The Consultant Machine: How digitalization is changing recruiters’ professional practices and identity

Abstract

Human Resources Analytics drawing on big data and artificial intelligence are today fundamentally changing the way labour market intermediaries work. Recruiters and HR consultants no longer rely on manually created databases and links, but increasingly on new technology which automatically links hundreds of these databases, yielding millions of data-points. This new technology takes over human decision-making by automatically distilling the ‘best fitting’ candidates and clients from large, Skynet-like databases. Yet, to date, little is known about how this new technology is transforming recruiters’ and HR consultants’ professional practices and identity, and what kinds of effects it has on socio-ideological systems of workers’ control, which have for decades been focused on the role of the discourse and not the material. In this text, we combine the lens of socio-materiality theory with the literature on systems of socio-ideological control to study how consultants of a large international labour market intermediary are affected by the introduction of a new big data based technology. As the firm’s management attempts to increase control over its employees through novel technology, and hopes to change their core identity from being socially oriented to one that is focussed on the commercial side of their work, consultants find new ways to deflect these efforts. Our findings, based on semi-structured interviews, non-participant observations and document collection indicate that a recent deployment of a new technological big data tool, intended to refocus consultants’ efforts on the commercial side of their work, has backfired on the company’s management efforts of enacting more control over the way their employees work. Consultants showed resistance to the new tool, because it is incongruent with their social-centred identity. They developed novel ways of using it more in line with their core identity.