When Ben Olson joined LinkedIn as the head of global talent acquisition earlier this year, he had to fight his natural instinct to move fast. Instead, he spent his first few months sitting down with folks across the global team.

"What excites them? What feels most uncertain? And importantly, what do they need from me and our leadership team right now?" he tells HR Executive.

Among the themes that emerged was the idea that it's time to rethink what "great recruiting" looks like in an organization enabled by AI.

"AI is creating entirely new ways for recruiters to find talent and get work done, and we need to help recruiters embrace those capabilities while doubling down on the uniquely human skills that cannot, and should not, be automated," Olson says.

Ahead of LinkedIn's Talent Connect conference this week in New York City, Olson spoke exclusively with HR Executive about how AI is revolutionizing recruiting and what talent leaders can do today to transform their functions.

HR Executive: As more candidates leverage AI in job hunting, and recruiters use the tech in their work, how is the candidate-employer relationship being redefined?

Olson: I think AI is actually making the candidate-employer relationship more human, not less.

I'm lucky enough to have some of the best recruiters in the world on speed dial, or maybe "speed chat" at this point, and I've recently asked them how AI is changing what they look for in candidates. What they told me was surprisingly consistent: There's an interesting paradox emerging: As AI makes it easier to polish how we present ourselves, the unpolished human signals start to matter even more.

One recruiter on our team told me she prefers candidates whose resumes have their own voice and narrative over something that feels overly polished. Another told me some of the best candidate signals come from talking about failure, because it's much harder to fake honesty, ownership and genuine self-reflection. And I'm hearing that the strongest candidates show their "work in progress": how they reason through a problem, weigh tradeoffs and know when their own judgment needs to override AI.

So, I think the best candidate-employer relationships are going deeper. As AI takes on more of the mechanics, the real differentiator becomes how well we understand each other and the relationships we build through that process.

Read the full article here: