Vasily Voropaev is a founder and CEO at Smartbrain.io, a serial entrepreneur, and is a dedicated promoter of remote work and remote teams shared his experience in material for Forbes.com.

You can read the original article at the link.

Barely anyone notices, but recruiters right now are stuck between the devil and the deep sea. They face two big problems that could gradually make their work unnecessary. If you want to go into recruiting or expand your HR department, think it over very carefully. Recruiting jobs in their current form may come to an end relatively soon.

But HRs are irreplaceable, aren’t they?

Let’s start with the fact that, until recently, human resource managers did not exist.

They first appeared with the emergence of large companies and corporations. The first HR department was launched in the early 1900s at the National Cash Register. The firm’s owner, John Patterson, created it to deal with employee complaints in order to preempt workers’ strikes. Then this model was adapted by Ford and other companies.

But these are what we would now call HR managers. Recruiters appeared even later. At the beginning of the 20th century, they were simply not needed: The company’s owner put advertisements in the newspapers or hung a poster on the street announcing the company needed people. When candidates came, they were checked and hired either by department managers or simply by senior employees. Full-fledged recruiters have become necessary only in the modern era of corporations when the allocation of specialized individuals to the process of hiring turned out to be more effective.

The term “human resources” did not appear until the 1980s, when the American Society for Personnel Administration, the largest professional association in the United States, changed its name to the Society for Human Resource Management. HRs in their current form did not exist just a few decades ago, and they may well not exist in the future. Right now they face two big problems, which can be summarized in one word: competition.

Problem One: AI

Checking resumes for keywords and posting vacancies is not a very creative task. AI already can do it almost as well as humans. Journalist Andrea Murad from the BBC, for the sake of the experiment, sent her resume to the publisher. And she was surprised to learn she was found and interviewed by a computer, not a real person.

The system that tested her skills was developed by Pymetrics, a New York-based company. The test questions and answers are designed to assess the intelligence and character traits of the applicant — for example, resistance to stress or how quickly they respond to certain situations. According to Pymetrics, the test measures cognitive and emotional performance objectively and accurately in 25 minutes.

A number of multinational companies are already using AI for recruiting — McDonald’s, Swarovski, BCG, JP Morgan, Colgate, Kraft Heinz and others. According to Pymetrics founder Frida Polli, “It’s about helping firms process a much wider pool [of applicants], and getting signals that someone will be successful in a job.”

Another company providing recruitment automation software is HireVue from Utah. Their AI system records videos of job seekers answering interview questions via a webcam. The sound is then converted into text and an algorithm analyzes it for keywords. For example, it can check if an applicant often says “me” instead of “we” in response to questions about working together, or check for a particular answer the company is looking for.

The HireVue system can then reject the candidate entirely — without any human verification. Or, if the AI is satisfied, it can direct the applicant to a video interview with a real recruiter. HireVue claims it has now completed more than 24 million interviews this way.

There are thousands of such systems now, mostly used internally. According to a report from 2019 by Undercover Recruiter, AI is expected to replace 16% of recruiting jobs within the next 10 years. And with the latest advances in technology and remote work, this percentage is bound to increase.

Problem Two: Outstaffing

In the United States, staffing industry sales now amount to more than $160 billion. According to the American Staffing Association, outstaffing is providing “job and career opportunities for about 16 million employees per year pre-pandemic (13.6 million during the pandemic).” That is around 10% of the total U.S. workforce. In the EU and Britain, the situation is similar. About 10% of the total number of employed people are hired there through outstaffing agencies, and this percentage is growing.

And here’s the kicker: Recruiters are not needed in the field of outstaffing, especially in IT and for large agencies. I work in this field, and we need only developers to be able to verify the qualifications of the candidate. You don’t even need to post vacancies and look for someone. Employees come to you on their own, if you have a well-known platform.

This shift is visible across the industry. Platforms like DesignRush, which showcase top staffing agencies (including ours), reflect how businesses are increasingly relying on established expertise to solve their talent needs efficiently.

If the field is strange and new to the company, they simply order outsourcing and get a completed project.

If they understand the field, they order outstaffing. Then, with their PMs and team leaders, they manage specialists rented from agencies. Recruiting is not needed here: Employees do not change hands every two or three years; they stay in the same company, just working for different customers.

I have been in this field for five years and have 15,000 employees but almost no HR managers and no recruiters. All vacancies are posted on our own platform, interviews are conducted by techies, and then by customer representatives. In the end, each individual company no longer needs a recruiter. Instead of 50 HR managers from different companies, you need just one person who is on the other side of the funnel.

Highly skilled HR managers, dedicated to improving the environment for employees, of course, are not going anywhere. They are important even when working remotely. But ordinary recruiters who hunt people, message them on LinkedIn and negotiate a convenient time to call are already gradually disappearing. I believe they will be next in line after cashiers and truck drivers. If you want to dedicate your life to this field, think about it carefully.