For a stretch of one of our careers, we traveled every week. Monday to Thursday, sometimes Friday. Occasionally more than one destination in a single week. We got to know airports the way most people know their commute. Which terminals at each airport have the best dining options. The quiet spots where you can work during a long connection. If you go left or right when the security line forks.
Sometime in those years we were traveling, CLEAR (essentially a paid fast pass system for airport security) showed up. At first we didn’t understand the value-add of CLEAR given that TSA PreCheck existed. But over time, as more and more flyers signed up for TSA PreCheck, it became slower and more unpredictable. More travelers were willing to pay for a better way through. CLEAR offered an alternative to a line that had gotten crowded.
We’ve been thinking about this lately in the context of hiring and if AI has made hiring easier.
For most companies, especially small and medium ones, hiring comes down to applications. You post a role, applications come in, and you work with what shows up. And there was a time where getting applications at all was the hard part. You posted a job ad in the paper, you waited, and you hoped. In this era recruitment firms earned their keep by knowing where to post, how to word it, and how to actually get a stack of applicants in front of an employer. The bottleneck was supply.
Then online job boards showed up and the bottleneck moved. Suddenly companies could source their own candidates without much trouble. And for a while, the signal held up reasonably well. Applying to a job still took at least a little effort, which meant candidates mostly applied to things that were plausibly a fit. The volume went up, but the noise floor only rose modestly.
Now we have AI. And the signal is mostly gone.
Applying to a job now takes a candidate very little time. Resumes are auto-tailored. Cover letters write themselves. And in a post-COVID world where people apply from anywhere, despite writing “IN-PERSON, JANESVILLE, WI” in all caps at the top of the posting you still get a pile of applications from people three time zones away who will never set foot in Janesville. The effort that used to act as a natural filter is gone. What’s left is a flood of applications that all look fine and tell you very little.
Here’s the heuristic we’d offer if you want to know whether your AI-assisted hiring process is actually working: are you talking to more qualified candidates than you were before? In our experience, most companies aren’t saying yes. The volume is up. The quality of the conversations is not.
We actually are a bit bullish on what this means for us. Candidates are increasingly getting frustrated with impersonal application processes where they don’t hear back. And companies are looking for more signal and less noise. This is where we introduce the hard working, external recruitment agency that proactively goes and finds qualified candidates. But sourcing is real work (shout out to our recruitment team), and the tools that are supposed to make it easier do exist but take a real lift to learn and even more time to learn well.
Which brings us back to CLEAR. When the general line gets bad enough, people start looking for a better way through. We think hiring is heading the same direction. More noise is not the same as more signal. And right now, there is a lot of noise.
Until next time,
Your Spherion WI & Northern IL team