How AI enables recruiters to focus what's really important

New technologies create more time. More time by speeding up tasks and therefore freeing up time to focus on what’s truly important; more time to create new solutions; more time to make audacious dreams a reality.

Over the weekend I watched the fabulous film Hidden Figures about three highly intelligent, black women working for NASA just before they managed to put the first man on the moon. They had to overcome challenges due to racial and gender discrimination, whilst at the same time seeing their jobs being replaced by machines. NASA introduced the IBM mainframe computer as it computes faster than any human meaning the protagonists experience similar anxieties and observe the same advantages as we can today.

Giving us more time

New technology increases the speed of outputs, thus provides a faster feedback and feedforward cycle. This gives people more time to focus on solving more complex problems whilst delivering them in a more personalised and relevant manner.

It is the same everywhere:

• In education, technology allows teachers to evolve their roles to mentors and tutors instead of being knowledge exhausts; as well as personalising their approach to the student instead of the traditional cookie cutter approach.
•  In recruitment, AI driven matching and selection technologies like Pocket Recruiter reduce time to shortlist from 3 days to 20 minutes and increases output to 24% more interviews - an increase in both speed and relevance. Pocket Recruiter increases recruiters’ time to personalise their approaches and morph into coaches instead of check-box tickers.

How it can be used

At Advanced Resource Managers (ARM) deploying Pocket Recruiter has led to an increase of 40% of hours on the phone and 26% increase in the number of calls made to candidates. These numbers are of importance as Leon Howgill - MD of ARM - believes that the recruiter of the future is a career coach and candidate engagement specialist.

To ensure its consultants are truly using their newly-gained time for this specific focus and to put it front and centre of everybody's minds, they have struck a deal with Feefo - a review provider widely used with consumer products: Candidates are asked to rate the performance of consultants. The individual results are published on ARM’s website as well as Feefo’s. The next step is changing remuneration from placement to satisfaction score.

In Hidden Figures as well as in the real world the thinking behind and the input into the machines is provided by people, as is sense-checking the outputs. This is how the time gained can be used - building new models of thinking, adjusting them with every new set of data and ensuring inputs and outputs are not only valid but value adding.

As Gary Vaynerchuk so eloquently put it during his key note of HR Tech World San Francisco:

 “It is insane to me, how excited I am about the future of the world because as technology commoditizes shit that doesn’t matter, all of us are going to be forced into the things that actually do matter: people!”