How is AI changing recruitment processes?

We recently spoke with Rags Vadali, Founder at Floto, previously CPO at token.com and Lantum at our 'The future of product and design in an AI generation' event. He shared his thoughts on the past, present and future of artificial intelligence on the product skill set. One key theme was the impact on hiring, especially interviewing. 

About Rags Vadali

Rags Vadali is an experienced product leader. Having developed his career across global tech giants, such as Google and Meta, and growing software brands, such as Token.com and Lantum, he is now on a mission to redefine how products are built at his own business - Floto.

Transcript

[AI} is affecting the process at every stage. So, in the first instance, the number of people applying has just, like, shot up just because I think they're just using AI tools to apply to every role. Secondly, we find that things like cover letters, even CVs, have basically become kind of useless as filters because AI is writing all of these things, right?

So, here's a few things we're doing now. We turn off, 'Easy Apply' on LinkedIn. We send people to our website to apply, and there we don't ask for cover letters anymore, but we actually ask people to answer about four to eight different questions depending on the role. And we ask questions that AI can't directly answer. I mean, you could use AI to [write] them. For instance, we ask them, give us an example when you did X, Y, and Z and what was the impact. In that instance it doesn't matter how AI writes it, but the substance of what you're doing is what matters, right?

And what we're doing, what we did actually, is we use these answers as our filters to do our first shortlist. So we may have lost a few people who may have had great resumes but didn't have great answers or used AI-generated answers, but we are having to do it otherwise it's just impossible.