Richard Collins is the co-founder and chief executive of ClickIQ and here he talks about Smarter Recruitment with Artificial Intelligence.
Recruitment is a people business. But it is also increasingly a numbers game. There is pressure to fill jobs faster and more effectively. Savvy recruiters are turning to programmatic software to increase the efficiency of their pay-per-click job ads.
Programmatic software is a hard worker. It stops recruiters from wasting their budgets on easy-to-fill vacancies once the desired number of applications are received. This frees up funds for the hard-to-fill roles. By increasing the cost per click to raise their profile and put them in front of more job seekers.
Don’t confuse ‘hard-working’ with ‘smart’ though. While programmatic software does a great job of improving ad performance and delivering cost savings, there are some limitations. This is because it doesn’t distribute your budget in the most efficient way it could. It guesses. It speculates. It makes mistakes. It doesn’t learn from its mistakes, because it can’t.
Artificial intelligence: disrupting recruitment advertising
Enter artificial intelligence (AI). We don’t mean a bunch of humanoid robots joining the workforce. We mean software and computers capable of thinking, learning and adapting. This is a fully fledged reality. And it presents an exciting opportunity for recruiters to improve the way they scout for talent.
AI adds a layer of intelligence to programmatic software. By looking at past campaigns on different job aggregators, analysing bid levels, site traffic, conversion rates and other market characteristics. It then determines where your ad should be placed and what the bid price should be, turning a reactive process into a proactive and predictive one. And it learns from every job, continuously improving ad performance. Put another way, AI ‘knows’ what the perfect campaign should look like before it even starts.
AI occupies the next logical place in the evolution of proficient recruitment advertising. AI makes the complex simple and delivers savings together with a far higher degree of effectiveness than has ever been possible before. We are at dawn of a huge leap forward in ad efficiency. And the real advantage of AI is for ever more intelligent recruitment.
Benefits to recruiters
AI will help recruiters – whether corporate HR, recruitment agencies or job boards – to do their jobs better. The five key benefits of AI are:
* Spending recruitment advertising budgets on the media that will deliver the best returns.
* No overspend on easy to fill roles or underspend on hard to fill positions.
* AI knows the perfect campaign before it even starts.
* Performance-based online advertising becomes a reality.
* Effortless insight and control of recruitment advertising budgets.
Where next for AI?
Ensuring the right quality of applicant is a responsibility that falls to the recruiter. This is currently outside the capabilities of machines and AI. Although that is a situation that will no doubt change in the not-too-distant future.
Richard Collins is the co-founder and chief executive of ClickIQ, a private equity backed online recruitment marketing and analytics platform. Most of his career has been dedicated to using technology to revolutionise the recruitment marketing industry and improve the applicant attraction process.
