How We Do, and Don’t, Use AI
We do our best to stay up with trends in the industry. Whether they be new best practices, new tools, or questions / concerns within our network, its important to us to keep our finger on the pulse of whats happening. One concern we hear come up time and time again is that candidates are worried (with good reason) that firms are never really even looking at their resume.
In the age of AI its hard to tell whats made by a person, and what was posted to be indexed by an algorithm. Its hard to know when you submit your resume if it is ever viewed by an individual, or if its reviewed by software and passed over because you didn’t hit the right key words.
For the transparency of our candidates, and our clients, we wanted to share how we leverage AI to do our work more efficiently, and where we purposefully avoid it to ensure we are doing the best quality work we can. Our value as a firm is in our relationships, our insight, our network, and our judgement. This is where we focus our efforts, and is the key to determining where we do, and don’t, use AI.
Where Axis does not use AI:
Sending messages: All messages are sent by an individual. AI may help with drafting, but at a minimum all messages are reviewed, and sent manually by a person.
Our value is in our judgement and our relationships. We don't believe in mass messaging individuals. We don't do things like automated texts, or automated LinkedIn messages. If you receive a message from us, rest assured it was sent by a person.
Reviewing Submitted Resumes / Portfolios: All messages, job applications, or emails are reviewed and assessed by a person. We recognize that it can be incredibly frustrating to find a job, and being filtered out by AI powered tools makes this even worse. We review each application manually as we know a person is behind every one.
Feedback: All feedback on resumes, portfolios, or other work is written and sent by a person. We know that a ton of work went into your portfolio, we believe this warrants time to be reviewed by a person.
Where Axis uses AI:
Design: AI is used to help make content flow better from a visual perspective, and go into a format that is ready to share on social media. We’re a team of recruiters, not designers. AI helps us make our ideas, and our content more easily digestable to readers in various formats.
Outbound Filtering: Axis reaches out to a ton of candidates on LinkedIn, we use AI to help us manage this process and prioritize reachouts.
Internal Processes: This is where we've found the most value in our workflows. Automating the 'clicking of buttons' to keep things up to date in our system. By doing so, we're able to spend more time working with people, and less time in spreadsheets and dashboards.
Writing and Editing Content: There is an important distinction here. Every post you see on our site started with a person, and their insights / perspective. This insight is what our posts are meant to convey. How can we teach a candidate to represent themselves better to employers? How can employers represent themselves better to candidates? This core structure, and perspective, is done manually. Where AI comes in is to help flesh out these ideas efficiently, and get them on paper in a digestable format.
While we recognize the power of AI, its important to understand that we're in a human industry where judgement, relationships and respect are paramount. Our approach is driven by how we can leverage AI to increase how much time we spend on activities and areas where we bring value: our judgement, our relationships, and our network.
