Kamal Ghorui
An Indian-origin 20-year-old third-year business student, Bhuvana Chilukuri, said artificial intelligence-driven recruitment made job hunting feel impersonal and harsh as she applied for more than 100 jobs and was rejected for every one ahead of graduating from Queen Mary University in London this summer.“It’s robotic. It’s brutal,” Bhuvana Chilukuri told BBC and added, “There are moments where I applied and I got a rejection less than two minutes later, which is really horrible.”She said she believed very few, if any, of her applications were seen by a human as firms increasingly used AI to hire new staff.“The first step is AI screening your CV. You can get rejected pretty quickly at that stage. Then the next process would maybe be an AI video interview,” Bhuvana said.Despite several work experience and internship stints, she said she failed to line up a job for after graduation. She said her frustration was shared by many people of her age, for whom the first rung on the career ladder seemed out of reach.Job vacancies almost halved since the post-pandemic peak, while higher costs for employers and strengthened rights for new hires made firms more reluctant to recruit. When firms did recruit, they increasingly turned to AI to help sift through the vast volume of applications. Some 89% of UK recruiters said they planned to use more AI in the hiring process this year, according to recent data from Linked In.Bhuvana said this meant logging on to recruitment portals that asked questions before she video recorded her answers while looking at her own reflection.“I do tend to feel like a robot, because you’re just seeing yourself on screen, and answering questions for almost 20 minutes. You become sort of monotone. You don’t speak to anyone, and it takes away your personality. It’s quite sad,” she said.Denis Machuel, CEO of Adecco Group, said the AI interview process could be demoralising. Adecco Group used AI in candidate pre-screening.“People need to send, on average, 200 applications to get a job offer,” said Denis Machuel CEO of Adecco Group, which uses AI in candidate pre-screening.“What AI brings is scale. Before, you would reach out to 50 people, and out of that you will take one, so you will have 49 people frustrated. Now, if you reach out to 500 candidates, you create 499 people frustrated,” he said.Bhuvana said she understood why companies used AI in recruitment and why some candidates fought back by using it themselves.“They’re getting floods of applications. So I don’t blame them. But it’s coming to a point where students are becoming lazy. They’re like ‘if you’re going to screen with AI, I’m going to apply with AI. And they use AI to write their CVs. I don’t blame them either. Everyone’s trying to figure it out,” she said.Law firm Mishcon de Reya said it turned to AI after it received 5,000 applications for 35 roles in its last round of hiring.“We’ve got more legal graduates, we’ve got fewer graduate roles, and we’ve got more candidates using AI to write more applications,” said Tom Wickstead, early careers manager at the company.“So for us as an employer, we’ve got this explosion of applications, and it’s harder to tell the difference between those applications,” he said.Wickstead said the firm trialled an AI chatbot developed by graduate careers advisors Bright Network that screened candidates at early stages and asked a series of questions in real time. He said the tool highlighted parts of an application that might have been written by AI.Wickstead said feedback from candidates so far was positive and that AI recruitment tools could make the process fairer overall.“I just don’t think that any recruitment process is free from bias,” he said. “So what AI has a potential to do is be far more consistent, far more fair than the old process.”He said human recruiters still interviewed candidates later in the process and took the final decision on a hire.“What we’re exploring is whether AI can come up with the same decisions, or even better, more consistent decisions than humans can,” he said.Bhuvana said machines were no match for humans.“I don’t trust the AI, I think I’ll always trust a person. But it’s hard to get the opportunity to see the person,” she said.Machuel said AI and humans needed to work together to get the best outcome for prospective employees and hiring companies.“What needs to happen is to inject the AI smartness at the right moment in the process, so that you compliment the efficiency of AI with the judgement and human touch of people,” he said. “That’s the combination that will break this arms race.”
