It’s ironical that I’m posting this piece right after #tascon17 (talent acquisition and sourcing conference). After yesterday’s sessions at the conference and meeting with a few industry sourcing stalwarts, I’m forced to rethink the future of sourcers in recruitment function. I’m not exaggerating when I say the title of recruitment sourcers (sourcers as known in the recruitment parlance) will be non-existent by 2022.. perhaps by 2020 itself!

With AI’s percolation & automation moves into almost every service industry, “most mundane, monotonous yet manual and must” will be replaced by intelligent bots. Recruitment will not be spared. My recent interactions with a slew of smart start-ups have more than convinced me that the current so-called sourcing activities will be automated and replaced with smart bots.

All the people that I spoke to (from the startups) are very optimistic that their respective products will source profiles with 90+% accuracy for any job that you have. Most of them are confident that their tool can also throw up phone numbers or mail ids of potential candidates.

It’s almost abnormal, not to leave behind a digital trace of your existence in the digital world. These smart sourcing tools use advanced scraping and x-ray’ing techniques to comb the wild web to sniff out the email ids in no time. As a matter of fact, I literally lost my balance when I was told that you will have profiles stacked up within 90 seconds of pressing the “publish the JD” button! Scary isn’t it?

Well, I’m not completely surprised. With Microsoft investing more into Linkedin, guys at Google don’t want to be lagging behind. Recruitment as an Industry is all about people and People = Data = Money! Google has silently done a beta release of “Google Hire”. They will mash machine learning, AI and abracadabra together to ensure that a few recruitment software players file for chapter 11.

What will happen to the Sourcers?

The answer is simple. Move up the value chain to be a real recruiter, else you will be forced to retire well before you actually want to. Sourcers.. are you listening? Would love to hear your comments.

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Srikrishnan Ananthanarayanan, also known as Sri” in the recruitment circles, is a Data Driven Talent Acquisition Leader, with more than 14 years of experience in all facets of recruitment. Over the last decade, Sri has successfully executed complex leadership mandates from Fortune 500 companies to cutting edge Tech Startups.

Sri is a founder of “Adviti” which focuses on Startup Hiring. He also holds a Masters degree in Management, majoring in Human Resources and Marketing from the University of Pune.