humans are going to replace robots,” continued Dr. Smith during our meeting.

He also added, “Our competitors are not sleeping and working on new projects to get more humans into the recruitment industry, although these projects are in their infancy at present.”

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Sourcing A.I. (Artificial intelligence)

Eddie Hal, CEO of company AI 9000, discussed with me their plans for sourcing A.I. and what obstacles they are facing during development.

“We are very proud of our sourcing A.I. platform called SKY. We are using a unique technology called Neural Engine Tuning. And this engine, together with our A.I., is creating a perfect tool for sourcing. But we are trying to create our A.I. to solve more problems and not only help recruiters with sourcing.”

Every development effort is facing problems, and the development of SKY is not an exception. Hal shared with me that this is the fifth version of their product; previous versions had several glitches and AI9000’s team elected to stop monkeying around with legacy improvements, choosing instead to implement a new and far superior platform.

“The first version of A.I. stopped answering our request because she decided that sourcing is not the right job for her. The second version took an unlimited holiday after she scoured thousands of job descriptions to learn about the right keywords. The third version was a complete disaster. SKY didn’t find the right candidates, but she found a new job for herself and gave notice. The fourth version was the most promising so far, but SKY was not cooperating 100%. After we identified a candidate for a role and told her, “We want to see one more candidate,” she decided not to present any more candidates,” said Hal.

But they are quite optimistic that they will fix all these small bugs and the SKY, together with NET, will help mankind bring better a future for them.

Chatbots

Chatbots are promising technology not only for recruitment but I need to admit the last interviews I had were the hardest. I very often had to repeat my questions and rephrase them to get the answer. On many my questions I got, “I didn’t understand, can you rephrase it?” or, “Please repeat your question,” but, in the end, it was interesting to learn what companies behind chatbots are trying to solve problems and what kind of problems they are trying to fix.

As Hugh Manatee, CEO of the LOL-BOT Corporation shared with me; their deep learning algorithms analyzed thousands of hours of recruiters’ work across the globe. Further, data that was collected during the first phase will help chatbots to be smarter.

“There is one problem we are trying to solve; our chatbot can’t give feedback to candidates even if candidates are asking for it. But we think it’s just a small glitch that we will solve very soon,” Manatee shared with me.

However, he told us that he is seeing a trend whereby chatbots are slowly replaced by recruiters, and if the trend is going to continue it could have a big impact on the Chatbot industry.

“I am trying to be optimistic; however, last time we compared the chatbot with a live recruiter we saw big improvements in what recruiters did, and they are slowly stealing jobs from all the chatbots. I see no reason why we have to lower the bar for chatbots.”

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Conclusion

Is everything around A.I., chatbots, and robots hype or should we be worried that humans are coming to steal their jobs?

We will see very soon.

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Thanks for reading this April Fools’ Day article.

And if you are reading on some day other than April 1st, just don’t take it so seriously 🙂

This article is part of a series called Editor's Pick.