The Resume Screening Struggle
AI promised to pull signal from the noise, streamlining a difficult and manual process of finding the right person for the right job. Then, AI created a new noise level, requiring both the original fundamentals and AI skills to do the same work.
This is a crisis in HR with the explosion of AI onto the scene: AI is necessary for HR to keep up with AI used by job applicants. In an ideal system, AI for HR should enable recruiters to see behind the scenes of resumes and connect the dots that sort the best candidates from the candidates that do not fit. Technical jobs, where jargon abounds, different frameworks are tossed around, like LangChain, RAG, React, Next.JS, Kafka, it is impossible to maintain both the knowledge of a practitioner and the skills of a recruiter. AI came with the promise to connect departments with candidates better than before.
But, like many technologies, AI has helped solve one problem and created a new one: applications can be tailored to speed through AI screenings, which leaves recruiters needing even more domain knowledge than before. What used to take an hour or two for a candidate to do, such as writing a thoughtful cover letter, or highlighting skills tailored to a job description, takes minutes.
If you want to skip everything else in this article, I hope to leave you at least with this.
Return to office can be a boon to both recruitment and a sense of belonging within a company. Working remote can make the work itself feel transactional with the company I work for. The silos are more real and tangible. Being more active in finding those who will help is a great way to break down that siloed feeling in an instant. A person with whom you might only have had a fleeting chain of text through Teams or Slack is now talking to you and recognizing you for more than just what meets a deadline.
And that gives me some hope about how AI might bring back a more human touch to our work. The ever present connectivity through text can now be supplemented or even replaced with AI. Just like hand written notes still carry more meaning than an email, despite having the same words, a coffee and a conversation will hold more value than it did before. We not only see the value of it, we know the value because we can feel its absence in a way we couldn’t before.
Screening the screened resumes: My experience as a practitioner
As the person on the receiving end of recruitment, doing the final resume screening and conducting interviews, recruiters are the invisible hand of a well functioning department. The right person, at the right time, can transform a department. Too many candidates, who do not meet our needs, and interviewing becomes a drain both in time allocation and psychologically. Saying no to someone I have spent the past hour getting to know, is heartbreaking.
I’ve conducted interviews, both screening and technical interviews, for 6 years now as a practitioner of data science. In the past two years, what was a “Top 5, find the right fit” process has become an exception instead of a norm.
In the past 2 years, I have conducted over 100 screening and technical interviews. I’ve seen far more resumes in trying to get to that screening round. These resumes have been prescreened already by recruiters, internal or external, so the original pool is even broader. I have heard the same problems in all of my conversations with recruiters, and seen the same weariness. Recruiting quotas are high, and the noise levels to cut through are even higher.
The promise of AI for recruitment can’t come soon enough, but those promises often don’t pan out.
Upskilling is only a partial solution - Focus on old school fundamentals and vocabulary
One answer, and it is a common one, is to upskill: learn the domain you are recruiting for. It is still true, whether today or five years ago, that understanding what goes on behind the scenes helps find better candidates. However, it takes time to learn and time to leverage it. A 10 hour training course that is taken to fulfill mandatory continuing education only gets you 10 hours into a complex domain composed of PhDs who are even overwhelmed with the speed of new developments. “AI can make mistakes, make sure to review its answers” is a true statement, but if the number of resumes to review has doubled, your work has still doubled. Only this time, it takes an expert to weed through the subtle signs of truth vs AI.
Technologies involved have also exploded to the point that even as a practitioner I can barely keep up. Words that meant one thing last year, such as RAG, means something different this year. Plus, “agent” and “agentic” are so poorly defined in the industry, it’s both a requirement for a position and meaningless at the same time. Even the timing of claims on resumes is important. Certain terms and concepts only existed after a specific development in the industry. I have reviewed countless resumes that claim experience before it was possible to do so.
“How we do things has changed, what we do has not” is a phrase people around me have heard too many times from me. What products are built, and how they’re built, has changed, such as needing RAG skills. But, why something is built, and why it improves a product, is still a fundamental problem solving skill.
