As we deal with a changing world of work, the staffing industry is moving at a super-fast pace, driven by myriad major trends including workplace transformation and advancements in staffing technology. Paradigm shifts in the way staffing companies operate involve cognitive intelligence powered by machine learning, deep learning and natural language processing. It’s a new era for the industry where systems are capable of handling unstructured information, deciphering patterns and self-healing to handle exceptions over time. 

Enter “Cognitive Recruitment,” which refers to the broader application of AI for intelligent automation of staffing processes, autonomous candidate and client engagement and predictive and prescriptive insights across the staffing value chain.

Chandra Pandey, global head of TCS’ staffing industry practice, believes that Cognitive Recruitment is the future of staffing industry and discusses its benefits and why it’s a must for staffing firms. He outlines how a roadmap — including a foundation, a change management process and the right approach to data — can alter the narrative for the industry.

Chandra Pandey
Global Head of TCS’ Staffing Industry Practice

As the world battles its way back from the pandemic, what trends do you see emerging in the staffing and recruitment industry? How do you see the industry changing in the post-pandemic world?

The pandemic has had a profound impact on the staffing industry and caused a major disruption to staffing business. Major staffing companies saw their revenues decline sharply, especially in the first two quarters of 2020.

Given that Covid-19 restricted worker mobility, many organizations had to turn to remote work. But remote working changed as Covid-19 evolved and its impact changed. Gradually, as pandemic restrictions eased, the “hybrid model” gained precedence as a new way of working, transforming the current operating models across the globe.

The pandemic has forced organizations to accelerate the adoption of technology to enable the new way of working and increase the pace of digitalization and automation across industries.

Further, the pandemic witnessed a shift in skills demand. During the beginning of the pandemic, the demand was more for frontline, healthcare and logistics workers. But during the later phases of the pandemic, we have been witnessing a huge demand for IT workers. 

Another important trend we are observing is that companies have an increased demand for contingent workers to have the flexibility to handle situations like Covid-19 going forward. The pandemic has forced organizations to be more flexible and resilient.

Given the rise of remote working, there has been an increased need for a better client and candidate experience. It has become important for staffing companies to be closely connected with the candidates, clients and associates to ensure that services are getting delivered efficiently, making candidate and client experience another key focus area during Covid-19.

Define “Cognitive Recruitment.” What are its key dimensions, and how can it boost staffing and recruitment?

There was lot of dependency on recruiters and consultants the way staffing companies faced the pandemic. A lot of work was manual, and many activities were rule-based digitalization. We need intelligent automation of such staffing activities so that there is less dependency on the recruiters and consultants, who in turn can focus more on building candidate and client relationships. How we automate the recruitment processes using cognitive technologies is what Cognitive Recruitment is all about.

Cognitive Recruitment involves extensive usage of artificial intelligence for automation of recruitment activities, autonomous candidate and client engagement and predictive and prescriptive insights across the staffing value chain. It is a machine-first recruitment delivery model for staffing companies.

There are four key dimensions of Cognitive Recruitment. The first one is bringing efficiency in recruitment activities and business processes via cognitive computing technologies such as AI, machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing and intelligent process automation.

The second dimension is enhanced and consistent experience for the candidates, clients and associates.

The third dimension is intelligent insights about candidates, clients and the data that resides in the database — it’s all about leveraging such insights for business benefits.

Last, but not the least, the fourth dimension is innovation. Cognitive Recruitment and the involved technologies help create a culture of continuous improvement in business; what is the best operating model, how we look at data and how we can innovate further?

Discuss the additional benefits of Cognitive Recruitment across the industry value chain from sourcing to selection and from opportunity to fulfilment. How does it impact the overall candidate and client experience?

Cognitive Recruitment has multiple benefits throughout the value chain including improved client and candidate engagement, efficient order management, job enrichment and prioritization, contextual search and match for better candidate shortlisting, machine-driven screening, interview scheduling, and audio/video interviews, efficient and faster onboarding, etc. All these lead to improved business efficiency and enhanced client and candidate experience.  

Currently, orders come through via email, phone or microsites that staffing companies have created for some of their large customers. We can create virtual recruiters that can engage with the clients, take the order, push that order into the front-office system of the company and get that processed.

Staffing companies can deploy virtual agents for better and on-demand engagement with the clients. Let’s say a client calls to speak with a recruiter at the office. The recruiter could be in a meeting or otherwise occupied, unable to take the client’s call. But suppose you have a virtual recruiter that has the capability to engage with the client — that client can immediately engage with the virtual recruiter. Same applies for engagement with the candidates.

We can use AI technology to prioritize the jobs which are faster to fill by recruiters, which makes it easier to focus on them and improve fill rates.

The next benefit is the contextual search and match. Previously, the process was very much rule-based and did not consider a humanistic approach or contextual aspects of jobs. But by using AI tools, we can do a contextual search and match to identify the best-fit candidates and increase success rates.

