The Future of Accelerated Recruitment
Our recent event exploring AI in recruitment brought together experts from LinkedIn, Microsoft, and Mercury, offering a wealth of insights into this rapidly evolving AI technology landscape.
The Future of Accelerated Recruitment.
The event kicked off with an emphasis on the rapid changes in the recruitment and talent acquisition landscape. As we step into 2024, the skills required in the job market are evolving at an unprecedented pace. The challenge of being the first to source talent has never been greater and the consensus is clear: AI in staffing isn't just an option; it's a necessity that's rapidly becoming more sophisticated and integral to the recruitment process.This technological advancement brings a shift from the traditional recruitment model, with the need to provide a differentiated and outstanding service. Businesses are increasingly seeking to fuel their growth, not necessarily through expanding their workforce, but through optimising it with recruiters aided by AI.“AI isn't going away; rather, it's poised to become faster, more relevant, and more indispensable in the recruitment industry” Steve Barnhurst, Mercury.
AI in Professional Networking with LinkedIn
Tony O'Hara from LinkedIn shared insights on AI's integration into LinkedIn's services. AI is already a part of many LinkedIn functionalities, and the company is continuously exploring new ways to integrate AI to assist recruiters. LinkedIn's commitment to responsible AI principles, emphasising fairness, transparency, and accountability, was also highlighted. One of the significant takeaways from LinkedIn's perspective was the changing skill set of recruiters. AI is expected to automate mundane tasks, freeing recruiters to focus more on relational and strategic aspects of their job.
Microsoft's Role in AI-Driven Recruitment
Rob Smithson from Microsoft discussed their advancements in AI technology, particularly the Copilot technology. Microsoft's AI innovations are geared toward enhancing the recruitment process, making it more efficient and effective. The integration of AI in Microsoft products is not only about improving functionalities but also about ensuring these technologies are responsibly and ethically used.Microsoft's Copilot is at the forefront of integrating advanced AI technologies into everyday business applications. It's designed to enhance efficiency and decision-making processes. For the recruitment industry, this means leveraging AI to streamline various tasks and provide a virtual assistant on every desktop.
Enhancing Recruiters' Capabilities
Rob spoke about how Copilot’s generative AI capabilities are being used in other industries, citing US car retailer Carmax who uses Copilot to write adverts for cars. Rob spoke about how it speeds up content production, but they've actually found that the content that's being written by AI is more effective at engaging with customers than what was being previously written by agencies or their own internal teams.Copilot isn't about replacing human recruiters; rather, it's about augmenting their capabilities. By automating routine tasks, recruiters can focus more on strategic activities like building relationships and making nuanced hiring decisions.With Copilot, recruitment becomes more data driven. The tool uses Microsoft’s robust data analytics and machine learning capabilities so will be able to provide insights into candidate trends, skill set analyses, and market changes. This data-driven approach helps recruiters make informed decisions, stay ahead of industry trends, and better understand the evolving job market.A key highlight of Copilot is its seamless integration with the entire Microsoft platform. This connectivity allows for a more holistic approach to recruitment, where data can be leveraged and used for efficient knowledge sharing and coordination within the team.Rob spoke about the importance of security and explained how Microsoft Copilot and Azure AI operate without using your data to train the underlying AI Large Language Model. “It’s like a one-way mirror” explained Rob, describing how the Copilot model can be trained and used on your own data within the walls of your own Azure tenancy.“We offer you effectively a one-way mirror so you get all the benefits of the large language models and all of the technology innovation that Microsoft put in across many different customers, many different industries. That all flows into your business to make it great, but your own intellectual property does not flow back out to train the underlying model. So you can make your own Copilot as smart as you want for your own organisation. It's not going to benefit your competitor down the road” Rob Smithson, Microsoft.Microsoft emphasises the responsible use of AI. Copilot is developed with ethical considerations in mind, ensuring fairness, transparency, and accountability in AI-driven recruitment processes. This approach addresses concerns about bias in AI, aiming to make recruitment more inclusive and diverse.Looking forward, Copilot is just the beginning of AI's role in transforming recruitment. Microsoft's ongoing innovations in AI promise to bring even more sophisticated tools to the recruitment industry, further enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of talent acquisition processes.“You'll see [Microsoft] products getting closer and closer, and that enables users like yourselves or people within your business to operate from a single screen that people are familiar with”. Rob Smithson, Microsoft.Rob Smithson's presentation on Microsoft's Copilot technology highlighted the immense potential of AI in revolutionizing recruitment. It underscores the importance for recruitment firms to embrace these technological advancements, not only to streamline their processes but also to gain a competitive edge in the talent acquisition market. With tools like Copilot, the future of recruitment is smarter, more efficient, and increasingly data driven.
