Last week, our friends at SmartRecruiters put on their much anticipated Hiring Success EMEA event at the Eye Film Museum in Amsterdam. With a focus on networking and thought leadership, the event exists to inform TA leaders and decision makers on how to navigate the future of HR, and identify the signal from the noise. As a SmartRecruiters integrations partner and headline sponsor for the event, Cronofy is excited to support the community and contribute to the strategic conversations surrounding HR tech.
The common thread in almost all presentations was the prevalence and adoption of AI in HR, with SmartRecruiters making big moves here, but more on that later. Let’s unpack a few of the presentations and themes from the day that shed light on the conversations TA leaders are and will be having in the coming months and quarters.
Leveraging AI in Talent Acquisition
Candidates' approach to work is changing, and how they want to interact with organisations is evolving. Dr. Swathi Palasamudram, Enterprise Business Architect at Bosch, leading digital transformation in HR, explained how her team is rapidly introducing AI tools and processes to meet candidates' evolving expectations. For HR teams developing their AI strategies, consider either Building, Buying, Bridging or Borrowing tooling to fill a strategic gap, taking the time to consider what is the highest priority and what resources are available today.
Broadly, candidates want automation in the hiring process, but HR teams' readiness to leverage AI has nuances globally. Asia leads the way, with HR teams leveraging AI to support the sheer volume and pace of hiring and help hiring managers match with the right candidates. North American HR teams are leveraging AI to address hiring biases and elevate the hiring experience for candidates. Europe and Oceania are more cautious with the adoption, focusing on ethical applications of AI in the hiring process, to augment HR teams to support the changing nature of interviewing and work (Remote).
Dr. Swathi Palasamudram went on to frame usage of AI as “addressing anomalies”, applying AI tooling where a machines output is unmatched compared to a humans, while still focusing on quality and fit for your organisation. When the delta between manual tasks and automation and AI is so significant, it's hard to argue with. A good example of this is Wise reducing their time to schedule by almost 10,000% through interview scheduling automation. AI and Automation is not just about efficiency but can be used to personalize the engagement with candidates and through removing the need to do low value, manual tasks, teams have more freedom to deliver high touch experiences for candidates.
A United Future of Work
In this presentation, Jon Stanners, Global Talent, People & Culture Transformation Leader, delivered a refreshingly positive view if AI and the birth of the “United Age” where humans and machines work together. Jon challenges TA leaders to think of AI as an accelerator to propel HR teams and candidates forward, and not a spanner in the works.
Our reliance on technology is only increasing, along with the gap between what humans are good at (creativity, passion, and an entrepreneurial mindset) and a machine's capabilities (speed, automation and efficiency). Jon provided helpful frameworks to categories human labour and digital labour as we enter this unified age where humans are in command and machines unlock new capabilities.
AI is just like any technology, and won't necessarily replace workers, but the process of finding and doing work will change. Work will evolve from being a place you go, to an environment where you do high value tasks. AI and ML technologies will make individuals' skills and competencies searchable and evidenced, allowing organizations to pursue the best talent for unique areas of responsibility — an opportunity for HR teams as they strive for better matching between the demand and supply of skills in the market. Jon summarised the presentation by explaining that if you or your team is doing something considered a task, it's ripe for automation.
Navigating the evolution of HR
Blending two presentations here as they felt complimentary. Nazim Ünlü Global People and Organization Director at Novartis, asked the hard questions around what HR teams like and dislike about the profession as a way of framing where to apply new technologies to make the profession as fulfilling as possible. There’s no crystal ball to navigate transformation in HR but Nazim presented clear pathways teams can use to identify where the gaps and opportunities are for hiring teams. Where are the bottlenecks, what does your team complain about the most, what tasks have your team normalized but could be drastically improved?
Guru Sethupathy, CEO of Fairnow, then spoke about the legal landscape of AI in talent acquisition. Guru explained that right now AI is being used the least by organisations, and is also being scrutinised the least. Having governance capabilities to manage AI in your organisation, reduces the risks of AI misuse within teams and helps to factor in ethical considerations at every stage. On the flip side, Guru explained there are risks in not using AI and automation in the hiring process, as candidates increasingly see this as a positive signal of the future as organisations strive to reduce hiring bias, improving personalization, increasing time in stage speed and imporve the overall hiring experience.
Considering AI and Automation tools for your HR tech stack? Above are some great questions to ask vendors to ensure your team is doing the required due diligence before partnering with HR vendors.
The Realities of AI in the TA ecosystem
Dr. Sven Elbert, Head Analyst Services, Fosway Group, delivered a hard hitting overview of the HR and TA ecosystem, solidifying how early AI adoption is for HR, but that it’s very much in full swing. He explained that AI adoption is happening on a spectrum, starting with augmentation (co-pilots and agents) and moving towards automation. It’s not however all lollipops and rainbows, with Dr Elbert sharing cautionary tales from organisations applying AI broadly to their TA strategy, i.e. removing humans from the entire hiring process. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
Some interesting stats Dr Elbert shared:
- 71% of TA leaders are looking to AI to increase efficiencies
- 60% of organizations are focusing on being a diverse, equitable and inclusive employer to attract and engage talent
- 51% of TA teams are adoption structured interview processes to better select and hire talent.
- 48% of TA teams are concerned about AI and GDPR and Data and Security
In the above slide, we can see what tooling is being built by vendors and adopted by HR teams. Addressing basic use cases like text generation and interview transcriptions, to more productivity focused tooling around onboarding agents for new hires and interpreting large data sets to generate reports — these AI powered helpers are being developed to assist teams get through tasks faster and with better accuracy while still keeping humans very much in the loop. Building for the future, Cronofy sits in the “beyond” bucket, delivering interview scheduling automation to assist hiring teams with their workflows and helping to deliver better candidate experiences. We’ve been building deterministic, predictable scheduling technology for almost a decade and we’re excited to see more HR teams adopt tooling that keeps the human in HR.
Learning and adopting AI is a continuous journey, and requires clarity from leadership and teams on where to apply it and what the impact will be from doing so.
Hiring For Success
Hats off to the SmartRecruiters team, they put together an incredibly valuable conference for the HR community in EMEA, an intimate and information dense day that left us all with a better understanding of what’s ahead and how to get there. I’m eager to hear the full SmartRecruiters product announcements come October 16 after giving us a sneak peek into how they are aligning and building for the future of HR. The future is bright for TA teams, and more than ever we have a healthy ecosystem of vendors and partners with tooling to streamline repetitive tasks and scale operations that free up time for strategic decisions.
