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Artificial intelligence has the potential to revolutionize how we work, making mundane tasks more efficient and slashing the cost of many back-office jobs. But there's a dark side associated with this efficiency and progress - the loss of those people skills that set one individual apart from another, those human qualities that engage others with your business and how you do things. These are often the essence of your business brand and the 'glue' that gets employees and customers to stick.
Think about the pre-Internet days when we might use a paper map to navigate a car journey. After a few trips, the human brain would begin to understand where the roads were and build a mental picture of the route. With generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini, that work is done for us so we lose the muscle memory of building up that picture. It's the same in the workplace - when employees are producing the same output for a task because they're all using the same tool, there is no differentiation and no reason to see your business as unique.
This is why it's an important shift that more and more companies are looking at skills over traditional qualifications. According to a global survey by hiring platform Indeed, 67% of jobseekers and 51% of hiring managers believe that skills and on-the-job experience carry more weight than someone's qualifications or job titles. Skills-based hiring prioritizes these personal qualities such as communication and engagement skills over whether someone attended a certain university, for example, or they might favour someone who had acquired transferable experience volunteering while their peers were at university.
Of course there will be industries where an academic qualification is essential, but our knowledge-based economy will need people who can set themselves apart with human qualities. The World Economic Forum's 2025 Future of Work report spells this out - alongside digital skills and data literacy, creative thinking, resilience, flexibility and agility are rising in importance. From a recruitment perspective, this means not setting up processes that rule people out based on non-essential criteria. In practice, this could mean removing the requirement for a degree or reducing the number of years’ experience needed (and in some countries, it’s unlawful to ask for these anyway). Look for ways that candidates can demonstrate qualities such as resilience and adaptability through the questions you ask or assessments you set.
Why is this important? While AI can reduce the cost of doing business, this should not be the ultimate goal. Take customer support - a role that is increasingly being taken over by chatbots or other AI tools. Although these bots can handle basic questions and troubleshooting, customers with more complex issues will always value the more nuanced input and critical thinking of a human employee. Or if your business is in the creative industry and responsible for producing written communications, the team that can create something innovative and different from others is the one that will stand out in selection over one that has asked a generative AI tool to write its pitch. From a brand perspective, focusing on skills-based hiring and human qualities over algorithms could be more valuable in the long term.
Of course, qualifications offer a measurement or benchmark by which we can compare people. But there are other approaches we can use in the recruitment process that can gauge if people have achieved in different ways. Perhaps they have excelled in a sport and are effective within a team, for example, or their previous experience and career trajectory in their career shows them to be a successful client advocate, even when they don't have the same level of qualification as another candidate. As with AI, we cannot rely on qualifications alone to secure the right path forward for the business - it's about the whole person, the whole 'problem' we're trying to solve for customers, and the multiple qualities that make an effective team that will deliver on targets.
Ultimately, leaders need to build a business that is adaptable and resilient in a fast-changing market. Although AI tools can support employees to get up to speed quickly with some aspects of their role (it can generate drafts for those who struggle with blank page, or help people to communicate in other languages for example), they cannot replace someone who can create an engaging first impression, alternative way to solve a problem, or put themselves in someone else's shoes. As markets change, quick-thinking and empathetic humans can adapt quickly, contributing to sustainable business growth in the long term.