Mercury and Textkernel discuss trends and strategies that will shape the recruitment landscape!

In a recent webinar, Daniel Fox, Marketing Manager of Mercury, discussed with Grant Telfer, Sales Director UK & Ireland of Textkernel about changing trends within the recruitment and staffing industry and how to tackle them with technology. Job market data In 2020, the number of jobs added in the UK from January to December was 8.1 million. In 2021, as we started to emerge and the expectation and positivity increased, it increased to 11.6 million jobs in the UK over the 2021 period, rising in 2022 to 12.6 million. However, in 2023, after profit warnings and revenues declining, it returned to 9.8 million, and that is a shift and change in the market. In March 2021, around 350,000 jobs were added per week, seeing a similar number for May 2020 and 2022, but in February 2024, around 160,000 jobs per week. Making for an interesting blend of not only the skills gap issue, but equally a real issue in terms of the number of jobs. It’s understandably impacted what recruiters and staffing organizations did during a challenging market. It's not just the case of upskilling and reskilling the candidates you had, it was about not finding candidates as a bigger issue. This in turn made business development aspects of a recruiters role at the forefront. Pace Pace became more important than ever. Recruiters need to be first to market to find the candidates, find the best way to reach out to them, engage with them so that you place the CV and those candidates in front of your clients faster than your competitors have. The jobs landscape is changing very quickly, so recruiters need to change at the same pace as jobs are changing. Platform vs Tech Stack for AI The duo then went on to discuss machine learning and AI. In comparing the tech stack model with the platform choice, with the main concern becoming evident - if you have a tech stack made up of lots of individual component parts, essentially silos of data, it's going to make it very difficult for a machine to learn from data because it's all stored in different ways. But, looking at the platform alternative gives you a single source of truth. It's one place for the machine to be able to learn from and any of the automation or analytics are already embedded and connected within that technology. So, it's giving you a much more robust infrastructure to begin with. Microsoft leads the AI race Daniel spoke about Microsoft Copilot leading the AI race to reduce admin, make our lives more convenient, saving us time, saving us money and capture conversations better. The Microsoft AI model works to train your data on your own information without that information being used to train the external model. Keeping your information secure in what is termed a one-way mirror. And so, you get the benefits of the large language model but internally you're training it on your own data that remains secure. Speed and quality Looking forward into 2024 the duo agreed there are two main discussions to be had: is this affecting speed or quality or both. The duo encouraged thinking around automating mundane processes, scheduling interviews, data compliance checks and refining your current data first before buying new in such as reviewing candidate data. Mercury and Textkernel Partnership For more information, contact us today. Let’s build the future of staffing & recruitment together.Written by Emily Jerman.