Nick Woodward, from our patners ETZ Payments, shares his thoughts on how Artificial Intelligence-enabled software is set to further boost competitive advantage for recruitment businesses.
A Profound Effect
The quality of candidates reflects on your recruitment agency. In essence, you are only as good as your contractors. However, building a strong talent pool takes a lot of time and effort. One important aspect of this is resource redundancy. A bank of skillsets is required, as you need enough professionals to account for the fact that not every candidate is going to be available at a certain location or point in time.
Technology is revolutionising the search for talented contractors; making the filtering process quicker and smarter, to help recruiters match strong candidates to upcoming roles. Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) are having a particularly profound effect on the role that tech plays in building agencies’ little black books. It is clear that the businesses which pay attention to the rapidly increasing influence of AI are set to be the biggest beneficiaries.
Intelligence, Automation and Sophistication
Finding good quality candidates is a perpetual problem for employers and recruitment agencies are instrumental in filling the gap. A survey by Glassdoor has discovered that almost half (48%) of employers across the world find talent shortages their biggest challenge, and many are willing to pay for professional support services to boost recruitment.
While recruiters can achieve great results with traditional search methods such as manual review of contractor CVs, technology takes a great deal of time and effort out of the sifting process.
As we outlined in our recent Future of Recruitment whitepaper, new technologies underpinned by AI are enabling recruitment agencies to automatically analyse the skills and experience on every contractor’s profile. An intelligent algorithm scans each contractor’s resumé for keywords, throwing up search results that match the particular capabilities that are required. This enables agencies to quickly generate shortlists of relevant applicants to put forward for new positions. This sounds rudimentary and similar to searching a Word document with the Find and Replace tool.
More than this, it also provides greater sophistication through the ability to support proactive searching opportunities. AI enabled tools enable recruitment companies to listen to the skills gap issues that clients are facing and search for appropriate contractors to put forward, even when there is no formal position advertised.
Smart and Getting Even Smarter
We are all familiar with the way software automation takes the effort out of a manual task like talent searching. However, one of the really ground-breaking aspects of AI in recruitment is its ability to get better at candidate matching over time.
Artificial Intelligence is able to learn iteratively, which means that the more data it processes, the better it becomes at performing meaningful analysis of the data. Consequently, as you use AI-enabled recruitment technology it learns the type of candidates you are shortlisting. Over time, it becomes more skilled at suggesting the type of candidates you may want to shortlist in the future.
For recruitment agencies, this means you’re only going to get more effective results for your investment – and the more contractors you successfully match, the better your bottom-line performance.
Beyond Search and into the Back-Office with AI
AI is a really interesting example of how technology positively impacts recruitment through enabling your agency to add even more value when solving your clients’ key challenges. However, with this sophisticated shortlisting capability becoming more widely available, optimising the talent search process alone is not enough to provide long-term competitive advantage.
To future-proof your business, you need to look at performance holistically, and how tech can address productivity and performance shortfalls across your wider agency operations. Front-end tools like AI talent search software may help you to offer a higher standard of service, but when combined with back-office recruitment tools they enable you to streamline your entire operation.
Over the next weeks, months and years, we are going to see more and more sophisticated solutions hitting the market. The focus of these is likely to cut the time, cost and effort it takes to carry out everyday functions, boosting efficiency to improve the performance of your recruitment business.
By keeping your eyes and minds open to developments like AI and embracing software, you are better equipped to tackle your biggest business challenges. You are well positioned to stay one step ahead of the wider industry and provide a better service than your competitors.
Nick Woodward is the founder of ETZ Payments.
