Recruiting is tough; being a candidate is tough. And we are making it even tougher.
I saw a thing today that made me react viscerally, and it was the concept that employers are now requiring multi-day in-person assessments as part of their interview process. Now, the concept of simulations or in-basket exercises is not new to the recruitment process. What is new is the expansion of it to combat the rise in AI-generated resumes.
These assessments also create an equity issue, because the expectation is that a candidate can be available for interviews and assessments over the course of multiple days at the will of the potential employer. This is unrealistic in any economy, but particularly in a tough job market where candidates might apply to 50+ roles before landing one. Candidates are expected to use personal leave from their existing job, schedule around other professional or personal conflicts, all for a process that is becoming less and less dignified. And if they don’t, we say they didn’t want it bad enough.
Punishing candidates with multi-day work trials is not a talent strategy; it is a confession that your organization has lost control of its recruitment architecture. You are likely watching your hiring managers scramble to implement these exhaustive, in-person assessments just to counter the overwhelming flood of AI-generated applications.
We removed humans from the loop to scale efficiency, forcing candidates to automate their resumes simply to survive the initial screen, and now we are penalizing them for surviving the exact environment we designed. Instead of fixing a broken pipeline where bots are left battling bots, we are regressing to exploitative hurdles that demand free labor from an already exhausted workforce.
A 2021 Harvard Business School and Accenture study found that 88% of executives already know their automated tracking systems actively reject highly qualified candidates, yet we are choosing to blame the applicant rather than the algorithm. As leaders, managers, and HR practitioners, we should be defending organizational dignity, but instead have become complicit.
We are not fixing a broken process. We are shifting the burden of that broken process onto the people least able to absorb it. And the answer is not longer interviews or multi-day assessments. It is re-centering the human in a system we over-automated.
There is a balance between leveraging AI for efficiency and preserving the human judgment necessary to maintain dignity and equity in hiring. We have a responsibility across every organization, every hiring manager, and every HR leader to find that balance, not to abandon it because the pipeline got noisy.
Our challenge is to bring dignity back to candidates in the age of AI, automated workflows, and impossible hiring metrics.