When looking for courses that your company provides, or are searching for ones on the internet, ask these two things of the course:
Will it help me understand what these words mean? (Vocabulary)
Will it help me understand why these skills matter? (Fundamentals)
Return to Office is an opportunity for Recruitment Liaisons
Professional recommendations will become more important as AI and return to office takes hold. Tapping into the local community, where the experts in your company are your liaisons in the field, will be vital. This, of course, requires finding the people-person that is not only willing, but enthusiastic about mingling. And they have to be comfortable with pitching their company, while also knowing having visibility beyond just their department.
Previously, a liaison might have only interviewed candidates for just their department, but they know that Amy in IT needs a certain person. Their view of people they meet isn’t just “I am looking for this person for my needs”, it’s “I understand my colleagues needs, and I think this person might just fit them.” Being in an office 3 days or more a week has brought back casual socialization. The communication between people is not limited to task requests or asking for a favor, it is an organic, human, interaction.
The intuitive assessment of a person to move forward to the next step is valuable here as well. The difference is that you’re not recruiting for a department, you’re recruiting for yourself and colleagues. You’re not parsing their technical proficiency in their field. And it’s not a one way relationship. Being recognized for something other than one’s technical skills is rewarding. The people who love to share, want to share, and will bring you along with them in an exchange of experiences.
The hardest part of most things is not that people don’t want to help. It is that they don’t know how to help.
Helping Your Liaisons Help
These liaisons need help, and the requirement for local talent will help you help them in ways that remote work made difficult to impossible.
They way they can help you is by being boots on the ground in professional groups. The way you can help them is to simplify things down to simple choices that can be planned around. Provide them a calendar of events in the area. Very high chances they haven’t even heard of some of them and will love to connect with other people in their discipline.
Here in Richmond, we have AI Ready RVA. A growing organization that has cohort groups for different departments, like product, veterans, and, yes, HR. While going to groups like this will help you find talent, if you go to a group of developers, I bet you’ll feel like you stick out like a sore thumb and feel disconnected. They will be talking in the language of their discipline, and often tired from work and don’t want to catch you up on their discussion.
Plus, you’re working 2, 3, even 4 hours after work just for an angle to save time at work. If there’s another recruiter there, it’s more likely that you’ll have drinks afterward with them and discuss how exhausting it is to be there (no shame, I would).
Those colleagues who want to be there, and are in their element, will have drinks afterwards with the person who’s gotten their attention. Sorting whose skills would fit and whose wouldn’t is part of them simply finding people they like talking to.
Concrete Takeaways
First, find people who enjoy sharing their knowledge. Many larger companies have internal conferences for their technical people to share and present. These are people who already like talking, enjoy sharing, and you can see first hand how strong their people skills are. If they are running a workshop, even better than a presentation. Set up a meeting with them to learn more.
Other times, there are internal groups that present and share insights that they’re enthusiastic to share. It can be really hard to find those groups. The ones I was a part of only happened because of word of mouth. The best way is to ask the people doing the interviews and have a genuine curiosity. Many interesting things are happening that are invisible just outside of the departments that build and run their slice of the company.
Be genuine in your approach, and give yourself permission to be curious about something you may know almost nothing about. Do watch their presentation, and ask about it. If you’re worried about their reaction to a dumb question, they’re not the right person to ask for help from.
Second, both simple and difficult (of course), find what networks exist in your geographic area. There are an increasing number of professional networks that are growing precisely because of return to work. People looking for jobs are looking for the human touch and the expert eye. But, finding these can be time consuming. For a professional like myself, it is one of those small burdens that feels big to start. Extroverted introverts like myself enjoy going out every time we do it, but it’s like exercising: we remember that we love doing it after doing it, but god help us if it’s all up to us to will ourselves out the door.
Find the organizations in your area
Have a list of the events
Know the referral bonus
Many companies have this. For myself, going to an event because there’s financial incentive is icky.
Helping a recruiter who helps me and coworkers I like, with a little money to boot, well, that’ll give me a little motivation to not skip the event in order to watch the latest episode of The Pitt instead.
When following up, ask them about the event and just the event. How did they like it? What did they find interesting? Is it actually in their wheel house? Would they recommend it?
If they found someone, they’ll let you know.
While there is a transactional element, your relationship with your liaisons can’t be transactional in nature. Though, in my experiences with recruiters, I have no doubt that it will ever be just transactional.
James
