seeing recruitment differently

During his three decades working within the sector, Stephen has founded and led numerous successful businesses, while working with TAtech and the National Online Recruitment Awards. The tech virtuoso spills his insights on how AI and data driven systems are reshaping talent acquisition into a slicker process for both candidates and recruiters.

Firstly, what is it about recruitment (and its accompanying technologies)

that appeals to you?

I am a born nosy parker! When you sit down and interview jobseekers for the first time you get an insight into their lives; you understand what makes them tick, what motivates them, and why they do what they do. Often they’ll tell you things that they wouldn’t tell their closest friends or partner. You also get an overview of employers because (as a recruiter) you have to understand their businesses.

Around 2000, I started a website called AllJobsUK.com, which was a signpost to every employer and recruitment agency in the UK that was advertising vacancies. The idea was to provide a service for candidates to find jobs that they otherwise wouldn’t be aware of. So the more I got into the technology side of things, the more I drifted away from hands-on recruiting: it’s a fascinating field that’s always changing.

What does TAtech, the membership organisation for technology providers within the recruitment industry, aim to achieve?

Our purpose is to help technology companies not only network with each other, but find ways in which they can partner or work together. Even when companies are competitors they can have a relationship with each other. In an evolving marketplace, it’s better that you know who you’re competing against, rather than working in the dark.

How is technology being used within the sector?

There’s a continual pendulum of what technologies candidates, employers, and recruiters are happy to use and what is available to them. What we’re finding now is that the placement of job adverts (in the same way as you might think about a billboard at the end of your street) is not always the best way of finding or attracting candidates. Not all candidates are necessarily looking for a job, but they are the people that you would like to come and work for your organisation, so technology is being used to identify people and put opportunities in front of them in ways that weren’t being considered before.

When looking at the providers of talent technology, has the field grown over the years?

There’s an ebb and flow. The evolution of technology in the marketplace has burgeoned, particularly in the last decade, where there are now technologies for every tiny little aspect of the process. What we also find is that there are a lot of mergers and acquisitions, where companies consolidate with each other to offer a more seamless solution to employers.

"THE INTRODUCTION OF AI WILL MEAN THAT TECHNOLOGY IS GOING TO LEARN FROM THE BEHAVIOURS OF RECRUITERS, CANDIDATES, AND EMPLOYERS TO ACCELERATE GROWTH.”

What emerging technologies have impressed you recently?

In the past couple of years, the pandemic has been a big punctuation point, because it changed how companies went about what they do, and how they do it. Candidates have more leverage than they had before. The number of applications per job is considerably down, and that changes the metrics of what makes a job board work (in terms of commerciality and profitability). Many jobs boards are incorporating newer technologies to not just wait for candidates to apply or to register, but to stimulate candidates’ interest in vacancies that are coming up. On top of that, there are more tools out there for candidates to use AI to identify jobs that suit them, rather than wait for an employer to tap them on the shoulder.

With the National Online Recruitment Awards, we recognise the best newcomers and innovations. A number of those companies are much more candidate-centric, giving candidates the tools to identify which type of employers they could be considering. For example, if I wanted to change industry, that's usually really difficult to do because there’s no set path. New technologies look at your background, experience, and qualifications and show the types of organisations that could be interested in

your skills.

Are there any downsides to massive advances in technology?

Whenever technology moves forward there is always a proportion of people who are not moving forward with it. Either they’re unable to, or they’re unaware that they should be doing it, or they don't have the tools to do so. There are always people who are left behind in the digital landscape.

Technologies often look for the quickest solution and if they're finding candidates who are good enough in the regular places, then they’ll go back to those places. And what that means is that people who perhaps have a more diverse background, an unstructured CV, or who didn’t go to the regular universities – then they’re not being looked at. Because technology is looking for the most obvious fit. I always prided myself in finding candidate that other recruiters were not coming across. And it might be people who are a bit older, people who don't have all thw qualifications, and those who have been unemployed or have unusual breaks in their background. I want to find those rough diamonds. It's usually the case that if the employer hires that person, they are finding someone who's more committed, more switched on, more trainable, and who, frankly, appreciates the opportunity more.

"WHENEVER TECHNOLOGY MOVES FORWARD THERE IS ALWAYS A PROPORTION OF POPLE WHO ARE MOVING FORWARD WITH IT."

You pinpoint the organisations that excel in the world of recruitment. What helps these businesses to be successful?

To my mind, the things that make recruitment agencies successful is never-ending curiosity and a keenness to connect one thing with another to make something new. The recruitment agencies who do well are the ones who partner with employers, who take an interest in how well the candidates do that they place, and learn from the ones that are successful and also the ones that don’t work out.

Who do you think are the main influencers and voices in the industry at the moment?

So, I would point first of all to the TAtech's annual top 100: it's a mix of people who might be very well-known and also people who aren't but are doing amazong things. There are no real leaders in the recruitment industry worldwide.

There are people of note, absolutely, and people people who have a degree of influence. It's also an industry that's full of people who are chockablock with opinions, like me. It’s relatively democratic.

Chad Sowash is obviously a bit of a lightning conductor with his podcast. Similarly, Matt Alder, and Serge and Serge and Shelley with The Recruitment Flex podcast. Many of the technology companies have their own webcasts and podcasts, which is great for marketing and also for evolving the conversation and focusing on where we should be turning to next.

In terms of companies that are doing great things, CV Wallet recently won best newcomer and is helping candidates take charge of their own career search process by managing all of their applications in one place. It’s founded and led by Beverly and Richard Collins, who have a number of successes in recruitment technology companies behind them. Another one would be Stint.co, which is very much on the side of gig work in the UK. On the innovation side of things, I would point to SonicJobs.

What does the future hold for the recruitment industry?

That's a really difficult question because the short answer is ‘continual change’. We’re at the very beginning of what’s going to be possible in recruitment technology. When planning ahead, technology companies used to be able to write a three or five year plan. It's not possible to think  that far ahead now; people need to be ready to pivot at any time because the market says so. The introduction of AI will mean that technology is going to learn from the behaviours of recruiters, candidates, and employers to accelerate growth. In the past 12 months, quite a few new companies have appeared, doing things that we didn’t expect. It’s great to see, and it challenges the thinking of

everyone in recruitment.

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