Automation isn’t always about doing less; sometimes it is just about shifting focus.

At Oceans, our talent acquisition process has always been fully human: every resume reviewed by a trained recruiter, every interview conducted in-house. But as our application numbers have drifted up (over 20k last year!), the wait time for candidates has gotten longer and longer as we struggle to meet the demands of a company where the headcount doubles every year.

So on my last visit to Sri Lanka, I suggested the possibility of at least partially automating resume screening. To me, it made sense: with years worth of data, training an algorithm to do the initial sort is a reasonable use of technology.

But the team was aghast. Human review has long been a cornerstone of how we recruit and the idea of doing anything else felt like a loss. They mourned those who might get passed over in the shuffle, the exceptions who wouldn’t get discovered by a mere machine.

So I posed a thought experiment: what if automating resume review allowed us to do twice as many phone screens?

The quarter-over-quarter model pushed by Wall Street has trained us to think in terms of reducing headcount; automation means investing in tech to eliminate people, saving money so the stock price goes up. And nowhere is this more noticeable than current discussions about AI, where CEOs with a vested interest tell us that in five years, all white collar jobs will be automated.

But as writer Joanna Maciejewska eloquently put it: “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.” Automation isn’t about having more or less hours in a day, it is just about changing the allocation of work to those hours. So when we think about automation, it shouldn’t always be with a “less” framing – we need to balance it with where we are going to redirect the energy.

To do that, I worked with the talent team to draw out our funnel: resume screen, phone screen, aptitude test, interview, etc. Then we looked at the conversion rate and time spent at each step to draw up a budget of where we were spending our resources. And I ended with a simple challenge: “I am not asking you to reduce; keep the time budget the same. But consider where we are most effective and then reallocate the hours to where you think humans make the biggest difference.”

Put that way, automating resume review made perfect sense to them. Would a few diamonds in the rough be missed out on? Sure. But by their own calculation, the additional time spent actually talking to real people and having dynamic conversations would actually help us find more potentially overlooked candidates.

Oceans is heavily skewed toward demographics that have traditionally been overlooked, and we’d like to keep it that way. Automation doesn’t have to be the end of everything good; it is just another tool in the box that can serve whatever goal you have. Yes, sometimes that is cost reduction, but it certainly doesn’t have to be. Wouldn’t it be lovely to hear a CEO say, “I want to keep our costs the same and use automation to increase our quality?”