Do Candidates Using AI Get an Unfair Advantage?

When you receive a resume (CV) do you immediately think about what role AI has played in its creation?  Probably not.  But you should.  How about the use of any uncontrolled cognitive, situational judgment and asynchronous videos to create short lists?  Your next actions might be influenced by the use of AI, even unconsciously.   

Ever considered that your applicant, if they are smart, will have uploaded your job advert to AI, uploaded their resume to AI, and then asked AI to suggest changes and improvements to the resume to make it look more like the job you’re advertising.  Why wouldn’t you do this?  Having started down that slippery path how much of the resume you’re reading is just fiction?  This just adds to the statistic that 70% of candidates already lie on their resume. 

The same goes for screen shotting questions on assessments, especially untimed ones, and having AI help to develop responses. 

Alan Bourne from Ommati (www.ommati.com) recently published a LinkedIn article where he discusses the effect AI has on hiring campaigns.  Admittedly he’s talking more about larger scale recruitment than many accounting firms undertake, or are even lucky enough to have the breadth of candidates, but the same principles apply.   

The point Alan makes in the article is that even if a relatively small group of candidates use AI, and it improves their chances of making an initial cut, they will then be, say, 2x over-represented in the final pool.  The issues this raises are: 

So what does this mean for those who need to hire?  Alan, I think rightly, says we need to adapt to, not fight AI.  It’s here and it’s not going away.  Here’s his takeaways: 

At Accountests we recognized the likely impact of AI a couple of years ago, and built robust proctoring into our platform a year ago.  Along with our platform providers we continue to enhance the proctoring experience for candidates, but also ensure it keeps up with the changing nature of AI.