We were promised jetpacks

Live (profitably) in the moment

When I was growing up, we were promised that the future would be jetpacks and flying cars.

Walking through London last week, it struck me that in reality our ‘futuristic’ form of transport is a bike where you don’t have to pedal quite as hard.  

In recruitment right now, we’re being promised a future dominated by smart robots and artificial intelligence. They might make us better at what we do, or they might take all our jobs and the jobs we’re working on. Either way, they’re definitely coming.

Just like those flying cars.

Now I’m no luddite. My focus is helping recruitment leaders run more profitable businesses, and my cynicism about the future is that it distracts you from what you can achieve right now.

If you’re getting paid a fair fee for the value you create for your clients then some of the emerging AI tech might help you do that work more efficiently. 

But if you are currently undervalued and underpaid for the work you do and then you start bringing in new tools, you risk spending good money to create additional value for your clients for no reward.

Of course AI is going to bring some big changes to how you do business. But if you’re old enough to remember the buzz around ‘cloud computing’, you’ll realise that the impact on your business came when Microsoft, Google and other tech suppliers adopted the new technology and made it part of your everyday life.

I can’t think of a recruitment agency that became known as ‘the one that uses cloud computing’. And I’ll bet hiring managers won’t be talking about ‘the recruitment agency that uses all that great AI’ in a few years’ time.

To put it simply, you need to stand out. Emerging tech is unlikely to help you do that.

If you are interested in learning what you can do right now to stand out and be more valued by your clients, reply to this email and I’ll talk you through the next steps.

Jon

P.S. Back to the Future II gave us a vision of 2015 where kids were skating around on hoverboards.

In a triumph of marketing over reality, you can buy a hoverboard for your kids these days… but they happen to come with wheels. Not quite what we were hoping for back in 1989.

We’re already seeing stories about AI chatbots and generated content that seem more broken than break-through. The risk of selling your clients a future dream is what that future might turn out to be.

So if you are interested in learning what you can do right now to stand out and be more valued by your clients, reply to this email and I’ll talk you through the next steps.