"The first car that recruits its own engineers." And with that gimmick, Volvo managed to steal all the spotlight at the Brussels Motor Show 2019.
Honestly, the whole concept of a 'recruitment car', powered with Artificial Intelligence, picking its own technicians is quite impressive. The video presentation makes it a great watch.
But coming to the practicality, this is one of the most useless things I have ever seen. And there's a good chance even Volvo knows it too. It was primarily meant to be a marketing stunt. And the fact that we're even talking about it, clearly it has filled its purpose.
In fact, 70 percent of all the news coverage on Brussels Motor Show 2019 was dedicated to Volvo.
So, it was/is an incredible campaign that Creative agency FamousGrey managed to pull for Volvo.
In brief, the car's AI system interviews candidates for the job and analyze their technical and social proficiency based on their answers. An evaluation document is made of each candidate. And then those docs are sent to the company's HR department, where HR managers meet and recruit the right candidates.
While AI is used more than ever in the recruitment process today, it isn’t known to be the most efficient measure. For instance, only last year, Amazon dumped its AI recruitment tool because the system was showing biased against women. So, no matter how advanced we've gone with Artificial Intelligence, it remains quite inefficient.
How effective was Volvo's 'Recruitment Car', the insights remain hidden. No one knows how efficiently it did its jobs. For all we know, it was a great concept for a marketing campaign.
In short, to answer your question: NO.
Forget me, no one will ever trust a car and its Artificial Intelligence to recruit.
AI remains far from the core of manual-free recruitment/hiring process. Not that it won’t get there; it will! However, at the moment, on the consumer level, we are still very far from deploying AI to hire employees.