6 ways to upskill recruitment teams for 2024

This event brings together the world leaders in Talent Acquisition. The aim is to collaborate, iterate, learn and invent the future of recruitment together.

Generative AI poses a fundamental question: what is a competency today and tomorrow?

Here are 6 areas of upskilling for recruitment teams that I took away from the event.

???URGENT NEED TO REVIEW CANDIDATE EVALUATION PROCESSES

What weight do pure technical mastery, reflection & soft skills have in the evaluation of candidates?

How should they be weighted, and how should they be evaluated?

Let's take the case of a female developer. Are we looking for a developer who knows how to code everything by herself, or rather one who can augment, optimize & write her code faster with Copilot-type wizards?

"What is a developer's skill in the age of Copilot?"

As Guillaume explains, today, developers who use generative AI tools have increased their productivity by 55% (even though the technology has only just been released...).

So, we urgently need to ask ourselves the right questions today, and adapt our assessments as quickly as possible to hire people with skills that are compatible with the future.

And review these assessments very regularly to adapt to the speed of evolution of AI tools.

Thank you Guillaume Alexandre for the exchange ??

?? AUTOMATED SOURCING IS THE NEXT STEP IN RECRUITMENT

I found very interesting the diagram shared by Balazs Paroczay, which breaks down sourcing into 13 tasks.

Of the 13, he considers that only 3 cannot be automated: "job briefing", "search" & "screening".

Many tools are already available on the market. The advent of generative AI - and the race for productivity it brings with it - is helping to bring these solutions to the fore.

This will raise the awareness of management committees on the subject, and thus unlock the budget to get things moving. Use recruiters for their grey matter rather than for repetitive, non-value-added tasks.

On the subject of automation, I invite you to read this article, which looks at the aspects of sourcing that can be automated.

It goes without saying that Linkedin - by analyzing users' behavior on the platform - really does have a strong card to play, which should enable us to improve our productivity by connecting us more quickly with the right people (with behavior on the platform that suggests they're listening to the market, and receptive to our employer brand).

Provided the algorithms are well executed.

Alexandre, who was on the website of one of his clients who sells lingerie, received a Linkedin notification for the following job offer with the words "Your profile matches this offer" ??. And ths offer : "testers cubicles product textile lingerie sizes 95C"

?? MESSAGE WRITING TO BE ENHANCED BY IA (NOT REPLACED)

There's going to be a lot of noise with AI: tons of messages are going to be generated by AI and dumped onto our candidates.

So, the goal is going to be big: writing ultra-personalized messages to hundreds of candidates in an automated way - while standing out ??

The use of text expanders will be decisive. A Text Expander is a productivity tool designed to save you time by automatically generating predetermined text extracts in response to specific "trigger" words or phrases.

Jan Tegze mentions Vengreso as one of the best tools. He also mentioned Briskine.

It will therefore be crucial to use AI tools in writing our messages, but also to use your critical mind to write messages that will need to be :

Personalized. In his talk , Marcel Van Der Meer shared with us an automation excel doc that uses ChatGPT to generate personalization phrases based on the Linkedin profile.

With emotion. Sandra Feldmann showed us how we can generate mass emailings with emotion.

For my part, I think the key will also be to bring value to candidates, with a targeted marketing content strategy based on the candidate persona.

?? BOOLEAN SOURCING ISN'T DEAD (YET)

In early October, Linkedin Recruiter announced in NYC the arrival in 2024 of a ChatGPT internal to Linkedin Recruiter. In other words, the system will no longer search for profiles by keyword, as is the case today, but in the form of a prompt.

Guillaume Alexandre is dubious and thinks that this will be less effective in the search for candidates, and that we'll have to be inventive to hijack the algorithm.

In fact, Irina Shamaeva, our global sourcing praetress, devoted her talk to optimizing searches in Linkedin Recruiter to go further than the "fields" proposed by Linkedin, which are not necessarily filled in declaratively by users.

Here are some of his tips:

?? Use Booleans in the "keywords" field, but not only. Also in the "job title" and "company" fields.

??Linkedin has considerably improved the "skills" field. When you search by skills, it no longer searches only the skills field (at the bottom of the profile), but the entire profile, including the candidate's Linkedin CV.

?? She also encourages us to use more "Linkedin operators", for example: headline: "open to work" OR headline:looking OR headline:hiring summary: "president's club" summary: "willing to relocate" skills: "chemical process" skills: "german language" spokenlanguage: "python" NOT seniority:5 (NOT manager)

?? Finally, she gave us 4 sourcing methodologies to use to find more candidates, which she dubbed: "targeted", "open-ended", "self-centered" & "calculated".

?? PROMPT ENGINEERING IS A MUST

The new way of communicating with machines will be mainly via prompts.

Prompt engineering is very important, because the way a prompt is written has a huge influence on the relevance of the result. Which persona should the AI imitate? What's the context? How should it proceed? What is the expected result? Many factors come into play to create potentially very different results.

Can anyone do prompt engineering? Of course, it's a skill that can be acquired and refined with experience. So it's important for recruitment teams to start practicing right away, so as to become more adept at writing prompts (which will be an indispensable skill in the new Linkedin Recruiter) and also to get a real feel for how it can help us improve our productivity.

We recommend setting up a "prompt library" to store and offer optimized prompts, ready for use in collaborative mode.

Where to start when you're a beginner?

Here are a few recruitment examples:

Considering him as your personal assistant, and talking to him about a candidate, listing his strengths and red flags, then writing a summary that can be sent directly to the Hiring Manager.

Consider him/her as the Hiring Manager for a specific position, and ask for additional information about the position to be filled: explain or understand a technology or concept, get information about the industry, the key issues of the position (to prepare interview questions), etc.

Upskilling recruitment teams in this area will be a strategic priority for years to come.

And last But not Least :

?? WE ARE HUMANS , BE PROUD TO BE HUMAN

How are we different from a machine?

Rassam Yaghmaei delivered an inspirational talk to encourage us to cultivate the different facets of our personality, while showing empathy towards others, which will enable us to have quality relationships with our candidates

The advent of generative AI in recruitment is placing greater emphasis on the soft skills that recruiters need to develop.

The 2 main soft skills on which we can focus the upskilling of recruitment teams are :

THE ABILITY TO BUILD RELATIONSHIPS

The most successful recruiters will be those who can put stars in the eyes of the best candidates, by telling them how your company differentiates itself in the marketplace.

A good storyteller will tell stories that bring out the uniqueness and culture of your organization. He or she will have the ability to present the job as both challenging and appealing, yet achievable so as not to frighten.

Recruiters will need to be even more adept at creating a close relationship with candidates, so that they are willing to share their story, values and ambitions. This will then enable them to pitch the company in terms of what's important to the candidate, to help them project themselves.

In addition, having a community spirit enables you to work collaboratively with your peers and be constantly on the lookout for ways to improve.

In addition, personal branding via social networks will help recruiters make the dif in the jungle of AI Generative.

Marcel Van der Meer told us about the AppSumo app, which lets us send automatic birthday and congrats messages to our Linkedin contacts. Also, the app. Salesrobot AI Linkedin commenter lets you create comments on other people's posts.