What U.S. and UK workforce chiefs want HR to know about AI and hiring - HR Executive

So the U.S. and UK workforce chiefs have gathered to whisper sweet nothings into HR's ear: invest in AI and your headcount will grow by 10.2% within two years. Well, that's a relief. The working paper from Ramp and Revelio Labs has spoken, so it must be true. But let's not get too excited about the 10.2% — that's the *growth* for companies that 'invest heavily.' Which is a bit like saying that people who eat heavily don't lose weight. And what about the heads that were counted? Were they the newly hired prompt engineers or the poor souls laid off from the customer service department and rehired at half the salary to oversee the AI? The working paper is silent on that, because why ruin a good headline?

The workforce chiefs, of course, have the answer: HR must 'embrace AI in hiring' — which means using algorithms to sift through applications, presumably so that the same biases can be automated at scale. Because that's what we need: a system that can reject you with the cold efficiency of a machine, rather than the warm indifference of a human. The implication is clear: if you're not using AI to hire, you're falling behind. Never mind that the AI tools themselves might be hallucinating qualifications or penalizing candidates from certain backgrounds. That's a problem for the next meeting, or the one after the class-action lawsuit.

So here we are, with the workforce chiefs cheerleading automation while the working paper cherry-picks a favorable statistic. The 10.2% growth is real, but so is the growing gap between the AI-haves and have-nots. And the advice from the chiefs? It's less a roadmap and more a participation trophy for the corporate world: keep spending, keep replacing, and pretend the numbers tell the whole story. Cheers to progress, lads. The bar is in the sub-basement.