A Glimpse into the Future: What Will Hiring Look Like in 2030?

This is the first in a series of three articles on the future of work. Like many people, the coronavirus pandemic accelerated my thinking about what work will be like in the future. There are three areas that I am particularly interested in and envisage significant disruption in over the next ten years: hiring, learning and collaborative working.

AIs are already disrupting how organisations search for talent, with keyword searches on LinkedIn and CVs. That’s set to dramatically change over the next ten years as the machines learn and data-driven approaches to hiring become far more prevalent.

Currently hiring managers still rely hugely on gut and rapport. This has well-understood disadvantages, firstly because of the biases we all have in terms of gender, nationality, appearance and so on, and secondly, the tendency to recruit in our own image. For AIs to be successful in hiring, they need to be trained with unbiased data, and the attributes that are valued and required for a job need to be properly understood and designed by a diverse group of people.

The interview remains the favoured assessment mechanism. AIs can start to play a role here. Instead of the standard scenario-based interview questioning, we may be able to use Extended Reality, a combination of augmented, virtual and mixed reality, to merge physical and virtual worlds and put candidates in scenarios that test them. With the use of video, far more analysis can be carried out on data points such as body language, expressions and micro-expressions.

Another area in which processing volumes of data could be used in hiring is in reviewing a candidate’s digital footprint. The other benefit of AI is that it could save a lot of time in the hiring process, potentially picking up on signals early on that indicate a candidate’s likelihood of accepting an offer or withdrawing, and enabling far better feedback loops in terms of performance, retention and long-term outcomes from hiring.

How soon can we expect to see such technology enter the mainstream? It will come, but it will take time. The technology is not yet good enough: image analysis, video sentiment analysis and natural language processing are still evolving. More research is needed to back the efficacy, and the costs involved currently prohibit most companies from prioritising such technology adoption. All of this will change, first slowly and then rapidly.

Do I think that AIs will replace humans entirely in the search for talent? No. What I envisage is that search executives will need to learn how to leverage AIs and work alongside them. Ethics will also have a significant part to play in how far organisations go in using this kind of technology responsibly.