This Week, In Recruiting - Issue 159

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Sponsored by our friends Pillar

Pillar - helping hiring teams modernize the interview process with AI-powered interview intelligence. Have a role you’re trying to fill, but aren’t sure what questions to ask??

Pillar has recently launched their AI-Generated Interview Guide. To generate your interview questions, all you have to do is…

1. Paste a job description here
2. In less than 5 minutes, their AI will generate your questions

Now, when it’s time to make that next great hire, you’ll have the right questions that lead to a more confident hiring decision. Because after all, great teams start with great interviews. If you’re interested in seeing how they’ve brought AI-generated interview guides into their interview intelligence platform, you can schedule time to chat with their team here .

Brainfooders who book a demo this week will qualify for free use of their new interview planning tool.

Open Kitchen: 'At Desk' Innovation for Recruitment Agencies

I've been looking for a term to adequately describe when tech innovation becomes real for recruiters.

We've been hearing about how AI will change the game for us over the past 18 months but the bulk of the discourse has remained locked in reports, white papers and tweet threads. Real examples of how technology has translated to the 'at desk' experience of recruiters doing the job has been conspicuously absent.

In the past few months though, we've really been seeing some progress. Credit must go especially to the vendors in the Interview Intelligence category - like today's sponsor Pillar - who have been leading the way in educating recruiters on what can be achieved by AI-enabled technology. The stunning efficacy of AI Interview Note Taking manifestly increases productivity by eliminating a mundane but necessary task from a recruiters workflow. Much like how Uber eliminated the experience of sticking your arm up to hail a taxi, we never understood what a pain it was until it was replaced by some great tech.

We're going to see more examples in the coming months of AI-enabled tech making transformatory change to recruiter workflows. Today's Open Kitchen I am going to outline a few scenarios of where it will happen soonest. In fact, most of them are happening right now.

1. Automated Leads Generation & Data Enrichment

Client acquisition has been the priority for recruiters ever since the hiring market made a sharp pivot in response to end of the Zero Interest Rate Period (ZIRP). Employers everywhere have slowed down or ceased their hiring plans, reducing the market size for recruiters and increasing the competition for business between them. How efficient a consultant to can get to the fewer prospects who are hiring might make the difference between a success vs survival in today's market.

Paiger Lead Generator - scrapes the web for recently published updates on thousands of career sites. De-duplicates and filters the data to improve quality, before data enrichment to attach contact details email and phone to most relevant contracts, before delivering the leads to recruiters on a daily basis. This is the automation of every aspect of the R&D process of leads prospecting, leaving only the outreach as thing recruiters need to do for these top leads. The technology isn't that incredible but the outcomes really is. Imagine if your consultants simply received a daily list of contact numbers and verified emails of prospects you knew where hiring. It's going to save them time and make you money.

2. AI-enabled CRM / ATS Nurture

Every serious recruitment agency has a database of 100,000's of candidate records. Yet the data is almost always redundant because the retrieval is too hard, data currency is too poor and opportunity cost of doing anything about it to be be far too high. We've had the era of automated CRM nurture software - which was great for its time - but the next generation of AI-enabled tech promises to really deliver the sort the value agencies have been waiting for.

Popp AI is a personalised recruitment assistant, which integrates with your ATS / CRM and is able to parse candidate data, enrich it from social media data, infer candidate preferences and communication style and then use that informaiton to interact with them with personalised, contextualised and responsive messaging via the communication media preferred by that candidate. Early pilots at organisations like Randstad have produced some astonishing outcomes - a single recruiter conducting simultaneous screening conversations with 3000+ candidates. A campaign that screened 100s of applicants, booked 50 interviews and ultimately led to 12 hires, over a weekend. This was for temp retail roles at a major department store and a Premier League football club, and the average time from application to interview booked was 12 minutes. Candidates rated the experience 4.9/5 on average.

There's loads of use cases for a Personal Recruitment Assistant but reviving a moribund and neglected database has got to be one of the most obvious. Imagine actually being able to finally convert that database into revenue. It'll happen with something with Popp AI

3. Dissemble / Reassemble Recruitment Operations with AI

Perhaps there has been no better recent example of AI enabled Recruitment on the agency side than that pioneered by the guy pictured above. In mid 2023, faced with a market which had generated close to zero revenue for his business, decided to do the most radical thing - cease recruitment operations entirely in order to review his entire business operation from leads prospecting, candidate interview scheduling, client reporting, candidate experience and the rest. For each area business, time and effort was dedicated to researching a more efficient way of doing the work - which these days increasingly involves the application of AI-enabled technology. Testing multiple vendors across each component of business took no less than six months - and by his own confession, several hundred thousand pounds spent on tech experimentation, not including projected lost sales having effectively shuttered the business for this entire period.

Reassembling the business with tech enablement allowed Livero Group to reduce overhead, dramatically scale key metrics (lead generation, client bookings) before delivering revenue enough to close out the year with close-to-target performance. It's a remarkable story and one which Neil is now evangelising about - as this is something any recruiter or recruitment business can do.

The technology is maturing and the case studies are mounting up. The AI-enabled recruiter is here. One of the most important questions for recruiters to answer is: do you want to be one of them?

More to come from this series.

Now out of the kitchen, onto the lounge ??

Whats In The News?

