The job interview in the age of AI: why the human element remains crucial

In the world of big data and artificial intelligence one begins to think that a number of business processes can be more or less completely 'dehumanised', even those that traditionally have a strong 'human' connotation. Think of the selection process. Does it really still make sense to organise selection interviews? Can't an algorithm conduct the interview and suggest the right candidate?

To answer this question, we need to ask ourselves another question: what is the selection interview? If we think that the interview is essentially a dialogue to verify a candidate's requirements and allow us to make the 'match' between person and requirements then isn't it better to delegate this task to technology which can do it much better than we can? After all, you don't need a live manager to ask questions. A well-trained 'virtual recruiter' can do it just fine. And you don't even need a manager to process the answers. Job 'matching' algorithms can in fact understand better than we do whether there is a 'match' between candidate and requirements. They sift through the data and without being influenced by all our biases and prejudices tell us whether the candidate is the right one, with a much smaller chance of error than a human being would have.

Is this the end of the 'human' interview? Yes if we interpret the 'job interview' as a mere verification of requirements. But if we broaden the discourse, we realise that the job interview can never be managed by technology, provided it is conducted in the right way and for the right purposes. Let me try to explain why.

Do we hire requirements or do we hire people? Do we want a sum of skills or a nice person who will marry our projects and our vision? Do we want someone to perform tasks or a partner who will not betray us in our time of need? The answer is obvious. We not only want to find out whether the person we are going to work with knows how to use software, but also what he does on Sunday afternoons, what his 'hidden world' is, what relationship he has with his sisters and neighbours. But if this is the case, why do our job interviews continue to be a series of banal questions? Why do we keep asking "where do you see yourself in ten years?" and never ask "what is your relationship with your sisters"?

We are prisoners of a ritual of requirements verification when what we are really interested in is getting to know a person as we would do on a train with a stranger. This attitude has very real effects: if I have to check requirements I ask the classic questions. If, on the other hand, I want to get to know a person, I don't have pre-packaged 'questionnaire' questions, but I have a conversational style because I want to satisfy an existential curiosity, and so I also come up with questions such as 'How do you deal with the melancholy of Sunday afternoons?