Mercury's Vision for the Future
In the last session of the morning, Daniel Fox from Mercury shared our vision of utilising Microsoft’s Power Platform and our own innovative technology to enhance operational effectiveness and acceleration in staffing businesses.Daniel observed how recruitment’s relationship with data is changing to have large data sets that allow advanced machine learning tools to analyse and build reliable models that guide consultants to the best next actions.He spoke about how generative AI is already being used to help consultants write job ads, candidate summaries and even suggest questions for the consultant to ask during an interview.But with AI tools able to ‘listen’ to every conversation and track every message, it gives us the ability to use sentiment analysis and understand the strength of our relationships. Deploying people to the clients or candidates where they can be most effective is just one of the marginal gains available to recruitment leaders, only now it can be based on data intelligence rather than gut feel and instinct.
Accelerated Recruitment
On the topic of Accelerated Recruitment, the Mercury team spoke about the importance of being first and the impact that has on the propensity to close a deal. Looking at stats from two Mercury clients, we were able to see how Mercury has already reduced the time to first submission, interview and placement.Taking a scenario of Contractor recruitment, where often the first agency to submit suitable candidates wins the business, we looked at how we can use technology to bring that time down from an average of 4 days to just a few minutes. In the demonstration that followed, Kevin Flower used Microsoft Teams to call a client and take a job order over the phone. In real-time, Conversation Intelligence listened to the call, producing a transcription and extracting the details about the vacancy. The automation then created the vacancy in the CRM and enriched it using generative AI before carrying out an automated search for suitable candidates. Within minutes, matching candidates were identified, and they were each sent an SMS inviting them to engage with a virtual agent if they were interested in the role. In less than ten minutes, the hiring manager was presented with a list of suitable candidates who had expressed an interest in the position. In a contractor market that speed will increase the win percentage considerably. But this scenario also highlights other opportunities for agencies to use the technology at other stages of their process or to work jobs that may not have otherwise been worked on.
Putting consultant back into Recruitment Consultant
One attendee asked if adopting this technology would make it more difficult for agencies to justify their fees. Mercury responded to the contrary. Daniel says “A large proportion of a consultant's time is currently spent on admin or doing time-hungry activities like coordinating calendars and booking interviews. Taking this away means a consultant can invest more time in understanding their clients, becoming experts in the market, and nurturing their candidate pool. These things are far more valuable to the client than making multiple calls to book an interview”.The Mercury team closed the session by sharing updates from our recent development hackathon, from which many of the projects have already made it into development sprints for future release. This includes using data to better understand people's networks and how recruiters can leverage candidates' connections to make more placements. “Current recruitment is reactive, responding to vacancies and job orders. Modern technology helps us put people into jobs, not just fill vacancies” commented Daniel.The event highlighted a crucial point: the need for recruiters to adapt to these technological advancements. The future of recruitment lies in leveraging AI not as a replacement for human recruiters but as a tool to enhance their capabilities, focusing on what humans do best - building relationships and making strategic decisions.We thank all those who attended and gave their valuable opinions and insights, particularly Rob Smithson from Microsoft and Tony O’Hara from LinkedIn. If you are interested in joining one of our future sessions, please visit our events page.