How AI Will Impact Staffing Firms in the Near Future

Artificial Intelligence is the next technological revolution, and there isn’t an industry out there that won’t be touched by it. This includes staffing firms. In fact, 70 percent of staffing firm executives believe AI will play a role in improving recruitment. Some staffing firms have already adopted early forms of AI that can make running their business easier.

One of the biggest fears of AI is that it will displace workers and leave many people without jobs. An understandable concern for the 9 to 41 percent of Americans who could lose their jobs to AI in the next two decades. That’s a lot of American jobs lost in a short period of time.

America has been through massive technology changes in the past and has learned how to quickly adapt. Infosys completed a survey of 1600 business and IT executives and asked them questions about the potential for AI. Eighty-five percent of respondents said they would train staff about the benefits and use of AI. Eighty percent responded that they would retrain or redeploy employees within the company who were displaced by AI technology.

AI in staffing has yet to make a big splash, but we promise you that it’s coming fast. Here are some ways we see AI affecting staffing firms in the future.

1. Automate Recruiting and Resume Sorting

Ready to automate and speed up your staffing firm’s recruiting? AI will save recruiters time by sorting through resumes, identifying potential candidates, and possibly even automating outreach messages to qualified candidates about good matches for available jobs.

AI also has a nice unintended benefit — it gets rid of first stage recruiting bias. All humans are biased when judging candidates, whether it be on race, disability, gender, or any other quality. These biases are deeply ingrained and difficult to completely eliminate. That is, unless you use AI to identify candidates.

When AI is available to do the first stage of recruitment, personnel have more time to focus on interviews and training of new candidates. This will save your employees the pain of first stage recruiting, but also save your company money. It’s likely that the implementation of AI will allow your company to reduce the size of your recruitment team or redeploy those employees to work in other areas of the business.

2. Deep Learning to Improve Candidate Engagement

One of the major benefits of using AI — and this is task independent — is that AI has the ability to learn, to adapt its algorithms to be better and smarter at its job.

One example of this within the staffing firm space could be using AI to communicate with contractors. Each contractor has a unique personality and individual habits. Some might like notifications by text, while others prefer notifications by email or even phone calls.

Deep learning algorithms can discover which method of communication is the best and what time of day the contractor is most likely to receive and respond to the message. This will streamline and improve your staffing firm’s ability to communicate with contractors. Communication is a two way street. It can’t just be set on what’s best for your staffing firm. AI will take into account what’s best for your contractors.

Even if your staffing firm is using automation to text contractors today, that doesn’t mean contractors are receiving or opening the messages, or even that you’re sending the right message.

In fact, here at Sense we’re already using AI techniques to deliver a richer candidate experience. Intelligent algorithms will increase the likelihood that the message is received and opened. If not, it will automate the process of trying a different form of communication until it learns the best method and time to communicate with each, individual contractor.

What might be most impressive is how AI will be personalized on an individual level. Each contractor will have a different communication pattern with the AI. A human isn’t capable of keeping track of so many patterns of communication, let alone optimizing them on their own.

3. Say Hello to Smart Virtual Assistants

Many companies have adopted some form of virtual assistance, but AI is going to take that to the next level. When contractors visit your website, chatbots will be able to answer any questions that visitors might have, and will get better at chatting over time.

Chatbots would also be able to guide website visitors to the right place to apply for a job, and even scan a resume to help contractors decide which job to apply to.

4. Analyze Staffing Firm Big Data

One of the most important functions that AI can fulfill is analyzing big data. What big data do staffing firms have, you ask? Lots.

AI will be able to analyze:

• Scoring talent on past history for future deployment
• Attrition rates
• Likelihood to get a job
• How likely a candidate is to complete an assignment

Similar to lead scoring in sales, intelligent analysis of big data could help staffing firms to figure out which of their candidates is most likely to show up for their interview and their first day of work, perform well at work, and how likely they are to complete the job.

At Sense, we’re even developing our own contractor attrition metrics by analyzing volumes of contractor data.

Analysis of this data would help staffing firms use a contractor’s past work history with the staffing firm to predict future actions. That kind of knowledge would make it easier to know which contractors are the best and, therefore, the most important to retain.

5. Robotic Process Automation for Staffing Firms

Robotic Process Automation or RPA is another way that AI could save your staffing firm time and money. RPA is able to do the repetitive, mind-numbing tasks that need to be done that your staff don’t enjoy — faster and more accurately. RPA frees staff to be able to do the things that require human skills such as emotional intelligence, judgement, reasoning, and customer interaction.

Any rote activity that is currently done by an employee will, in the future, be done by RPA. Just imagine the possibilities.

AI is the way of the future. There’s no point in resisting the change. Consider how these benefits would impact your staffing firm if you decided to adopt AI tomorrow. New technology is always intimidating at first, but AI can truly save your staffing firm time and money.

How much of this is guessing and how much can be done right now? We’ll tell you. What are you waiting for? Reach out to Sense and find out how our software can benefit your staffing firm right now.