Recruitment Agencies Have to Automate Today to Drive Innovation Tomorrow
Recruitment businesses are exposed to enormous amounts of information every day. The more understanding they have of their consultants, candidates, clients, and jobs, the better equipped they are to turn opportunities into revenue. Leveraging automation is the cost-effective and time-sensible way to take all the data we encounter and turn it into useful action. Especially when you consider that insight drives innovation and deeper insights allow for bigger innovation.
It all comes back to the information you have to work with in front of you and how agencies are harnessing automation and good processes to get it there.
Automation is making us more human
We’re not here to compete with machines on their strengths, but we should double down on what makes us uniquely human and leverage machines in doing so. In recruitment, leveraging machines is likely to remove the tasks that are high-volume and low-value. The cumbersome, burdensome, but necessary actions that take consultants away from what they do best. Connecting the right people, with the right roles, at the right time.
Automation will have a major impact in the sifting, screening, scheduling, and pre-qualification of candidates during the early stages of the recruitment journey. Its biggest value, however, will be felt in how agencies manage their data. How they record, process, report, and analyse data to give themselves a greater opportunity to innovate.
Automation has the opportunity to restructure entire workflows. By capturing activity when it happens and delivering insights at the point of need to make better decisions. Embracing the advantages of automation is inevitable progress. It’s not a question of if—but rather of when—and the early adopters will extend the longest leads.
Data intelligent recruitment
Automation has an opportunity to address the challenges of data quality caused by human error. For consultants, these challenges include:
- Under-reporting and giving a one-sided view of reality
- Busy schedules leading to poor time allocation
- Mistakes due to manual work
- Poor processes
- Limited capacity, skill and time to crunch vast amounts of data
We also know that artificial intelligence has everyone excited in 2019. Whilst the subject may have changed, the conversations we’re having are still very much the same.
How do we improve the quality of data we’re feeding into these machines and programmes to deliver the outcomes we want.
Automation is not AI
People are using AI, automation, and deep learning interchangeably and drawing some pretty fantastical conclusions. It’s time we lay them to bed.
At cube19, we describe automation simply as “software that follows pre-programmed rules,” whereas AI is “software that is designed to learn.” Our founder, Dan McGuire, actually debunked half the misconceptions around recruitment AI and automation in a recent talk at the London Powerhive.
There are still reservations and a significant amount of confusion around the threat of automation to agency jobs.
Bullhorn’s 2018 AU Recruitment Trends Report suggested that only 17% of businesses considered automation a top three priority and were hesitant because of this. Further findings showed that over 10% didn’t understand its value and almost a third didn’t employ it at any stage of the recruitment process. According to PwC, automation is expected to put 3% of total jobs at risk in the early years of the 2020s, while simultaneously delivering a boost of $15 Trillion to global GDP.
Explore the Recruitment Trends Report
Be the change you talk about
We champion innovation as an industry but often comfortably follow the same blueprint and methods that were successful one, two, or even three decades ago. Automation won’t be an afterthought or a wishlist inclusion for agencies, it will be a necessary step to scale past ten men, ten offices and ten countries.
I’ve spoken with thousands of agency owners over the last few years about growth and the vast majority of them always agree on the same principle. Think like a big agency from the blocks and put the processes and infrastructure in place to accommodate where you want your company to be.
