The traditional job application is outdated and paradigm shift is needed.
This is the headline of a Business Insider article:
This article is only half right. It got the problem right but the solution was completely wrong.
Yes, hiring is broken.
But NO, the AI solutions it suggests are merely using AI to automate the existing dysfunction. You can imagine the end result: magnification of chaos and frustrations, which will end up breaking hiring even more.
What is the solution?
The abolishment of the entire concept of ‘job application’. In other words, a complete paradigm shift.
The traditional job application is an anachronistic and outdated model of the 20th century. It is not fit for purpose in the 3rd decade of the 21st century.
Instead of putting up a job ad and waiting for a flood of CVs to arrive, how about recruiters using LinkedIn as a talent search engine instead?
All job seekers need to do is put up an invisible flag on LinkedIn that they are open to a new role. Then the LinkedIn talent search engine will be used by recruiters to find the ones.
Then take a step even further. Let’s abolish the entire concept of the Google-style keyword search in the talent search engine. Why not unleash the power of AI’s LLM machine learning to ingest everything related to the candidate’s entire career? For example, the candidate’s blogs, LinkedIn posts, design portfolio, wikis, projects, problems they’ve solved, books they’ve written, papers they’ve written, software they’ve built, code they’ve written, mentions in media, technical books they’ve reviewed, etc. This can be done if there is a way for candidates to connect everything related to their entire career to LinkedIn’s super AI learning bot.
Then instead of doing a traditional Google-style keyword search, use Perplexity-style AI-powered Q&A to find the candidates. For example,
Find me a candidate who can write C code compiled for the TZ254 mainframe processor solving the Ricardian Equations for use in genetic algorithms to find the best match in elephant DNAs.(I’m making up the jargon in this example). Then this AI search engine will trawl through its trained AI models to find that obscure candidate.
Also, as the candidate progresses through his/her career, the AI bot will get to learn new things about the candidate, therefore always having the most up-to-date information. In contrast, the mountains of CVs that recruiters collect in their database will get out of date within years as the candidate progresses in his/her career.
LinkedIn has the potential to overturn the outdated model of CVs and cover letters. This outdated model belongs to the anachronistic past. LinkedIn can disrupt the entire business model of SEEK, Indeed and the recruiting industry.