AI and verification: with great power comes great confusion

AI and verification: the new job board peanut butter and jelly? OK, I’m stretching things a little (maybe a lot). But the reality is that when AI can mimic humans so well that deep fakes are often effective at fooling their audience, it also creates a challenge for recruiting. How do you know that the application that you just handed off to your employer client is actually a real, live human being? I’m not sure that checking a box that say’s ‘I’m not a robot’ will suffice.

Verification has been an important part of the hiring process since, well, forever. However, I’m not sure traditional verification has ever faced a challenge quite like AI. The technology behind generative AI allows almost anyone to create lifelike applications, in high volume, and in such a way as to evade traditional methods of ‘proving’ their source. What’s to prevent an ambitious job seeker from burrowing into the interview cycles of multiple companies – or even more likely, what’s to keep a bored hacker or angry ex-employee from doing the same? Just as a denial of service attack can bring a web server to its knees, so too could an avalanche of seemingly real but completely fake applications swamp the typically overworked and understaffed HR department.

Imagine how happy that overwhelmed HR department would be if the applications were all sourced back to your job board? It would certainly elevate the usual complaint from employers of ‘unqualified applicants’ to a new and impressive height!

So what is a poor job board to do? I’m not sure, but I know what I would do. I would lock my tech team in a room with the most manipulative job seekers you could find, and let them have at it. Ideally, at least a couple of folks would be eternally pessimistic – pessimists tend to pose useful questions about possible solutions. I suspect that the job seekers could provide ingenious problems for the tech team. Mixing AI and verification would produce plenty of problems – maybe it could produce some solutions, too.

Or maybe not.

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