The AI Race. Winner Takes All?
One thing is always certain when I enter an ultra marathon race – I never finish first. I enjoy walking too much, eating too much and chatting too much with fellow competitors.
However, over the years I have accepted that finding the best talent for your company can be an even tougher challenge than running across the mountains of Nepal so my race strategy for this has fundamentally changed.
The results are always worth the effort, but there are no guarantees. You could find a viable candidate tomorrow, or you could find one a year from now, and not necessarily have a proven process for getting from point A to point B.
But today, technology and AI is making the process of recruitment more efficient and effective than ever. It’s not a surprise there is a race to digitalise recruitment when you consider the benefits – the ability to spend less and find employees who are a better fit for your company.
Should you be using cognitive tools and data to find the best people to join your team?
Why there’s a race to digitalise recruitment
Recruiters today are facing some serious challenges, including:
Competition. It’s getting harder and harder to find people who are prepared to move into specialised roles. The rise of short-term contract roles hasn’t done anything to help with the process of finding quality hires.
Quality of candidates. Younger workers aren’t loyal to any one company. Plus, they may not be prepared for the nuances involved in their jobs. This makes ongoing training and coaching essential.
Retention. Retention has emerged as a significant challenge, especially with millennials. They will make up roughly 50% of the workforce by 2020, so not learning to work with millennials will put you at a disadvantage.
Digitalising recruitment can help ease some of these burdens. Add to this the mounting costs of recruitment and you can see why companies are looking for alternatives.
How tech is changing recruitment
Many industries are being disrupted by innovation. Recruitment is no exception.
Tools like GetLinks and Arya are changing the way recruiters approach their work.
Both recruiters and jobseekers can sign up to join GetLinks’ job portal, which will automatically match recruiters with tech talent.
Arya, by contrast, is an AI recruiting platform. It will learn and repeat your most successful hiring patterns. This frees up recruiters to focus on engaging candidates instead of searching for them. Most importantly, it will help them find people who are the right fit for your company.
These types of tools can help you reduce the costs of recruiting while finding better candidates.
The benefits of using AI in your recruiting
Companies using tools like Mya, Olivia and Pomato are already seeing considerably more success in their recruitment efforts than those who aren’t.
Here are some of the benefits they’re already experiencing:
Reviewing resumes and CVs. You might use keyword searches to find relevant candidates (i.e. you might use the title of the position you’re looking to fill). But this might exclude certain applicants who’ve held the same position elsewhere but with a different title. AI can make sense of these differences and help you find more candidates.
Engagement. Tools are freeing up recruiters to focus on engaging candidates – not merely sorting CVs or scheduling interviews.
Making faster hires. Positions can go unfilled for months, leaving other team members to pick up the slack. Sometimes it means important work just doesn’t get done. Because you can run different scenarios in real time with AI tools, it makes it easier to fill positions faster.
Building a pipeline. You can either go looking for them or have them come looking for you. AI tools can match you up with the best possible candidates for you to sort through. That’s much more efficient than you running search after search trying to find the right people for your company.
Reduced overhead. Recruiters can be freed up to focused on high level activity instead of getting caught in the monotony of sorting CVs, scheduling interviews, and so on.
Wouldn’t you agree that this is a race worth entering and winning?
Looking forward to your thoughts.
