Charles Hipps, CEO, Oleeo: What 30 Years in TA Tech Taught Me About the Recruiter’s New Role in the Age of AI

As the Founder and CEO of Oleeo, I’ve spent over 30 years in TA tech, driven by a passion for transforming how organizations find and hire the best talent.

I love innovation and the teamwork it involves. I am passionate about helping organizations and individuals navigate significant change. And I am motivated by impact—particularly our customers’ success and our people’s development.

AI, when done right, optimizes the Human-AI partnership, combining significant behavioral change with innovation and impact.

The traditional recruiting playbook is obsolete. Based on direct conversations at recent customer meetings and the seismic shifts discussed at industry conferences and webinars, I want to share my thoughts on how recruiters’ jobs are set to change.

So, let’s get stuck in…

As AI Agents help us to recruit, what aspects of our jobs and what new roles are set to emerge?

Humans-in-the-Loop?

Driven in part by candidates’ use of AI, employers have seen a significant increase in applications—on average 43% in the last 12 months among our customers. When a single vacancy can attract up to 1,500 applicants, it’s not practical to manually screen them well.

With application volumes continuing to increase at pace, recruiters have no choice but to evolve their jobs to become “humans-in-the-loop,” working in partnership with AI. In this model, they review AI’s screening recommendations and its explanations, and then make the final decision. This is just one of many ways recruiters’ transactional workloads will reduce as AI does more of the heavy lifting.

Candidate Concierge Associate?

As candidates’ AI talks to employers’ AI, is the recruiter time spent communicating with candidates set to decline? Or will we see the emergence of specialist candidate concierges as we attempt to maintain the human touch?

High-volume recruiters already can’t afford to offer extensive human contact to every candidate. They provide human contact at scale through events, webinars, “meet-our-people” website sections, personalized CRM-driven content, and more recently, GenAI chatbots and AI guides to navigate candidates to the jobs that match their skills.

We’ll see more of these high-volume techniques adopted across all types of recruitment: more employee videos and, of course, new tools, including ways to scale 1:1 communications for candidates further down the funnel.

Could your job title in the future be “Candidate Concierge Associate”? Personally, I think not. I believe scaling 1:1 communication is about coordinating and spreading the load throughout the organization. Will more of your colleagues have a bit more “employer ambassador” in their job? I hope so.

Candidate Recruitment Experience Designer?

However, “Candidate Recruitment Experience Designer” seems a more likely job title, or at least it might be a larger part of your job. As AI handles more of the day-to-day tasks and application volumes increase, we are going to need to spend more time designing candidate experiences that, at scale, humanize the process, communicate culture, values, and what it’s like to be part of the team. In a similar vein, Employer Branding Consultants’ jobs appear safe… which leads us to the role of the AI Process Designer.

AI Process Designer?

I don’t know if the job title is AI Process Designer or Recruitment Policy & Procedure Designer for AI Agents or something similar. However, if AI is going to source and chat to our candidates, guide them to the right roles, make sifting recommendations, schedule interviews, and recommend whether pre-employment checks have been passed, recruiters are going to have to give the AI Agents detailed instructions to follow.

Policies and procedures are the tactics or instructions that detail how operational day-to-day tasks should be carried out. As AI is set to take over many of the operational tasks of recruiters, humans remain very much embedded in the entire process. First of all, by writing the instructions that the AI is to follow, and then by reviewing the AI’s recommendations in order to make the final decision.

As policies and procedures are embedded in chatbots, AI will also take over some of the role of supporting hiring managers in following good practices and strengthening their contribution to recruitment. This means not just answering hiring managers’ questions, but giving them hands-on help, for example, in drafting a job description.

So, as AI takes on the day-to-day heavy lifting, recruiters’ jobs are set to become more tactical and strategic—AI Process Designer, Screening Process Designer, Candidate Experience Designer, Employer Branding Consultant, Head of Recruitment Strategy, Trainers of Recruiters, and Trainers of AI. And then, of course, if there are procedures to be followed, there is the Recruitment Compliance Manager and the Head of Algorithmic Fairness & Compliance. Which leads us neatly to fairer hiring.

Think Diversity Is Done For? Think Again.

If you’re disheartened by the recent fall from favor of diversity initiatives, I thought you might be encouraged by the idea that diversity is not a management fad but indeed fundamental to the success of life itself.

Life flourished when it moved beyond simply replicating itself identically by splitting in half and embraced genetic diversity. Rather than endlessly cloning themselves, two genetically different organisms partnered to create a third, genetically diverse offspring.

