Staffing World 2024 Recap: AI and the Future of Recruitment

Author: Blake Babcock, VP, Client Engagement at Staffing Solutions Enterprises

The week of October 21st I attended Staffing World, hosted by The American Staffing Association. This was my third consecutive year attending this conference and it never disappoints. The conference is an opportunity to connect and learn from industry experts and peers from across the United States and Abroad with the goal of bringing back tangible things to improve our internal operations, processes, and technology to better serve our clients.

The year is 2024, and as you can imagine, AI dominated many of the conversations that took place that week. However, this year felt a little different for me personally. While AI dominated the conversations the topic of human interaction and relationships was not left undiscussed. I believe we’ve begun to make the turn from “Oh no! AI is going to take all of our jobs!” To, “How can we better utilize AI to improve the efficiency and experience of our work.” I might be in the minority with that sentiment, but I’ll further explain in my takeaways.

Policy → Upskill → Enable:

1. Create an AI Policy at your organization. Fortunately for us, the American Staffing Association has provided plenty of resources to help organizations craft such a policy that makes sense. Don’t go it alone; leverage your network and specific industry associations/organizations to help you develop the policy. Share the policy with your staff and ensure that there is a clear understanding of what the policy means and how it works.
2. Upskill your staff. It’s not enough to create a policy and blindly trust that your employees will figure it out. What AI tools make the most sense for individuals in their specific roles to utilize and how do they utilize that AI tool in a way that is compliant with your policy. Again, leverage your network and industry peers to learn from them on what tools they are utilizing and how.
3. Enable your employees to utilize these AI tools. Chances are they are already using AI (approved or not), so enable them by reviewing the policy to ensure compliance, upskill them specific to a tool that makes sense for their work and enable them leverage AI in a way that can make their work more efficient.

Moonshot Transformational Opportunities:

How can we leverage AI without losing the “human” element of what we do? Afterall, we are in the people business and our passion at SSE is, “Impacting lives by creating transformational opportunities”. What would it look like if we could “moonshot” the number of lives impacted by utilizing AI without losing the human element of relationships?

We’ve done just that with the utilization of ConverzAI. We’ve been able to utilize this specific AI tool as a “virtual” recruiter conducting the initial screen of candidates applying to a specific job. We began by beta testing this tool with a very specific project because we wanted to ensure that 1) the candidate experience is satisfactory to our standards at SSE 2) it was providing efficiency for the recruiter on the project and 3) the client was getting top talent in a timely manner.

What we've discovered is that ConverzAI can screen multiple candidates at once during its extended operating hours—something that would be impractical for a human. This enables the recruiter managing the project to start the day with a list of qualified candidates, fostering those important human relationships in our talent acquisition process. So far, this AI tool has helped us make 80 placements. No, this didn’t replace the recruiter on our team; it allowed us to impact more lives by creating a more efficient process.

Digital Marketing:

It’s the new first impression. By the time our client engagement team connects with a potential client or our recruiting team connects with a potential candidate, they’ve seen our content in the digital world. From a post on LinkedIn, Instagram, and or visited our website they have some inclination of who we are. We are consistently making improvements to the content that we put out to ensure we are effectively communicating who we are and what we do.

This work never ends because you must ensure that your content is catering to your target audience. For us, that’s atricky task due to the vast audiences that we engage with as candidates and clients. At the conference, we focused on one simple question to tackle this: Is it easy to engage with your brand? We live in the world of the easy button (I actually just ordered a book I remembered I needed to buy while writing this blog, it will be on my doorstep tomorrow…that was easy).

Invite peers, friends and people in your network to take the journey on your website. As an example, we have staff and friends of staff go to our website and apply to jobs and provide feedback on the experience. Was it easy to find the jobs page? Was it easy to apply? Were you able to find the information to questions you would have as a job seeker? What other information was not listed that you felt should have been listed? What would you have liked to see to provide a better experience?

Final Thoughts

This is a never-ending journey of self-improvement to ensure you’re able to be seen, you’re able to be understood, and most importantly you’re able to be contacted for the human element of relationships.

This is a fraction of the discussions and findings that took place during Staffing World and there’s still plenty of notes from the weeks sessions to sift through and prioritize as we aim to better serve you, our next great client or our next great candidate.