Virtual assistance can take on initial screening of candidates, set up the interviews and conduct them through audio or video. Then bots start the entire associate onboarding process, which currently is mostly manual and requires a lot of paperwork that could be automated.

In totality, the benefits are across four areas: efficiency, automation, creating a better candidate and client experience and creating less dependency on human elements such as physical recruiters. When I say less dependency on physical recruiters, that does not mean they will disappear. Instead, Cognitive Recruitment can augment the activities of physical recruiters and save their time spent on non-value-added activities. Instead, they can invest that time into some of the value-added things like talking to candidates and clients and building out those relationships.

Share with us some examples of Cognitive Recruitment in action. What are the critical success factors for a staffing company embarking on a Cognitive Recruitment journey?

With advancement of technology and maturing of AI models, Cognitive Recruitment has gradually shifted mainstream. One of our customers created a virtual recruiter, which is essentially a natural language processing-based bot available for the clients on demand. Clients no longer need to call the recruiter, look at their recruiter’s availability and call back later if the recruiter is busy. The bot is available for clients to engage, place their order, check the status of their order and check the availability of candidates, and then the bot can push that job into a front-office system for processing.

The second example is about effective sourcing, selection and candidate engagement. Search and match is one of the most difficult and complex activities for any staffing company; however, there are tools in the market that are AI-driven with very contextual search and match features rather than keyword-based search. The contextual search and match provides a list of candidates who are better fit for a job and thus have a better selection success rate. One of our clients is further leveraging virtual recruiter assistants to engage with candidates, arrange and conduct interviews and roll out offers.

When implementing an effective Cognitive Recruitment system, it is important for staffing companies to have several basic things in place. The most important is digitization of business processes because Cognitive Recruitment techniques work on top of existing digital systems.

The second important success factor is availability of sufficient quality data corpus that can be used to implement machine learning and deep learning to create the insight.

The third is creating a roadmap. It is important to have the roadmap for the Cognitive Recruitment implementation process, and to prioritize important use cases and leverage design thinking to build a human-centric user experience.

And last, but not least, is the change in the way recruiters work. Their entire working model has to change, and that can be brought about only through effective organizational change management.

And of course, when implementing any technology, you need to have the necessary skills. There is a need to have the right skills within the organization to create, implement and manage cognitive technologies like data science, AI and ML.

These are some of the key success factors that are important to any staffing company before embarking on this journey.

Do you think this is a difficult transition to make? What do you see as the biggest challenge around the adoption of Cognitive Recruitment?

It comes down to having a foundation in place. It will not be a difficult transition, provided digitization of processes, availability of good-quality data corpus, the Cognitive Recruitment implementation roadmap, prioritization of the use cases and effective organizational change management is in place with buy-in from the business users. But at the same time, we are seeing that the data maturity is currently not there within many organizations. That is an issue as successful deployment of cognitive intelligence needs massive and diverse data corpus to train and fine-tune AI models. Effective data management to improve data quality, security and governance is critical.

Having said that, a big challenge I see is that the recruiters must adapt to the new way of working — the mindset has to change to include the adoption of cognitive technology.

With AI being the key component of Cognitive Recruitment, will its wider adoption and acceptance be affected, especially in view of some recent studies related to the ethical dangers of AI when not well-designed?

We need to ensure we have proper checks and balances in place. Cognitive technologies work on the data corpus available within the organization. So, it is important to ensure that whatever data is there in the system is compliant with regulatory and legal requirements. If we have audits, controls and a system in place to build explainable and transparent AI applications, I don’t think it should be a big issue.

How does the concept of Cognitive Recruitment compare to similar concepts across industries like banking and retail? Are there any lessons to be learned?

These industries have been leaders in adopting cognitive technologies. The banking industry uses bots that can engage with new customers, capture their details, feed that data into the system and open a bank account. Similarly, financial institutions use AI for fraud analytics and risk assessment. Retail uses AI technologies to get a 360-degree view of the customers, knowing their preferences and pushing the products that may be of interest to them.

The lessons we glean from them is the same across industries. Have your basic foundations in place. Prioritize digitization of the processes, quality data corpus and the framework for cognitive solution implementation and effective organizational change management. Staffing companies might be a little late in the adoption of cognitive intelligence, but we can follow in their footsteps.

What is your advice to staffing companies that are still evaluating their next steps in the cognitive transformation journey?

Cognitive Recruitment is a must. It is no longer an option. Before going down the path, however, staffing firms need to consider a few things as mentioned earlier, like how prepared they are for adopting cognitive processes.

The time to start this journey is now. Staffing companies can leverage cognitive technologies for creating better candidate, client and associate engagement and experiences; increasing their fill ratio; reducing time to hire; reducing cost of hire and so on.

To see how TCS can help you on your Cognitive Recruitment journey, contact Naveen Pathak, domain consultant, at nk.pathak@tcs.com.