I was going through my email recently, and I saw some data pulled from Greenhouse showing that the number of applications has basically doubled per job opening in the past year. At first glance, you would believe, “Oh, the economy isn’t doing great; that’s probably the reason.” But in reality, unemployment is still relatively low. So, it is a bit harder to find a job, but historically, there has been pretty low unemployment.

My next feeling is that AI and candidates’ ability to use AI to apply for jobs are more likely the culprits and the Greenhouse team confirmed that. They are seeing candidates apply to many jobs within seconds, which isn’t humanly possible. Also, candidates are using AI tools to match their resumes to the job description, so our matching technology is also struggling to differentiate candidates.

All of this leads me to one simple conclusion.

If AI writes resumes for our jobs and matches jobs to our candidates, we are going to end up with way more candidates who look amazing but are most likely not that amazing. The only way we’ll find this out is to do an amazing job interviewing!

Guess what?!

Most of us SUCK at interviewing! I mean, not you/us/I; we are recruiting professionals, and we are amazing at interviewing! Right?! Right? Right…

It’s our hiring managers who will need the most help.

This is why I believe Interview Intelligence Technology, like Pillar (FYI—I’m an advisor and investor in Pillar—I think they’re amazing technology) and BrightHire, will be the type of HR Technology that takes off in 2025 and 2026. Right now, about 10% of organizations are using AI-built interview technology, but we’ll begin to see that percentage skyrocket.

Our reality in Talent Acquisition is this:

• We don’t have the capacity to interview enough candidates now, and it’s getting worse, not better.
• We don’t have the capacity, material, and skill to train our hiring managers to be better at interviewing to the level we need them.
• We need technology to help us be better at making interviews as bias-free as possible for all of those employees we have interviewing candidates.
• We need to be able to track all the data and content created in interviews.

When I start to ask myself what the future of HR and Talent Acquisition looks like in an AI-enabled world, this is one of the things I’ve come up with. We’ll be having way more face-to-face interviews than ever before, and it’s going to be more critical for us to make fewer false-positive hires, not only from a skills standpoint but also from a fit standpoint.