Bullhorn launches Copilot

We're going to be AI-enabled recruiters whether we like it or not. Great to see significant roll outs like this from Bullhorn last week. The changes in industry are going to felt 'at desk' for recruiters - our jobs will change - hopefully for the better. Bullhorn press release here , and learn about the AI in a special webinar later today here

Indeed Launches Smart Sourcing

Another major product update from a recruitment tech giant - Indeed Smart Sourcing looks like a matching product, which I should imagine would work better human search. Critics who complain about simple key word matching underestimate how much pattern matching human review really this. Impressive innovation from Indeed, who are looking to bounce back at a rough 2023. Product release from Indeed here, Techcrunch with the analysis here .

Right to Ask for Flexible Work Comes Into Force in the UK

Significant news from the UK, which gives employees the right to ask for flexible working on any job offer made, which employers then have to seriously consider. This will have influence on job design, the ergonomics of job design and maybe even location discrimination down the road. However, a big win for diversity and workers in general. Have a read here .

What's Going On?

Big List of Recruiter Events to Attend in 2024

There are 100+ events in the Big List of Recruiting and HR Events to Attend in 2024 - make sure you bookmark this spreadsheet, share it with your event organiser and event going friends and get yourself to one of these this year. If you see any that are missing and should be there, please do add to the bottom of the spreadsheet - I will merge them in weekly.

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep253 - Skill Based Hiring: Rhetoric or Reality? Friday 12th April, 2pm BST

Excited to be bring this topic to the table - SBH / SBO - something which we say we care about but how many of us have actually implemented anything beyond some CV anonymisation? And what exactly, are we hoping to achieve with SBH? We're with advocates of both sides of the debate on this one - with Matthias Schmei?er , Global Senior Director, (Emnify), Andrew Grier , Head of TA (Helping Hands Home Care), Dan Logan , Director of Transformation (Advance) & Marija Kose , CPO (Human Edge) - register here

Tribepad Gro Webinar -Unlocking Growth: Scaling Your Team with AI Driven Recruitment , Tuesday 16th April, 2pm BST

Super excited to have this conversation, particularly as we are finally getting examples of recruitment teams re-orientating themselves around AI-enabled functions. Examples are rare, but they are there. Lets see how far we can get to with this - join me, Neil Ray , MD, Livero Group and others. Register here

Canadian Staffing Summit 2024 , Weds 17th April, One King West Hotel, Toronto

Honoured to be keynote in the Canadian Staffing Summit 2024. It is going to be welcome opportunity to learn from the Canadian community on what the local challenges have been in operating a recruiting business. My task is set those challenges into a global context, and offer some strategies that recruitment agencies in other parts of the world have pursued. It's going to be a great event - tickets here .

Simplifying Skills Based Hiring: Are Most Companies Overcomplicating it? 30th April, 12-1pm BST

We're back with this topic, from a different angle - this time we are talking implementation and how to get out of your own way. We're with Dominic Joyce , Head of Talent Acquisition (Travelex) and Robert Newry, CEO (Arctic Shores). Register here

HR Tech Europe , 2nd-3rd May, RAI Amsterdam

HR Tech Europe in Amsterdam promises to be a top class event. I'm humbled to be sharing the stage with luminaries of the industry like Josh Bersin and Madeline Laurano . 2 day event, let me know if you're in Amsterdam in May! Register here

If you have an event, webinar or podcast going on next week and want it featured on next week's newsletter,?comment below?with the link and event details. Don't forget to at mention me so that I see it

Who's Hiring?

Are recruiter jobs starting uptick slightly? I think we are going to need some trends analysis on this Amit! Regardless on this, you should sign up to this job board as it is a real time aggregator of direct TA jobs across the planet. Great filters on posting date, location etc. If you're looking, check it out here

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What Are You Doing?

Matt Ellis and Matt Bradburn are launching a new podcast The Hive. Fantastic to see two veterans of the industry get behind the mic - we need more voices like this to join the public discourse. Give this is a page a follow and watch out (or listen out?) for their first episode!

Manjuri Sinha goes up to VP Talent Success & DEI at OLX Group. This is the sort of career trajectory I am really interested in tracking - the expansion of scope beyond Talent Acquisition and into Talent development and Culture building. Going to do a Brainfood Live on this - watch this space.

Martin Lee joins Meta at Technical Talent Sourcer. Martin has long been one of the leading thinker/doers in the sourcing space in the UK and no surprise to see him land this opportunity with one of the big tech giants that is still hiring for engineers! Congratulations Martin - we're well overdue a catch up brother!

Matt Woodward makes a big announcement - the end of Melbourne Recruitment Meetup and the announcement of Melbourne Talent Meetup ! Same but expanded, with the scope now to include Talent Development, Internal Mobility, Non-FTE hiring and the rest. Important shift - and one all of us need to making. Congratulations Matt - look forward to seeing how you and the rest of the team get on!

If you have any personal news or initiative that you want to share, make sure you comment on the this newsletter with your news.

End Note

Last week in London before off again on the travels. Hope that we can finally get Spring under way. Note - if you're in Toronto, Montreal, Denver, Amsterdam and Boston over the next month - let me know in the comments below. If there is enough interest, I'll do a meetup in each town

Cheers

Hung

Hung Lee is the curator of Recruiting Brainfood , and now This Week In Recruiting. Subscribe to both if you are into recruiting or HR or just interested in world of work.