Interviewing people and selecting people for jobs has always been difficult. Companies have spent a lot of time and money to select the people best suited for their company. Generative AI has made that more difficult.

Most positions within a company come with a list of desired skills or experience the hiring managers believe a person should have to be successful in the given position. People having all the desired qualities may not be right for the job, despite the resume. Interviews are meant to help us figure out if the person meets the requirements for a job, based on asking questions, giving tests, or having a conversation about past experiences.

To be clear, this is not a post arguing if an AI should be doing interviews on behalf of a company or having AI be part of the hiring process at all. That itself is full of missteps and possible legal challenges. Instead, this is a focus on how Generative AI is changing the way that we evaluate candidates, for good or for bad.

Generative AI Breaks Traditional Interviews

This is a bit dramatic. The technology hasn’t “broken” the interview process. It is just that many of the old interview processes are looking for the wrong attributes. In days gone by, the person with the certificate or the person with the most experience in a technology had the advantage. Now, a person with little background within a subject can ask a multitude of existing generative systems for reasonable solutions to many questions asked or expertise within a subject.

However, a persons experience and education may inform them of how well a “reasonable” solution may be.

So given that newer generative systems can provide insight previously reserved for those with advanced education or experience, what are we interviewing people for?

Improving The Interview

Interviewing has always been more complex than determining the skills, experience, aptitude of an individual. There are so many other factors at play. How is their communication, are they able to ask insightful questions, can the solve problems on their own. In other words, can they be creative and expressive.

So, to improve the interview, we need to determine what attributes are important, and which have become less important with the introduction of these tools.

While traditional interviews used tests to determine a candidates specific knowledge, this new interview process will need to see if the applicants have a broad understanding of multiple concepts. It will no longer be good enough to be an expert with a specific technology. Candidates will need to know how to piece together different areas of knowledge and weave them into a cohesive tapestry, each area building upon another.

Here are some key attributes for candidates to consider when developing your interview process.

• Are they curious to know how things work and can be made to work together
• Are they able to break down a task into smaller tasks effectively
• Being able to recognize and challenge their own assumptions and biases

Every company should have a different measuring stick for these and different methods for assessing them. However, the coming AI revolution will require employees with at least these foundations.

The AI Opportunity

ChatGPT, DALL-E and other generative systems, have lit the world on fire. Giving the outside world a glimpse of what could be possible with these new tools. These tools are becoming more prevalent with the proliferation of open sourced pre-trained models for specific domains and the exploding popularity of places like Hugging Face.

These are some amazing tools, and I use them myself. However, do they, or can they, replace the creativity of a person?

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

Attributed to Henry Ford (no underlying first hand accounts)

These systems all rely on a more concrete foundation, being able to ask the correct question. These systems start with the premise of having a person entering in information about what they need. If one thing is certain, people rarely articulate what they need.

The opportunity for companies is to find employees with the creativity, expressiveness AND curiosity to look outside of their box. The people that engage with their work, actively try to understand it, and be open to new ideas and accept criticisms.

What Are You Hiring For?

Many managers and companies do not consistently re-evaluate their hiring strategy. But with the upcoming change in the nature of many careers, this is a necessity. Identifying the attributes of you want in a person working within your company is essential.

Successful companies are built by people, not purely by processes. They are led by inspirational leaders, empathetic co-workers, and a bond over common struggles and successes.

Just as robotics displaced many manufacturing jobs, the same will be said of more white collar jobs in the coming years. As this happens more frequently, the interview process will need to start relying on different aspects of experience and education. The rise of Generative AI will replace many of the boilerplate work that many of us have done repeatedly.

But an interview to find the most successful employees, will need to change and look for how work will be done in the future. Not forgetting the lessons of the past, but incorporating them into what comes next.

So what are you hiring for?