Using AI to Elevate the Strategic Value of Recruiters

For recruiters and hiring managers, the fear of being ‘displaced’ by AI is real. There is discomfort in change and the unknown, and at Sapia.ai we work daily with organisations to reframe how AI is perceived by hiring teams.

We know that technology like Sapia.ai doesn’t displace, it elevates. But how to manage that elevation with your team is critical. Bringing a team of recruiters and potentially an entire organisation of hiring managers on a journey of change requires you to enable them to envision what’s possible for them in the new world. (Check out how we do that here ).

Our customers know that leveraging tools like Sapia.ai to take care of the ‘grunt work’ of recruiting - the screening, the shortlisting, the scheduling - enables recruiters to become strategic business partners. They have much more time to focus on building and enabling strategic functions like advisory, sourcing, and performance analytics.??

But what does it mean for a recruiter to elevate their role to this strategic level? What can they be doing day to day, with all this extra time??

Here are some practical examples of things that recruiters can finally start doing when they’re no longer shuffling through mountains of applications.?

Enhancing Employer Branding and Employee Value Proposition (EVP)

EVP improvement: Focus on understanding and communicating what makes your workplace attractive. This means conducting employee surveys, focus groups, and market research to enhance the EVP and stand out in the highly competitive retail job market.?

Strengthening employer branding: Spend time collaborating with marketing and HR to develop campaigns that showcase your company's culture, benefits, and growth opportunities. This would attract top talent who align with your values, reducing turnover by attracting the right candidates from the start.

Developing a Talent Pipeline and Workforce Planning

Proactive talent pipeline: Create a more robust talent pipeline, focusing on identifying high-potential candidates for future needs, not just immediate hires. This would involve partnering with schools, training programs, and community organizations to ensure a steady flow of candidates. Leveraging technology like Sapia.ai to assess potential talent for soft skills will help you build these pipelines in a data-driven way.?

Workforce planning: Collaborate with department heads to forecast staffing needs based on sales trends, seasonal spikes, and other factors, ensuring we have a ready supply of talent at the right times. This reduces the "emergency" hiring that contributes to high turnover and reduces your stress levels when it comes to seasonal hiring peaks.

Improving Candidate Experience

Streamlining the recruitment journey: With time freed up from manual tasks, you're able to take a step back to review your end-to-end candidate experience—from application to onboarding. Do candidates feel informed, valued, and respected at every step? Building a seamless experience will lead to better retention and referrals. It’s important to note that this should always be done when bringing a new tool like Sapia.ai into your hiring process, considering how a new assessment or interview experience can enable enhancements to other parts of your process. Ongoing, having the capacity to review the process and understand what is working and what can be enhanced ensures you stay on top of your game.??

Personalized interactions for high-value candidates: Because Sapia.ai provides you with a shortlist of the top candidates automatically, you can invest your time in ensuring the high-potential candidates receive personal outreach and interaction, offering a human touch to differentiate your company from competitors.

Data Analysis and Recruitment Metrics

Leveraging analytics: Invest time in analyzing recruitment data—such as time-to-hire, candidate quality, and turnover rates. This allows you to continuously refine your sourcing strategies and ensure you’re hiring candidates who are a better long-term fit. At Sapia.ai , data like this is provided to all customers, leveraging data from your ATS and augmenting it with data collected from our interviews to provide insight into key business metrics.?

Turnover reduction strategies: By analyzing patterns in the data, you can develop initiatives to address the reasons behind high turnover. For example, this could involve identifying roles or locations with the highest turnover and implementing specific retention strategies for those areas.

Learning and Development Initiatives

Collaborating with L&D teams: Partner with the Learning and Development department to identify skills gaps in the frontline roles and suggest programs to help new hires succeed and stay with the company longer; and ensure that your new assessment capability is assessing for those skills.?

Upskilling managers: Help your hiring managers to be better equipped to engage and retain frontline staff by implementing leadership development programs, focusing on coaching and managing retail workers effectively.

Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) Initiatives

D&I recruitment strategies: Focus on building a more diverse workforce by creating targeted outreach programs that attract underrepresented groups. You could partner with community organizations, diversity job boards, and internal employee resource groups to widen your prospective applicant pool and ensure inclusivity in your sourcing strategy.?

Bias-free hiring process: By default, an AI you are using to screen or assess candidates should be inclusive and remove bias from the screening process. At Sapia.ai we provide diversity metrics to our customers that give visibility of potential hiring bias, all the way to the store level. Leverage this type of data to understand where improvements can be made and work with your business stakeholders to remove potential biases and ensure a diverse hiring practice.

Stakeholder and Relationship Management

Building stronger relationships with stakeholders: You can invest more time in fostering relationships with department managers, understanding their unique needs, and tailoring recruitment strategies to fit their teams. This ensures that hires align better with specific team dynamics and culture.

Partnering with HR and Operations: Collaborate more closely with the HR and Operations teams to improve the overall employee lifecycle experience—from onboarding to performance management to retention strategies.

Innovating Sourcing and Retention Strategies

Exploring new recruitment channels: Experiment with new ways to source candidates—such as social media campaigns, employee referral programs, and local community engagement efforts.

Retention-focused recruitment: Implement hiring practices that focus not just on filling roles quickly but also on finding people who are likely to stay long-term, aligning better with the company’s goals and values. When working with a tool like Sapia.ai , you are more likely to hire the people who belong with you, as they’re being assessed directly for potential role-fit at the first step of the hiring process.?

Creating an Effective Onboarding Process

Onboarding program review: Take a deep dive into improving your onboarding process, making it more engaging, informative, and aligned with your company culture. This ensures that new hires feel supported and prepared, increasing their likelihood of staying.

By shifting focus from administrative tasks to strategic initiatives, you’ll create a more efficient recruitment process while significantly impacting retention rates, employee engagement, and long-term business success.