There is no doubt that AI is going to revolutionise the world of recruitment. The only question is how quickly is it going to arrive and whether your organisation will be ready to reap the rewards?
As a recruitment agency, your teams will be collating vast quantities of data daily on your clients, candidates and placements that will be an invaluable resource in the future if it can be accessed by the numerous AI tools that will be coming on stream.
At the same time, the developers working across your platform providers will all be beavering away, trying to stay ahead of the competition to deliver you the best AI tools. However, there are a number of challenges that need to be addressed before you can be certain that AI is really going to give you the edge:
The biggest problem is that not one system contains all of your data. Whilst there has been some consolidation across the platform providers, the majority of agencies will use the best-in-class system for their CRM, Timesheets and Finance ledgers, resulting in these AI tools only having the capability to interrogate a partial data set.
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- Similarly, if you or your competition are only able to use the tools that your platform providers make available, then that isn’t going to give you a discernible advantage, unless of course your peers choose not to jump on the band wagon, but that is unlikely!
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- Whilst recruitment leaders have a huge interest in AI, the same entrepreneurial spirit results in a relatively small number of large recruitment businesses. As a result, few are yet at a scale where they can afford to invest in a traditional business intelligence team and consider themselves lucky if they have a data analyst, never mind a fully-fledged data scientist. As a result, even if they had the data at their fingertips then they may struggle to harness AI’s potential.
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- The final challenge is that much of the data is collected by humans, who’s primary motivation in life isn’t to win the ‘most compliant award’ at the end of each quarter. As a result, to get the greatest value form your data, much of it will need to be cleansed and aggregated between systems to deliver the most accurate insight.
There will be no shortage of AI tools released over the coming years, each with differing price points and capabilities, one of which will be a perfect fit for your organisation. If you can get your data into a position to be able to harness their power, you will no doubt experience a real commercial advantage.
However, the work should start now to have a solution to aggregate your data into a single environment, and ensure it is clean. This will also deliver some immediate benefits:
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- Centralising your key data will make it significantly easier to deliver a business intelligence suite that can be used across your business to enable data led decision making
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- Efficiencies will be realised across your back-office teams as they will no longer need to constantly download reports from your platforms and then wrestle with the data in Excel to calculate commissions, perform compliance checks and deliver ad hoc reporting
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- For the first time, you will be able to assign a value to your clients and contractors and manage them appropriately and focus on the opportunities that will drive real value for the business.
Whilst this destination may feel out of reach, the fact that many of you will be working on cloud-based applications, opens up the opportunity to avoid the traditional approach to building a bespoke data warehouse, which often take years to deliver and a minimum six figure spend!
