The world is changing quickly, for your clients as much as for your business. I spoke at the Recruitment Expo this week about the opportunity this change creates for you, and shared five examples of recruiters adapting to the new world.
Here are two of those examples: solving the overwhelming volume of applications, and verifying that candidates are real people.
The application tsunami
Just a few years ago a client might have got 50-100 applications to a job ad and felt overwhelmed. Now the response can be 500-1000 applications for a single role, with job seekers getting AI bots to apply for them.
Some tech firms are selling AI application management tools, but that just takes us into an arms race where AI applicants compete with AI screening bots for an increasingly small possibility that a hiring manager actually gets to see good candidates.
As a recruiter, you are perfectly placed to solve this problem. In fact, recruiters have always been solving the challenge of how hiring managers get to see the right people; AI has simply supercharged the issue, which gives us a big opportunity to add more value.
I worked with an agency in New York recently who have focused on solving the application tsunami for their clients. They promoted their ‘10-2-1’ candidate funnel as part of their service, explaining that they introduce the client to the best ten candidates for the role in a short listing meeting, bring 2 or 3 to interview, then the client selects 1 (or more) to recruit.
This might seem relatively normal to a recruiter, but by understanding a key pain point for their clients and then highlighting this part of the service as a well-packaged solution, it’s proved to be a strong way to win new business.
The candidate that never was
At the Expo I shared the incredible story of a candidate who got through to a fifth-stage interview… only for the client to realise they weren’t real. Someone had been using an AI ‘mask’ on their video interviews, and very nearly got the job.
Perhaps most incredible of all, this happened to an online security company. If people can already use AI to trick tech-savvy clients, imagine how hard it’s going to be for the majority of businesses.
Trust is going to be valued more highly than ever as clients experience this kind of fraud. The good news is that recruiters are well placed to offer verified candidates that clients can trust are real.
One regional recruitment agency has made a strategic decision to meet every candidate face to face before introducing them to clients. Instinctively, this might seem like the old fashioned way of doing things… but it’s a great way to apply real, human value to solve an AI-powered problem.
Focus on the value
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by all the AI changes. But your job as a recruiter is to solve your clients’ hiring challenges, and now is the time for you to focus on what these problems are and how you can solve them.
The more you can solve these challenges, the more valuable you become to your clients. You stop being seen like a transactional recruiter, and start being treated as an expert partner.
If you’re looking for advice on how to add more value to your clients and design your services to solve their AI-powered challenges, simply reply to this email and I’ll explain how I can help.
Jon.
P.S. There was a great panel session at the Expo where four TA professionals shared their experiences of working with recruiters, including their frustrations and best moments.
One line stood out to me: “We don’t just want help finding candidates, agencies can help with everything else we do outside hiring.”
If you’re looking for advice on how to add more value to your clients and design your services to solve their AI-powered challenges, simply reply to this email and I’ll explain how I can help.