How AI can lead to better hires, with Metaview CEO Siadhal Magos

The lightbulb moment for Metaview – an AI-powered note-taking tool for candidate interviews – came to Siadhal while working for a high-growth tech company and acting as a hiring manager.

“When interviewing, you really want to get to know the candidate in front of you. You want to be curious; you want to be engaging, you want to find out if they are the right fit for the company. But you’re spending most of your precious attention on taking notes.

Today, he advocates for AI’s potential to improve the recruitment process and to make better hires. So, how exactly is AI changing recruitment and what should recruiters look out for?

Overall, however, he believes people can also be biased because they take mental shortcuts. This can look like choosing a candidate with a similar background to other employees in a team.

We know from our research that jobseekers are not yet ready for AI to make the final hiring decision, and legislation such as the UK GDPR limits AI’s involvement in making life-altering decisions for humans.

That’s why it’s essential to continuously test and monitor AI systems, and the training data. Companies that use AI are still required to have human oversight in their recruitment process, as UK GDPR laws restrict automated decisions.

How AI could enhance human interaction in recruitment

With all the time saved thanks to automation, recruiters will be able to do what they do best, communicate with candidates and hiring managers. When asked what AI can’t replicate, Siadhal says “In one word – relationships.”

He adds:

Your key differentiator as a recruiter will be how you cultivate those relationships and beneath that, great recruiters will understand the candidate and the hiring manager better than anyone else. They will be able to advise the candidate and the hiring manager from a point of authority and credibility because they’ve built that relationship with them. They will be deeply curious when they’re meeting with people and eliciting really rich insights about these human beings. In a way we’re very far away from AI being able to. More importantly, we are very far away from other human beings wanting to engage with AI.

Our research backs Siadhal’s view as well, showing a majority of candidates across all age groups and genders don’t want AI to conduct job interviews (86%) or help with the decision-making process after an interview (84%).

Tips for recruiters who want to leverage AI

Siadhal underlines the importance of being timely in adopting AI skills.

Like with any other technology, using AI and automation tools effectively is down to practising newly gained skills and keeping up with updates. Whether you’re familiar with AI or just starting to use it, it’s important to test out what you can automate and where human involvement is needed.

Siadhal says, “More of a general advice would be that you don’t want to be thinking too much about AI for AI’s sake. But you do want to be cognizant that some things are possible now with AI that weren’t before. You need to think about the parts of your job that can be done on autopilot because soon an autopilot will be doing it for you. So, you need to move away from doing those things.”

At the same time, working with these tools and testing allows recruiters to pinpoint what is possible and what’s not, building an intuitive understanding of the technology.

Siadhal’s favourite AI tools

Metaview: “Obviously”, says Siadhal. “We’re hiring at the moment, so I use it a bunch.”

ChatGPT: “I use it a lot for generating ideas and getting off a blank page if I want to put something together or to have an understanding of a certain topic.”

Perplexity.ai: “I’ve started to use perplexity.ai which is good for research. If you want to learn about a topic, Perplexity, from my experience so far, is better than ChatGPT. There are citations for everything, so it essentially gives you the source data.”

Poe: Most importantly, Siadhal uses Poe to create bedtime stories for his daughter.

I ask Poe to come up with a children’s bedtime story based on a few variables. And it does it for me. And I read that to my daughter most evenings. She’s obsessed with dinosaurs. She’ll usually tell me the story. She says it needs to involve me getting some ice cream and then Pachycephalosaurus steals the ice cream. And then Poe turns it into a 4-minute story.