On the face of it you would have thought that using AI to read CV’s would be a good thing, or hiring an agency to do help with your recruitment by screening the applicants down to a top 10 before you see the CV’s yourself. And in the modern world where there are thousands of applicants for some jobs this just has to be the case, you simply don’t have the time or sometimes even the skills to go through all the CV’s yourselves. But and there is a big But…… are you missing out on the golden child hidden in all those CV’s that just didn’t quite write it down as the AI or the recruiter wants to see it.
Now I personally have 20 years experience of SQL Server, Windows, Visual Basic, C, C++, .NET etc, but have not done any in the last few years as I have been mainly working in PHP and MySQL, that doesn’t mean that I dont still have masses of software development experience, team leadership, software design, and management experience, it just means I’ve been doing something else for a bit, which if anything adds to and compliments my previous experience.
What the AI and the recruiter see is your last 3 jobs, all in PHP and MySQL, and pretty much everything else is discounted meaning someone looking for a really top notch all round developer that can easily adapt to new technologies as they come along, is totally overlooked.
What the AI and probably the recruiter also dont see is that 5 years or so developing on SQL Server 6.5 is worth a lifetime in the latest versions, and having done Visual Basic 6 and early .Net versions means you understand the technology at a massively deeper level than people who who only ever been Molly coddled by the .Net framework and it’s intricate OO models, developers that worked with C++ for windows 3.1 would have had to overcome memory issues, how to message and share information between apps, message queuing on the OS and many other things that we now take for granted, even down to the distribution of DLL libraries and creation of common code between applications.
All the recruiter or software is looking for is 5 years of the latest technology that only came out 6 months ago (yes I have seen this in requirements for roles all too often).
Personally what do I care, Ive served my time, im not looking for gainful employment in the software market anymore, but I actually feel sorry for the companies that wind up overlooking the more experienced candidates that may not be a perfect fit tech wise, but could bring so much experience and knowledge to bear on a project. To the ultimate benefit of everyone that works on it. And this dent just count in the IT Industry, AI is going to be everywhere in recruitment and I personally think it will dumb down the industry even more than it already is.
