As all 7 of my followers know, I do have a bit of a thing for the movie Predator. Judge away, I don’t care.

If there is anyone reading this who hasn’t seen Predator, stop reading now, unfollow me, remove our LinkedIn connection, we cannot be friends. For everyone else of sane and rational mind, let me take you to the scene where Billy is starting to figure out that something they didn’t really understand was likely to cause some serious damage:

“Billy, you know something, what is it?”

“I’m scared Poncho”

“Bullshit! You ain’t afraid of no man!”

“There’s something out there waiting for us and it ain’t no man…(dramatic pause)… we’re all gonna die”

Literal chills right now…

So, whilst I could just leave it there and allow the drama of that scene to sink in, I’ll expand on why it’s relevant to recruitment:

• Technology exists to tell you whether you need to recruit or not.
• Technology exists to identify, profile and engage candidate targets to recruit.
• Technology exists to create all the visual and written content to personalise content based on profiling.
• Technology exists to engage in dialogue with candidates, answer queries, generate engagement.
• Technology exists to automate the entirety of the screening/selection process.
• Technology exists to automate large parts of the interviewing process. It can even tell you what to say based on what a candidate has said to you.
• Technology exists to automate the assessment process.
• Technology exists to score and rank performance within a recruitment process.
• Technology exists to take a 30-second voice recording of you and provide a psychometric breakdown of your personality traits.
• Technology exists to deliver all comms to successful and unsuccessful candidates.

If you went to the (current) extreme, you could build a recruitment infrastructure in which humans only need to design and build your system, train humans on those systems, and design and embed your recruitment strategy into said system. The good news is companies are building technology to automate software development, and tech that automates systems training already exists. If tech is smart enough to build itself, it can build a recruitment strategy for sure.

30 years ago, no one had a mobile phone and if they did, they needed a backpack to carry it in. Today there are more mobile phones in use in the UK than there are people. So when the cynics say there’s no chance the future will be this extreme, I’ll refer you to my son who saw a picture of a landline telephone recently and asked me what it was. Now admittedly, my son is a moron but the point is still valid…

The mantra is that Innovation drives advancement. But with advancement comes winners and losers. I’ll give you an example. The fight against disease. Few would argue beating life-threatening diseases isn’t a good thing. But governments around the world have a looming pension crisis because people are living longer and pension pots aren’t big enough. So, either pensioners get less (bad), taxpayers pay more (not great), or we need more taxpayers through increasing working-age population size in a world struggling with over-population (definitely not ideal). As I say, advancement has winners and losers, and tech innovation will present exactly the same winners and losers scenario.

I asked Google’s AI tool Bard a question; “Are humans necessary?”

“Whether or not humans are necessary is a complex question with no easy answer. It depends on how you define “necessary” and what you value. If we define “necessary” as meaning “essential to survival,” then humans are not strictly necessary. AI and robotics could theoretically automate all of the tasks that humans currently perform, and even develop new ways to produce food and energy. However, even if humans were no longer necessary for survival, they could still be valuable for other reasons.”

Now I have chills for an entirely different reason.

Business leaders are investing huge sums in technology development to replace humans and maximise profits. It’ll have massive repercussions for recruitment. Less recruitment to do for sure. Way less recruiter to do the recruitment still left to do. I was at an AI event recently where two global Tech megabrands were very careful to say that their AI developments weren’t going to displace humans, rather give humans more time to do other stuff. Other stuff they couldn’t define. It was almost as if they’d been told not to mention the massive elephant stampeding around the room that no-one else was smart enough to see…

I am not against advancement at all. But this advancement is different. A recent survey of 2,700 of the leading AI scientists globally gave a 5% chance that generative AI would lead to the extinction of the human race. The last seismic and fundamental shift in the recruiting world was LinkedIn. Now, many times using LinkedIn I have wished certain people an untimely end, but not everyone.

To those people investing, innovating, advancing I’d say this – be careful how far you go down that path. If you have young children, they currently have no idea what they are valuable for. They have to learn what their value is through being treated as valuable. The Predator was invisible to the naked eye, camouflaged in plain sight, until he came up right beside you and chopped you in two. When your child grows and they perceive no value in themselves because you couldn’t figure out what job they’d do whilst the machines were doing everything humans used to, your money won’t do you any good then. That won’t help your children have purpose.

AI is being developed for two reasons. Some humans are testing the boundaries, as some humans always have. Other humans, already very wealthy humans, are doing it to get even wealthier. Depressingly, this is also no surprise.

And to the recruiters trying to answer the question the tech megabrands won’t, to figure out what other “reasons they may be valuable” for, I asked Bard to list the professions recruiters could have if they were replaced by AI. Without a hint of irony, Bard suggested becoming a career counsellor.

Billy was right. We’re all going to die…