How important is technology in recruitment?
I think recruitment has three passes to it: people, process and technology. And they used to be equally important. But more recently the advancement that we've been seeing in technology, especially artificial intelligence, is making it probably the most important factor. Which is a strange thing to say in the people business, But let me explain. You can throw as much technology as you want at a bad process and usually it wouldn't work, the process would collapse. So the technology will be pointless. Or you could have the wrong people. Using the technology or misusing the technology. And your business outcomes would still be terrible.
There’s what my previous employer actually created is this wonderful thing called hiring success methodology. Now though the technology is becoming so good and so creative that the technology itself can look at the process and change it. The technology itself can look at certain people, that it can replace or that are underperforming and coach those people to change their behavior. The technology itself is becoming a process and people optimizer and it's learning from everything, it’s learning from what it sees. What people do is learn from the process of that mind and it's learning from itself. And it interacts with people like candidates. So I think that right now technology is very likely the most important factor in the successful recruitment function.
What should or what can the industry do with AI?
I think the most important thing the industry can do with AI is to start to optimize for candidates, for hiring managers and their teams, the actual employees. Because what it has been doing has been optimizing for recruiters. An industry that's been created to facilitate a process, to facilitate connecting people to jobs at scale, which technology right now I can do much better. But because you cannot monetize a candidate, and because the recruitment teams, and HR teams that they usually report into, hold the recruitment technology budget, it's logical that all the technology vendors instead of making technology that delivers the best candidate experience and delivers the best hiring team experience, has actually been focusing on empowering experiences for recruiters. My perspective is that it has created an unnecessary buckle that we can remove if we start thinking about what we can do to make the recruitment as cost effective as possible, as impactful as possible in terms of finding the right people. And making this the best possible experience for everyone involved. For the key people that the recruitment industry really needs, to the candidates, and the hiring managers and their teams. That's what we can really assure the paradigm shift and that's what I think. Everyone involved in recruitment technology should be thinking about it.
What do you think, where can it be helpful when recruiting from another country?
In almost every facet of that journey. For example, Scotty AI speaks 140 languages, and it doesn't just speak all those languages, it speaks them in different dialects. We have 16 dialects of Arabic. So if you're a global business recruiting from multiple countries or a local business, but you want to expand your talent pool, (where this would have been quite difficult in the past because you would need either multilingual recruiters or you would need to work with partners abroad) and now you can just use technology like ours to recruit wherever you want to recruit from. But then there's the entire rest of the journey. There's the question that how do you onboard people globally? How do you onboard them into working across borders? AI can be a 24/7 available buddy assistant coach.
What would be the one lesson you would share from 2023 based on your professional activities?
The one lesson that tech is developing really fast, I might say that. We are close to coming to a point where either we make change or change will happen to us. And It's still developing quickly. The technology that I represent wasn't possible to exist at the current level six months ago. I would say just technology in general and its speed. I mean for me that was the biggest lesson.
It's becoming more and more evident also for people not involved as much in the industry because AI is cycling into the daily lives of everyone at work and outside of it. Blue collar workers are using AI to get movie recommendations. But in our industry I think we'll reach an inflection point where if you are using AI you'll remain relevant, you will be able to find candidates, and if you aren't you'll stay behind very quickly.
What do you see as the biggest challenge for 2024?
There's so many challenges really. I think adopting AI in the right way, and I'll go back to what I said before, adopting AI in a way that it primarily focuses on effective and impactful hires and a great hiring manager experience and not just making another productivity booster for recruitment teams. That's a big challenge because it requires a real paradigm shift, it requires professionals.
And I think a lot of people have been so caught up in their daily routines and their antiquated processes of screening CVs and sending out in mails, that they forgot what recruitment is really really about. The biggest challenge will be changing that mindset.
Of all the advice and feedback you've received over the years, which has stuck with you the most?
The one that keeps coming back to me is that the manager in my first job said that if you fail to plan you plan to fail. We also really need to look ahead and optimize for the long term. It's no coincidence that I'm working in AI. I see what's happening all around me. I want to be able to provide for my family and to make an impact. That's why I planned to do something in this space. And I think that if we all think a little bit more about what we're doing and plan ahead why we're doing it, that we'll reap a lot of benefits from.
Thanks for the answer for Stan Wasowicz, the VP of Growth & Partnerships at Scotty AI!