Empowering recruiters and candidates to find each other with the help of AI – IBM

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A guest blog by Richard McGawley – Founder & CEO, Jobdeck.

Our recruitment platform – Jobdeck – empowers organisations to get the right messages, in the right format, to the right candidates, through the right channels. Using IBM watsonx technology, we help give employers confidence that their shortlisted candidates hit the right data points for each position. With Jobdeck, hiring managers can make clear and confident decisions that result in great hires, and talent-acquisition professionals can spend less time on administration and more on strategic work.

I wanted to share my experience of working with IBM and IBM watsonx technology, which I’m convinced is going to be a game-changer not just for us, but the talent-acquisition industry in general. If you want to learn how we cut the cost of AI by 90%, read on.

Tackling the volume challenge

A key challenge for employers today is that they’re dealing with a much higher volume of inbound applicants than ever before. As a result, talent-acquisition teams must analyse growing amounts of information within shrinking deadlines to find the best candidates.

In our industry, we talk about the seven-second CV: a CV or resumé will typically have the undivided attention of a recruiter for just seven seconds. Clearly, that raises the chances of the wrong applicants coming through the process, which helps nobody. UK employers are already struggling to find people with the right skills for their vacancies, and we believe the volume of applicants per position is only going to increase in the years ahead.

It’s never going to be possible for a recruiter to personally engage with 250 or 300 applicants. We therefore set out to provide efficiency tools to talent-acquisition professionals to help them reach out to, identify and focus on the top applicants.

Cutting costs by up to 90% with IBM Client Engineering

The first component in Jobdeck is a content management and outbound marketing automation platform, plugged into all the relevant social media channels and recruitment platforms. The second component analyses each applicant’s details against the skills, responsibilities, industry, location and experience quoted in the job description.

Here’s where IBM comes into the picture. Our solution uses AI to parse the natural-language content of CVs and application letters and rank them by how closely they match the job description.

When we started our AI journey, the immediate challenge was how to manage costs. We were consuming a lot of tokens, and we felt that the solution wasn’t commercially sustainable or scalable.

Working with IBM Client Engineering and replacing our existing AI technology with the IBM watsonx platform has reduced our cost per action by a staggering 90%.

Click here to understand how you can work with IBM Client Engineering.

Navigating the AI challenge with IBM

When IBM first suggested a face-to-face meeting, I must admit that I was expecting a sales pitch for a load of technology that I didn’t need. My experience was the absolute opposite: that first Client Engineering session was open, engaging and enthusiastic, and generated tangible outcomes in terms of what was going to happen next. I came away really excited about the prospect of working with IBM. All too often, technology vendors will try to get you to rip and replace everything you’ve done before. IBM looked at what we had and how we do things, then made their technology play within our current environment.

Everything since that point has been exceptional – the support, the communication, the conversations. As we head into production with the solution, we’re looking forward to going beyond Client Engineering into Customer Success and then Expert Labs at IBM. There’s a real sense that we’re following a roadmap that will give us the appropriate tools at each stage as we grow.

Keeping AI transparent and explainable

With watsonx providing high-quality, low-cost analytical services within Jobdeck, we can reduce costs significantly for our customers while also accelerating our service. With watsonx.data, we have a technology stack that’s ultra-scalable, so we can ingest not just millions but billions of data points.

And with watsonx.governance, we have the opportunity to move towards a comprehensive governance suite that we can offer to talent-acquisition teams to boost the visibility and credibility of their automated models. On that note, one of the benefits of working with IBM is that we’ve been able to move away from what was a black-box solution in AI analysis. What we have today is essentially a mathematical formula which can be viewed, interrogated and explained. HR departments are extremely wary about any technology that might introduce bias into recruitment, so the ability to see what’s going on behind the scenes is a huge plus point for them.

Focusing on improving the candidate experience

Beyond the outbound marketing automation and candidate analysis components, the third component of our solution captures and manages all inbound and outbound communications. We’re already doing a certain amount of automation here, and we want to take things much further – not least because communication is a major element in the candidate experience.

While times are tough for recruiters today, they’re no better for candidates. People seeking work often feel like they’re stepping into a black hole where there is no feedback. The industry needs to fix the candidate experience problem, which means providing more information. Recruiters also need to do a better job of educating the talent pool in general. We help them reach not only the people who are active job seekers but also the “passive talent” – those people who are currently in employment and not looking to change jobs, but who could be persuaded by the right opportunity. As a seasoned recruiter, I know that these people tend to be the best applicants, particularly in technical fields.

Our marketing automation tools help organisations create that vital series of touch points with potential future candidates, whether active or passive. Our rule of thumb: it takes seven hours of content and 11 touchpoints across four channels to bring in a candidate.

Another angle on candidate experience is that there’s often a significant potential overlap between candidates and customers. Even in the B2B space, you need to consider the influencer effect. Something like 50% of candidates say they would not purchase from a company if they had a bad experience when applying for a job, and 74% of candidates would share a negative recruitment experience with their immediate network. [1] That’s a lot of potential for negative press if you get things wrong.

We’re increasingly positioning Jobdeck as a candidate engagement platform, able to curate the recruitment process from start through to shortlist delivery and beyond, with interview coordination to make sure that the talent pool is engaged, warm and active. And with high-quality communication throughout, we help reduce the chance of a poor candidate experience going viral!

Putting power in the hands of applicants

We already have tools that inform an applicant if they are added to the shortlist for a job, and we want to take that further. We’ll be adding some of the same tools that employers use for analysis to the candidate portal so that candidates can check their profile against open positions and work out which ones best suit them.

Our portal could even become the single tool that people use to manage job applications across their full careers. That’s a highly ambitious goal, but it’s a measure of the confidence we’ve gained from partnering with IBM. The resources that IBM has in software engineering, the credibility they have worldwide, and the strength of their technology stack mean that there are no practical limits to what we can aim to achieve.

Using IBM watsonx technologies, we’re moving ahead with our mission to make recruitment faster, easier and more accurate, so that organisations can find the right people for their culture, and people can find the most rewarding positions in the organisations that best suit them.

About the author

Richard McGawley is an expert recruiter with almost two decades of experience working with some of the leading brands and businesses in the Life Science field. In addition to helping connect great employers with top executive talent, Richard is passionate about supporting candidates in making impactful career choices. With Jobdeck, he is helping businesses enhance the way they recruit so that they are better positioned to make a positive impact on the world.

[1] Source: https://www.thatlittleagency.co.uk/candidate-experience-how-to-meet-and-exceed-their-expectations/#:~:text=50%25%20of%20candidates%20who%20receive,Source%3A%20Virgin%20Media