This first ‘diversity initiative’ unlocked an evolutionary advantage: populations embracing diversity better adapt to changing environments, resist disease, and explore new ecological niches.

This diversity initiative’s success is evident today: millions of diverse species—from tiny insects to towering trees—occupy nearly every habitat on Earth. They account for the vast majority of the planet’s biomass, thriving in ways that species which rely on identical cloning could never achieve. In short, diversity has been the engine of life’s resilience and dominance.

In the professional world, diverse teams mirror the advantages of a diverse gene pool: being better at adapting to changing markets; resisting groupthink; devising more resilient strategies; and innovating more effectively.

As a result, I am optimistic that diverse teams, and the diverse hiring initiatives that support them, will ultimately prevail.

Job Analysts, Selection Process Designers, and Heads of Algorithmic Fairness & Compliance?

In order to give AI written procedures to follow, particularly for sifting candidates, our instructions are going to have to be more precise and valid.

Would you be happy writing down the detailed basis on which every hiring manager makes each selection decision?

Is there any unconscious bias in your organization? If so, I suspect that an instruction set that replicates that decision-making is a biased formula.

With the detailed basis for making decisions only in people’s heads, it is more difficult to prosecute than if it is written down.

The effective and legal way to hire quality talent is through detailed job analysis and the use of criteria proven to drive actual job performance.

I expect to see more Job Analysts, Selection Process Designers, and Heads of Algorithmic Fairness & Compliance to write the precise, fair, and valid instructions for AI to make sifting recommendations.

Candidate Fraud Prevention? Recruitment Fraud & Risk Analyst Roles

Generative AI has increased the opportunities for candidate fraud:

– Is that a real candidate or a fake identity?

– Is their application truthful?

– Is that an Avatar or a real person in the video interview?

– Is AI guiding the candidate through the interview?

– What risks does my recruitment process expose my organization to?

– How can my recruitment process be exploited by Cyber Criminals?

These questions highlight a potential process gap: what risks does our current process expose our organization to, and who is accountable for defining the required defenses?

Will candidate fraud prevention and detection be part of the Recruitment Compliance Manager’s job or the role of a dedicated Recruitment Fraud & Risk Analyst?

I think we’ll ask AI to do more cross-checks for consistency. We’ll design processes to avoid and limit candidates’ ability to cheat. We’ll remove sifts that candidates’ use of AI has rendered ineffective. The increased risk of candidate fraud definitely means that managing it will become a larger part of recruiters’ jobs.

Let’s Do More of What We Enjoy & Create Better Outcomes:

I am optimistic that the job is set to be enhanced—to be more engaging, less repetitive, and more of what we enjoy.

Throughout, recruiters remain in control, setting strategy, designing the processes for AI to follow, and working in partnership with AI to review recommendations and make final decisions.

And of course, humans prevail in the final steps—whether this be final-round interviews, persuading candidates to join, and welcoming new hires.

In addition, more explicit instructions mean fairer, more transparent hiring decisions, improved candidate feedback, better hiring outcomes, a more productive organization, and happier employees.

How to Protect Your Job (and Make It More Enjoyable)?

If there was any doubt that employers will adopt AI for the improvements in quality, diversity, and efficiency it offers, candidates’ use of AI and the surging increase in application volume leave employers little choice. Ironically, AI (the candidate’s use) is creating employers more work, not less.

If your job involves repetition, even including a reasonable amount of judgment—sourcing and chatting to candidates, guiding them to the right roles, sifting, scheduling, reference checking—AI is going to take over a proportion of your job.

However, AI will act as your highly efficient partner, not as a replacement. AI will present you with recommendations and evidence for your final decision or, for example, answer standard questions while passing more difficult ones to you.

For this to happen, we need more AI Process Designers, and today the detailed knowledge to design those processes lies in your heads, providing an opportunity for you to develop the design skills which will be an important part of working alongside AI.

In time, these skills may lead to a role as an AI Process Designer, a Candidate Recruitment Experience Designer, or Selection Process Designer.

These in turn may be stepping stones to Employer Branding, Recruitment Strategists, or Algorithmic Fairness & Compliance and Recruitment Fraud & Risk.

I am optimistic about how recruiters’ jobs are set to change, including less repetitive work, more strategic and tactical work, and more human contact with quality candidates further down the recruitment funnel, all supported by an intelligent and reliable AI colleague.

Your job is not going to be taken by AI but by another recruiter who knows how to use AI—how to work alongside AI and improve it by making suggestions to enhance its decision-making. Better to think ahead about the skills you’ll need along the way and embrace your new AI co-worker.

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