Using AI to select the best candidates, many companies dream of it. But the dream has partly come true. Because more and more large groups that receive mountains of CVs, in particular La Poste or the insurance company Generali, are using software capable of first skimming the list of applications.
Some of these smart software, called “chatbots” and able to interact with usersare even used to get candidates through pre-job interviews.
Clear, it’s not a human being asking you if you’re motivated or what your qualities and faults are, it’s an AI. Recruiters cite a saving of time and money and an opportunity to devote themselves to more stimulating tasks than sorting CVs, but sometimes there are hiccups.
“I had ten seconds to think about my answer”
When Anna decides to apply to become a sales consultant in a large chain of cosmetics stores, she typically sends her CV and cover letter via their website. The 20-year-old young woman, who has already had several face-to-face interviews, receives an invitation by email to take a pre-interview not with a human being, but with a “chatbot”.
This is an interview where the candidate films himself at home. Questions are displayed in writing on the candidate’s computer screen, while a stopwatch is ticking : “It was a countdown, I had ten seconds to think about my answer and once the ten seconds were up my camera would go off and I had thirty seconds to respond.”
“You can’t be natural!”
In all, five minutes of interview for six questions “basic and unsurprising” according to Anna, except one. The young woman is almost amused, thinking about it: “One of the questions was ‘what’s your favorite product from the store?’, it stuck with me!” The one who is now a hostess for an agency does not know if her answers have been viewed by a recruiter or analyzed by a robot because she did not get any feedback on her performance.
The young woman simply received an email telling her that her application had not been accepted. Not really a surprise for the young woman, rather jovial and sociable, but who felt destabilized by the recruitment process : “It’s disturbing, I was trying to look normal and natural, but you can’t be natural, you see the clock ticking, it’s embarrassing!” Despite her obvious interpersonal skills, the candidate literally melted away.
The limits of interviews conducted by an AI
“The idea invoked by recruiters is to carry out an initial screening to receive for interviews only the applications that correspond precisely to what they are looking for, but the method has its limits“explains Gilles Gateau, general manager of the Association for the employment of Executives (Apec).
“If you only retain candidates via your AI whose CVs include the name of a school X or a skill Y”explains Gilles Gateau, “you leave on the edge those who do not have a perfect command of French spelling but who have an exceptional profile or experience! That’s whywe will have to be vigilant on these issues in the future.”
Déjà,
in a study published in 2020, Apec, responsible for advising small and medium-sized companies in their recruitment methods, issued a warning : artificial intelligence should only be a complementary tool to carry out the most tedious tasks but it can in no way be considered infallible.
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