Artificial Intelligence & Exotic Birds

Ostriches don’t bury their heads in the sand. It’s a myth. But they do dig nests for their eggs.

So if you see an Ostrich poking its beak into the nest, rest assured, it’s more aware of what’s around it than any other time.

If you had 100,000 applicants to various vacancies per year, would you wear a blindfold and randomly grab the CV your hands first touch?

Artificial Intelligence is the nest for your eggs (hires), looking after them in a controlled but adaptable way. Harness and embrace it and you will hire, retain and attract the best, before the rest.

Take for example, Unilever (micro-startup consumer goods company, you’ve probably never heard of them):

• Recruits around 30,000 people per year
• Gets through about 2 million applications per year
• Applicants originate from 190 countries
• Interview process includes games and videos and more, much of this is online… all requiring analysis
• Data gathered from previous successful hires, are used to benchmark new applicant stats
• Provides a two page feedback document to all applicants, successful or not

To manage this mammoth process; to hire well, to learn and adapt the process, to analyse results, to quantify interview elements that would otherwise be subjectively (inconsistently) observed by the human eye or relayed between various HR bods… Unilever harness Ai.

Ai cuts out 70,000 person hours of work for Unilever, whilst unearthing talent which might otherwise stay hidden.

Stats courtesy of this article. Ta.

Daily, I’m told that Artificial Intelligence is better at recruitment than I am.

Daily, I receive personalised unsolicited emails, peddling the latest SaaS based Recruitment/CRM/Marketing/Automation tool which will revolutionise my working life and grow my billings exponentially.

Artificial Intelligence is the Peacock of the tech world, fanning its feathers like an Insta influencer ‘living their best life’ (kill me now, I swore I’d never use that phrase).

I’m an Ostrich, I’ve dug a nest that is equipped with a periscope, WiFi and a lifetime supply of Huel. I’m at peace with the inevitability that Ai brings.

I can’t help but notice the irony that early market penetration of Ai brings.

That human being at the start the sales pipeline, who pushed the red button of the sales prospecting email campaign, has instigated a sales process which renders themselves obsolete, due to their own proprietary Ai tools.

An Ai evangelistic business, will almost always use Ai in their sales process. A prospecting tool, a segmentation tool, a data mining tool… a stack of tools, all Ai centric which once set up, automate the entire pre sales process with on-boarding also handled by automation linked to a billings platform. Bye-bye human sales person.

Reminds me of a quote:

“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist”. The Usual Suspects/Charles Baudelaire

If given the chance, humans like an easy ride. Humans prefer to take credit for a good end result but don’t really care about the journey.

Humans are the assistant to the machine.

Should we fear our imminent obsolescence as Recruiters (and humans)? Yes. No. Who knows. If anything, I’m excited.

“What all of us have to do is to make sure we are using AI in a way that is for the benefit of humanity, not to the detriment of humanity”. Tim Cook

Until Ai replaces me, I’ll be embracing it to help me do the things that quite frankly, are outside of my knowledge base or take too long manually.

It’s a damn sight cheaper for me to use Ai tools to run a marketing campaign, than it is to hire an entire marketing team.

It’s so much more cost effective to analyse data with the aid of Ai, rather than outsource the process. A sales process can have a far FAR wider reach if performed by a prospecting tool.

“What all of us have to do is to make sure we are using AI in a way that is for the benefit of humanity, not to the detriment of humanity”. Tim Cook, CEO Apple Inc

Though we’re feeding the machine, we need the machine. And for the time being, the machine needs us.