Do you know WHO you're hiring?

For any growing business, hiring the most skilled professionals is key to achieving your company’s goals. Successful companies are hiring all the time, building out highly capable teams in order to gain a competitive advantage in the market. But do you always know who you’re hiring?

 In this emerging age of AI, it’s getting harder and harder to know what is real and what is, in fact, an AI generated output. Many of us are familiar with the most popularised examples of generative AI flexing it’s code – ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Midjourney etc. -   but as with all state of the art technology, development refuses to stand still. And in the case of AI, the envelope is not being pushed, but rather strapped tightly to a booster rocket and launched straight into the stratosphere.

 Imagine for a moment you’ve sat down to interview a software developer over a Zoom video call. You’ve got a list of questions ready to qualify whether or not this person has the skills needed for the role. You get through the introductions and the more general questions and are now ready to move on to the real, qualifying questions, asking them “How would you approach optimizing a memory-intensive Python-based Android app that's experiencing frequent crashes?”.

 The candidate tells you what a great question that is and outlines his methodology, touching on leveraging Android Studio's Profiler to pinpoint memory leaks, excessive allocations, and performance bottlenecks, using more efficient data structures like a SparseArray, object pooling, avoiding nested layouts… the works. A strong answer, given confidently – and you’re impressed! You’re convinced you’re looking at your next hire.

 What they’re looking at, however, is a window containing a cascading transcript of your entire conversation, meticulously transcribed by an AI system that, unknown to you, has been quietly listening in on the interview. Not only is it accurately transcribing everything you’ve said so far, it is providing real time responses to your answers for the candidate to regurgitate verbatim. It has also been primed for the interview in advance. It’s been told what the role is, the organisation that is hiring and what the objective of the conversation is. An objective it appears to have executed flawlessly.

 What if we told you that this isn’t a hypothetical AI use case? This software exists and is being used. It’s called LockedIn AI. A “revolutionary dual layer AI system” that “auto-generates tailored, accurate meeting responses and feedback in real-time”. Compatible with all major meeting software applications, including Zoom, Teams and Skype, LockedIn AI is a model trained on real meeting data and fine-tuned to generate tailored real time responses based on the transcript of the entire conversation history.

 With such powerful AI software becoming available to the masses, the importance of face-to-face interviews becomes very apparent. If you’re not conducting at least one in person interview during your hiring process, you risk potentially falling victim to individuals leveraging AI as a substitute for real capability. By the time you figure out that the candidate it not quite suitable for the role, you’ve already wasted your time, money and lost the best candidates to other businesses. In light of this, there can only be one conclusion: face to face interviews are not just important – they are essential.

If you’d like to discuss further, and identify the many ways to ensure you’re hiring the very best talent into your business, our specialists are on hand to support.