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5 min readRecruitment Marketing | Video | Vlog


Why your Recruitment Firm Needs to use AI…Now

There’s a lot of press about AI at the moment – from claims about jobs being stolen to Stephen Hawking warning of the end of the world. But what really is AI and why does it matter to recruitment firms?

AI is quite simply when computers learn to think. Trackback just 30 years – and computers were so much larger and clunky, they could only ever be used to play very poor games. Now, computers are so much faster and powerful that allowing a computer to think for itself and draw conclusions from data is becoming a matter of course.

You most likely interact with AI in some way or another almost every day. Google’s search is largely powered by artificial intelligence – and if you’ve ever uttered a word to Siri or Alexa, you’ve used AI (no matter how bad the response is).

But AI can do a LOT more than just answer questions or set timers:

  • AI Now

    With the rise of computing power, AIs are analysing data and making predictions in all manner of areas, which are impacting jobs in a big way:

    Driving
    Waymo (owned by google) has started to allow users to hire autonomous vehicles, and Elon Musk will have a car drive by itself across the States in November/December 2017.

    Whilst there is a lot of concern about how these cars will operate and questions about insurance – there is no doubt that Driverless cars will soon sweep the world, in a big way.

    Lawyers
    JP Morgan recently used an artificial intelligence program to analyse financial deals for legal issues. The process would have taken their team of lawyers around 360,000 hours to complete, but it only took the software seconds to implement.

    Insurance workers
    Fukoku Mutual Life has replaced 34 jobs with AI. The system analyses insurance payouts after rapidly researching patient medical histories and procedures. This eliminates hours of workers filtering through files on every single case.

    Profitability will increase at the company as it directly eliminates some roles – but also allows other workers to process the final payout faster.

    Hedge Fund Managers
    Bridgewater Capital – one of the most successful Hedge Funds with $160bn under management is using AI to automate day to day management of the firm in absence of the founder.

    Journalism
    Narrative Science is one of a few companies taking on journalism – with its own software to write articles based on data that it’s fed. If you’ve read a sports report or financial report summary online – it’s more than likely that a few of these have been generated by AI.

    Doctors
    One of the more popular uses of AI is to determine the difference between pictures. This superpower is now so advanced that AI will regularly outperform Doctors in diagnosis tests.

    Computers can also now choose a better recommendation for a cancer treatment than a Doctor can.

  • Why are we seeing such an increase now?

    I’m sure your Dad can tell you when he was young he was told were how we’d all be driving flying cars by the year 2000 and nobody would have to work again. And I’m sure he’s sceptical of the changes AI will bring.

    Thinking computers
    Computers can now think and make decisions. Even just 10 years ago, everything had to be programmed in advance for a computer. If you wanted to create relationships between words in a database, you’d have to pre-program every single relationship. Now, the most advanced tools can simply take a huge amount of data, process it on multiple servers, draw conclusions and make decisions from it.

    Further, the more decisions a computer makes – the better it gets at making future decisions.

  • How AI is being used in Recruitment

    It’s hard to identify a firm with a bigger impact on recruitment than Linkedin – and they’re throwing more money at AI than you’d care to imagine.

    Using AI has accelerated Linkedin’s profits from their recruitment tools. It’s the only way for them to take advantage of all the data they have on its users:

    “Just to give you a magnitude of the improvement, it leads to 2 million more (job) applications than we used to have”

    Linkedin has even bought the firm Connectifier https://www.connectifier.com/ – who use AI to search the web and get extended details about potential candidates.

    Other uses of AI in recruitment
    Tryma is using AI to quality candidates faster than humans can, showing a 70% decrease in the time to hire through sourcing, scanning and scheduling.

    Textrecruit is using AI to engage with Candidates using Chatbots. While Facebook is investing heavily into recruiting tools which will undoubtedly use AI to target potential candidates.

  • The future of jobs

    Looking at the macro level, the future of jobs can look rather bleak.

    Just a simple analysis of self-driving trucks leads to the following:

    There are currently 3 million truck drivers in the US (the most popular job in most states)
    In the long term, these jobs WILL go. Once it’s been safely demonstrated that a computer can drive a truck better than a human and at a cheaper cost to the haulage company, there will be a surge of the use of AI in trucks and jobs eliminated as fast as the trucks can be made.
    There are also a huge amount of jobs associated with the trucking industry – entire towns in the US rely on businesses that support truckers – such as gas stations and cafes. With nobody driving the trucks, there will be nobody to stop and buy food or drink at these places, effectively making them unprofitable.
    Whilst this will have a huge impact on the communities directly, there is the indirect impact to look at, outside of the industry.
    With fewer people employed by the trucking industry, there is less disposable income to spend on other goods and services, which has an indirect effect on numerous other industries and locations.
    PwC estimates that 38% of all jobs will be lost to robots by 2020. And there is a huge speculation as to whether jobs will still exist in 2050. Elon Musk is working on ways to turn us all into superhuman computers – with his NeuralLink company which has plans to allow us to learn anything we want and ‘know’ it in minutes.

  • A macro solution

    A solution to the reduction in jobs that is being touted as a sensible way forward is Universal Basic Income – broadly guaranteeing everyone in a location an income level, irrespective of whether they work or not. Some proponents believe this is the only sensible solution in a world where there are fewer jobs around.

    The pros and cons of this are outside the scope of this article, and it doesn’t give you much help, BUT there are ways you can maximise your revenue using AI:

  • AI tools that can help recruiters

    So what can you do, when AI brings more uncertainty? The simplest thing to do is maximise your use of AI within your firm. The correct use of AI can supercharge your firm in all sorts of ways.

    Sales calls
    Use tools like Gong or Chorus to maximise your results from sales calls. These tools will record your team’s sales calls and extract the most salient points. Instead of listening to a 30-minute sales call, you can listen to the 3 minutes that made all the difference.

    Engaging Candidates
    Manychat is a tool that integrates with Facebook Messenger and allows you to engage with candidates online. Crucially, it can import their details for conversations at a later date – and uses AI to answer the simplest questions.

    Support and advice
    Converse.ai links with intercom (helpdesk software) to provide automated bots to general queries. Let’s say someone comes to your site and asks ‘what is the starting salary for an accountant in Leeds’ – the bot can pull data from your blog and any customer service interaction to help the candidate.

  • Find out more

    It’s an exciting, confusing, unknown future – just put one foot in front of the other and keep moving forward every day.

    Chat with our chat bot, to find out how we can help your recruitment firm attract more candidates and clients.

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