AI’s arrival at work reshaping employers’ hunt for talent

PARIS: Predictions of imminent AI-driven mass unemployment are likely overblown, but employers will seek workers with different skills as the technology matures, a top executive at global recruiter ManpowerGroup told AFP at Paris’s Vivatech trade fair.

The world’s third-largest staffing firm by revenue ran a startup contest at Vivatech in which one of the contenders was building systems to hire out customisable autonomous AI ‘agents’, rather than humans.

Their service was reminiscent of a warning last month from Dario Amodei, head of American AI giant Anthropic, that the technology could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years.

For ManpowerGroup, AI agents are “certainly not going to become our core business any time soon,” the company’s Chief Innovation Officer Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic said.

“If history shows us one thing, it’s most of these forecasts are wrong.”

An International Labour Organisation (ILO) report published in May found that around “one in four workers across the world are in an occupation with some degree of exposure” to generative AI models’ capabilities. “Few jobs are currently at high risk of full automation,” the ILO added. But the UN body also highlighted “rapid expansion of AI capabilities since our previous study” in 2023, including the emergence of “agentic” models more able to act autonomously or semi-autonomously and use software like web browsers and email.

‘Soft skills’

Chamorro-Premuzic predicted that the introduction of efficiency-enhancing AI tools would put pressure on workers, managers and firms to make the most of the time they will save. “If what happens is that AI helps knowledge workers save 30, 40, maybe 50 per cent of their time, but that time is then wasted on social media, that´s not an increase in net output,” he said.

Adoption of AI could give workers “more time to do creative work” -- or impose “greater standardisation of their roles and reduced autonomy,” the ILO said. There’s general agreement that interpersonal skills and an entrepreneurial attitude will become more important for knowledge workers as their daily tasks shift towards corralling AIs.

Employers identified ethical judgement, customer service, team management and strategic thinking as top skills AI could not replace in a ManpowerGroup survey of over 40,000 employers across 42 countries published this week.

Nevertheless, training that adopts those new priorities has not increased in step with AI adoption, Chamorro-Premuzic lamented. “For every dollar you invest in technology, you need to invest eight or nine on HR, culture transformation, change management,” he said. He argued that such gaps suggest companies are still chasing automation, rather than the often-stated aim of augmenting human workers’ capabilities with AI.

AI hiring AI?

One of the areas where AI is transforming the world of work most rapidly is ManpowerGroup’s core business of recruitment. But here candidates are adopting the tools just as quickly as recruiters and companies, disrupting the old way of doing things from the bottom up.

“Candidates are able to send 500 perfect applications in one day, they are able to send their bots to interview, they are even able to game elements of the assessments,” Chamorro-Premuzic said. That extreme picture was not borne out in a survey of over 1,000 job seekers released this week by recruitment platform TestGorilla, which found just 17 per cent of applicants admitting to cheating on tests, and only some of those to using AI.

Jobseekers’ use of consumer AI tools meets recruiters doing the same. The same TestGorilla survey found almost two-thirds of the more-than-1,000 hiring decision-makers polled used AI to generate job descriptions and screen applications.

But a far smaller share are already using the technology to actually interview candidates.

Where employers today are focused on candidates’ skills over credentials, Chamorro-Premuzic predicted that “the next evolution is to focus on potential, not even skills even if I know the skills you bring to the table today, they might be obsolete in six months”.

“I’m better off knowing that you’re hard-working, that you are curious, that you have good people skills, -- and that, AI can help you evaluate,” he believes.