MUMBAI: In a world where people are increasingly relying on AI tools, companies have a new hiring challenge: AI-generated resumes. Firms are finding it difficult to select candidates for job roles from a flood of CVs that look alike, making soft skills more valuable than ever, said Nicholas Kirk, CEO at recruitment firm Michael Page.The London-based company which has been operating in India for more than a decade now said that the volume of interviews that recruiters today conduct have gone up because corporates are mandating them to look beyond CVs when shortlisting a pool of candidates for a job. “Earlier CVs used to be unique but technology has changed that. Resumes are no longer a selling point. And that’s where the importance of going really deep into a person’s experience, behaviour and values. That’s where soft skills come in and is more important than ever,” Kirk said in an interview here.

Soft Skills Matter

“We might have interviewed 300 candidates to get the short-list of three. That’s the hard work that goes into what we do,” Kirk said.The global job market has seen a slowdown due to the war, with processes taking longer to close although there hasn’t been mass hiring freeze by companies or a total collapse of the market as was the case during the dot-com bubble burst (early 2000s) and the 2008 financial crisis, said Kirk.Many companies, however, are using AI as a cushion to justify job cuts as having spent billions on AI, they need to show returns to their investors. “Do I think there have been layoffs as a result of AI…sure they have. I just think there’s plenty of others that have nothing to do with AI but business performance. Organisations are having to be more cost efficient because their businesses haven’t been performing the way they should and in many cases, it is quite easy to point a finger and say it is an AI transformation,” Kirk said.In India, the impact of the conflict has been more pronounced in sectors such as manufacturing. “There we have not only seen a slowdown in the hiring process but also jobs being put on hold till we see clarity because some of the jobs are senior in nature,” said Nilay Khandelwal, senior MD, India and Singapore at Michael Page.