AI: Where Every Solution Is A New Problem

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AI isn’t just wrecking the inbound recruiting process (i.e. job postings & applications.) It’s starting to wreak havoc on outbound recruiting (e.g. good ‘ole headhunting.)

When Jeff Smith and I were putting together Episode 98 of the 10 Minute Talent Rant ("Inbound Recruiting Is Broken"), our colleagues’ had a strange observation: their Boolean searches within LinkedIn Recruiter sometimes stopped working properly.

People who did not have the skills our colleagues were filtering on would occasionally pop up in search results. These are senior recruiters who have done this for years. And they were suddenly wondering if they were losing their minds or forgot how to do Boolean properly.

Then they found the culprit. Within LinkedIn Recruiter (the upgraded package recruiters use that most people will never see), there’s a new feature where AI “enhances” a candidate’s profile with additional details pulled from their uploaded resume. That’s what is supposed to happen, anyway.

Where it sometimes goes haywire:

👉The AI hallucinates and adds details – in some cases entire jobs – that do not exist to the candidate’s profiles. (Note: the profile owner never sees these details. It’s only within LinkedIn Recruiter.)

👉People using the “white text” trick – i.e. keyword stuffing their resume with white text in the headers/footers/blank space, which recruiters can’t see but document scanners can –  are getting injected info profiles even they weren’t added by the candidate specifically.

(The “white text” trick is not a new problem, but an old problem now on steroids.)

AI: where every solution is a new problem.

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