LONDON: Earlier this year, in the depths of summer, the Addleshaw Goddard law firm found itself in a slight pickle. In what was becoming a familiar pattern, an advert it had placed for an IT job in its human resources department had drawn a slew of applications.
A year ago, only a couple of dozen people might have sent in a resume for a position like this one. But AI has made the job of applying for a job much faster and easier, and this time 178 applications arrived.
The problem was, the longer it took to sift them, the higher the chance that good candidates would find work elsewhere. Like a lot of organisations, Addleshaw has been encouraging its managers to test ways that AI can safely improve its processes, so the firm’s HR department decided to do an experiment.
It would see how well an AI agent could assess the applications compared with humans.