3 things to know about AI now to prepare for future success

This newsletter comes to you from Jason Heilman , SVP of Product at Bullhorn , and highlights the recent webinar, Exploring AI: A Conversation with Matthew Fischer and Jason Heilman. You can find a recording of that session here. And make sure you subscribe to stay up-to-date with all things AI and automation.

AI has captured the world's imagination, particularly in the capabilities unveiled by generative AI. Open AI, the maker of ChatGPT, has combined an immense amount of data and decades of technical breakthroughs into an astonishingly approachable and versatile tool. Anyone who has tried it out can understand why it has scaled to over 100 million users faster than anything before it, in a mere matter of months.??

Since ChatGPT and other AI tools started to make headlines, I’ve been asked countless times about what this means for staffing and how Bullhorn is going to approach AI. My answer? There are a number of obvious early opportunities to take advantage of this technology, and there’s still a lot we’re learning about AI and its applications within staffing.

Many are already using AI…but the majority are still feeling it out

To get a pulse on how the staffing industry is thinking about AI, Bullhorn recently sent out a short survey to our customers, and the insights were really interesting. Here’s a quick look at the findings, and the full report can be found here.

While those are intriguing data points, the one I find most compelling is that a majority of those we surveyed are mainly curious about what other staffing firms are doing. It’s great that over half are planning to roll out AI-driven solutions within the next year, and even better that 60% are already working with generative AI. The fact that so many of our customers are primarily interested in what others are doing with AI signals to me that we should share as many of our findings as early and often as possible. This is a journey we’ll be taking along with our customers, and the closer we work together, the more beneficial it will be to our industry.??

I’ve talked to a number of staffing executives about how they are already experimenting with AI. What I most often hear is that they have a handful of recruiters experimenting with ChatGPT, usually to help with messaging or summarization of content. There are a few who are systematizing this, but most have just started to look into it rather than implementing it in a strategic way across the business. They are also limiting their adoption due to security and compliance concerns, both important considerations.

If you’re reading this and worried that you’re behind or that you’re not investing enough in AI, don’t panic. Bullhorn is already thinking about how to apply AI to staffing to make it that much easier for you to implement it into the things you’re already doing, like sourcing candidates, screening resumes, reaching out to candidates, and writing job descriptions, and do it in a way that is safe and compliant.

The current AI landscape (and how Bullhorn is approaching this space)

The current AI leaders are the traditional “big tech” providers such as Microsoft/Open AI (ChatGPT) and Google (Bard). Thanks to Meta (Facebook) open-sourcing much of their technology, there has been astounding progress in open-source models, which are already outperforming some versions of ChatGPT.?

Right now, most of you who are using an AI tool are probably navigating to a separate window, working in that platform, and then bringing that information back into your ATS. Our goal at Bullhorn is to embed AI directly into your workflow, creating curated, staffing-specific applications of AI that just make sense.

Applying AI to staffing-specific use cases

While AI is incredibly promising and could revolutionize the staffing industry, it is important to understand that today, it works best as an enabler to augment your existing tools.?

So, what does that look like in practice??

While the applications of AI in staffing may seem complex, at Bullhorn, we think of staffing AI as falling into three buckets: generative AI, sourcing AI, and directive AI.?

I see generative AI helping to transform processes that recruiters are already doing, like:

• Creating a summary of a candidate's profile?
• Writing a message to a candidate about how they’d be a great fit for a job opening??
• Generating a series of pre-screening questions specific to that candidate for that role
• Crafting a pitch to the client about why this candidate is a great fit

Extending past generating new content, sourcing AI optimizes even more parts of the recruitment process, like candidate matching, searching for new job orders, and identifying opportunities with existing clients that you may not be aware of.?

And to help recruiters better focus their time and efforts in the right places, directive AI can identify risks and opportunities, suggest things for recruiters to get done that day, and find the best person to contact at a customer or prospect. This task is pretty well handled by analytics platforms right now, but we see the potential for AI to have an even greater impact here in the long run.

Now, it’s no secret that AI can speed up your processes and help your team reduce manual work. But in addition to making you more efficient, it also helps you generate more value from your data and see a higher ROI on your overall tech investment – two big wins for staffing firms right now.

We are incredibly excited about the future we can construct alongside our customers by leveraging these new AI technologies. Stay tuned for more AI-focused webinars where we’ll share practical ways to apply AI to processes like sourcing and tips on making sure your team is prepared to add AI to your tech stack.?

Are there other AI topics you’re looking for more insight on? Let me know in the comments! ??

And if you’re looking for more information on Bullhorn’s AI product, copilot, check out our website.