Recruitment’s got talent – and AI is uncovering it

Recruitment agencies are only as good as your contractors – but building a strong talent pool takes a lot of time and effort. Creating a bank of skillsets means going above and beyond, as you need enough professionals to account for the fact that not everyone will be available at a certain location or point in time.
Technology is revolutionising the search for talented contractors; making the filtering process quicker and smarter, to help recruiters match strong candidates to upcoming roles. Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) are having a particularly profound effect on the role that tech plays in building agencies’ little black books – and businesses that pay attention to AI’s rapidly increasing influence will be the biggest beneficiaries.

The world’s got talent, it just needs to be discovered

Finding good quality candidates is a perpetual problem for employers, which recruitment agencies can positively address. A survey by Glassdoor has discovered that almost half (48%) of employers across the world find talent shortages their biggest challenge, and many are willing to pay for professional support services to boost their recruitment drive.
While recruiters can achieve great results with traditional search methods – manually reviewing contractor CVs to shortlist the most appropriate people for the job – technology can cut a great deal of time and effort out of this process.
As we outlined in our recent Future of Recruitment whitepaper, new technologies underpinned by AI are enabling recruitment agencies to automatically analyse the skills and experience on every contractor’s profile. An intelligent algorithm will scan each contractor’s resumé for keywords, pulling up results that match the particular capabilities you are searching for. This enables agencies to quickly generate shortlists of relevant applicants to put forward for new positions.
It can also support proactive searching opportunities, as recruitment companies are able to listen to the skills gap issues your clients are facing and search for appropriate contractors to suggest – even if there is no formal position advertised.

Smart search is getting even smarter

One of the really ground-breaking aspects of AI in recruitment is not just its capacity to cut the effort of talent searching, but its ability to get better at candidate matching over time.
Artificial Intelligence is able to learn iteratively, which means that the more data it processes, the better it becomes at processing data. Therefore, as you use AI technology it will understand the type of candidates you are shortlisting, and will become more skilled at suggesting the type of candidates you may want to shortlist in future.
For recruitment agencies, this means you’re only going to get more effective results for your investment – and the more contractors you successfully match, the better your bottom-line performance.

Bringing AI into the recruitment technology suite

AI is a really interesting example of how technology is positively changing recruitment agencies, enabling recruiters to add even more value when solving your clients’ key challenges. However, optimising the talent search process alone is not enough.
To future-proof your business, you need to look at performance holistically, and how tech can solve productivity and performance shortfalls across the board. Front-end tools like AI talent search software can help you to offer a higher standard of service, but when combined with back office recruitment tools you can streamline your entire operation.
Over the next weeks, months and years, we will see more and more sophisticated solutions hitting the market, offering to help recruiters cut the time, cost and effort it takes to carry out everyday functions, and improve your performance.
By keeping your eyes and minds open to development like AI, and embracing software that tackles your biggest business challenges, you can stay one step ahead of the wider industry – and provide a better service than your competitors.
Discover how AI and other technologies are shaping our industry: download ETZ’s free whitepaper on The Future of Recruitment.