How AI could change the recruiter’s role
As AI takes on routine tasks, recruiters should have more time for decisions that need their judgment.
If we were designing recruiting from scratch today, knowing what AI can and can’t do, would we build anything resembling the system we have now?
I recently joined Anders Sundquist on the Lean In with Anders podcast to explore that question. We discussed how AI could change the work recruiters do and give them greater influence over how hiring happens.
Having the keys doesn’t mean we know how to drive
My son recently received his learner’s permit, and it gave me a useful way to think about this moment.
Talent acquisition has been handed the keys to an extraordinarily powerful new capability. But having the keys isn’t the same as knowing how to drive. We still have to learn how to use it well.
At Dropbox, that learning became part of a new initiative we began early last year.
Our initial instinct was to push for rapid adoption because AI was moving quickly. But urgency can easily feel like a threat. Employees hearing that AI is changing their jobs may feel uncertain about what comes next.
We learned that AI adoption couldn’t be something we did to our recruiting team. Recruiters needed to help design what came next. That meant giving team members room to experiment with their own workflows within clear legal and security guardrails. It also meant being transparent about where we, as leaders, had taken the wrong approach.
Giving recruiters ownership made room for them to explore how AI could help with the problems they encountered in their work.
Making time for candidate conversations
As we examined our recruiting workflows, we considered where AI could improve productivity and where it could improve the quality of the outcome.
Repeatable administrative work is an obvious opportunity. AI can help with coordination and other execution-heavy parts of recruiting. There are also moments in which a person’s judgment can meaningfully change the outcome.
An honest career conversation can help a recruiter understand a candidate’s motivations and concerns. Helping someone evaluate an offer means taking time to discuss a potentially major life decision, including concerns they haven’t yet voiced.
If AI can reduce the time spent on repeatable execution, recruiters should be able to invest more deeply in those interactions.
From filling jobs to helping design them
For most of recruiting’s history, someone handed a recruiter a job, and the recruiter found the best available person to do it. AI gives talent teams an opportunity to engage earlier and ask better questions:
- What is this team trying to accomplish?
- Which parts of the work could AI handle, and what oversight would they need?
- Where will human judgment become more valuable?
- What new capabilities does the team need as a result?
Recruiters could help shape jobs before hiring begins. The role would combine elements of job architecture, workforce strategy, and assessment design. Recruiters would gain greater influence over how work is structured and which capabilities an organization develops.
Looking beyond the résumé
AI is also changing how candidates and employers use résumés.
Candidates can now use AI to tailor résumés to job descriptions, while employers use AI to evaluate those résumés. That can turn the top of the hiring funnel into one system responding to another without either side necessarily learning much about the person involved.
Over time, I expect hiring to place greater emphasis on demonstrated capability. Thoughtfully designed work samples or assessments could help candidates show what they can do rather than relying so heavily on where they went to school or which companies previously employed them.
That possibility excites me because it could help surface talented people who have historically been overlooked.
These changes will take time and require careful design, especially around fairness. We should be willing to question inherited processes rather than preserving them simply because they are familiar.
Where talent leaders can start
Which decisions should recruiters have more time to make as AI takes on routine work? That’s the question I want talent leaders to spend more time on.
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