The major news in recruiting for the year 2017 was undeniably AI, and with its increasing adoption this trend is only expected to increase in 2018.

By working with tools like ATS, recruiters have used technology to make their jobs easier, faster, and better or in other words highly efficient. Employees are the company’s most important asset, which makes talent acquisition strategy the foundation for ongoing success.

AI is capable of considering a probable employee for a particular position by looking at candidate’s background and matching up with those workers by identifying certain qualifications, educational history, work experience and other factors that consider a candidate has the background to emulate the top performers at your organization.

According to a study by Harvard Business Review, it was found that 44% of businesses incorporate AI into their IT functions, and 19% use AI to predict their customers’ future purchases and present them with suitable offers. Businesses are also beginning to see the benefits of AI in recruitment. According to Ideal, 96% of senior HR professionals consider that AI can highly leverage talent acquisition and retention.

Here's how AI can help:

1. In Posting Jobs: AI can use programmatic advertising technique which gives the user the ability to place highly targeted ads in front of the targeted audience based on their browsing history, online activity, and cookies. Cookies can be used to track candidates who visit career pages, allowing us to compile records of what other pages they’re browsing and what type of jobs they're looking for.
2. Sourcing candidates: AI, in the form of machine learning, sources, and qualifies candidates online in resume databases such as CareerBuilder, Indeed and Monster for recruiters to follow-up with. The process often uses Sentiment analysis which comprises of the use of natural language processing, text analysis, computational linguistics, and biometrics to systematically identify, extract, quantify, subjective information. It can also help recruiters in creating job descriptions with keywords that attract a more diverse candidate pool.
3. Resume screening: Manually screening resumes is a fairly tedious task, however, by using the machine learning ability AI screening can be automated by learning what existing employees’ skills and qualifications are. By assigning certain rules and triggers, conversations related to specific hiring or job queries and receive instant answers can be automated.
4. Messaging and data collection: Chatbots that use natural language processing to collect data from candidates, in form of screening questions, chat responses, answer FAQs about the job, and schedule an interview. Information from a candidate collected by the chatbots is then fed into a job portal/s or sent directly to a human recruiter to follow up with the candidate. This process reduces the need to respond to emails, phone calls, and text messages without compromising on candidate experience.

AI technology is capable of changing many things. However, it still is not equipped enough to remove complete human interaction. AI can help bypass back-end and repetitive processes, ultimately assisting recruiters in finding the right talent. The technology is here but it is not all-encompassing; conducting face-to-face interviews may still promise a satisfactory match than otherwise. While AI can assist in many parts of the recruitment process, the human involvement remains imperative.

In the very near future, most recruitment models will involve AI. AI is already transforming every business vertical; in medicine, AI is taking the role of a clinical assistant to help physicians make faster and reliable diagnoses. Companies like General Electric & Siemens are using AI for monitoring machine fleets and factories.

Artificial Intelligence is also rapidly evolving in the Staffing industry and is bound to change the game of recruitment. Jobinvote CEO, Dan Finnigan said, “If recruiters and companies can learn to pair themselves with a specific AI, they can train it to understand a particular corporate mission and culture, so that recruiters feel like they leverage these chatbots and other similar technology as extensions of their teams, not as replacements for them”. In the words of Cyberpunk author, William Gibson, “The future is already here, it’s just not widely distributed.”

Cloud is now a basic business requirement; every business in some way or another is harnessing the power of cloud to succeed. Some may choose in-house infrastructure or a private cloud environment, while others prefer public cloud offerings. The fact still remains that companies are relying more on their cloud vendors now more than ever for providing the best services at reasonable rates. However, all too often, that’s not always what’s delivered.

Here are some points to keep in mind while you deal with a cloud vendor in order to get the best deal for your corporate assistance.

1. Review Vendor’s Uptime and Downtime Statistic

Uptime statistics define the time that a cloud service is accessible to its users, those who have subscribed for the cloud provider’s services. Companies often claim that they rarely have outages or they are better in uptime statistics. Don’t let these claims go unchecked. A lot of cloud providers fail to deliver a good uptime, in other words, are not giving to the customer three nines (99.9%) of availability. 99.9% uptime means 9 hours of unscheduled downtime per year which does not count the scheduled downtime that the companies organize for maintenance purposes. Along with availability, it is equally important to have a good response time warranty, i.e., how fast the system is operating when it is up and running. It is of utmost importance to get detailed statistics before signing up with a vendor.

2. Get specifics on Support Levels

Cloud vendors pretty much offer more or less the same support levels with few alterations with names like ‘standard’, ‘essential’, and ‘ultimate’ packages. These packages often do not give detailed information as to how much support each level guarantees. Always remember to ask your vendor a full description of these support levels and specific examples and whether these situations would be covered in the support or not. It is advisable to get the guarantee in the form of an agreement to serve as a record if at all required in the future.

3. Find a point of contact

In case of an issue, you must have a designated point of contact with the vendor, who can resolve it. Many companies try to get past this by introducing a ticketing system. ‘Tell us your problem, and we’ll get back to you when we have a fix’, is an example of a pop-up message and is very common in the industry. A Designated POC would be an ideal alternative to such a message in order to address the issue at hand immediately and to make sure the right people are working to resolve it.

4. Avoid Vendor lock-in and know your Separation Agreements

Cloud vendors may try to get an initial long-term contract with lock-in periods varying from months to years and often levy early termination charges. While choosing a cloud provider it is important to evaluate the Separation Agreements in place. While separation maybe the last thing that comes to mind while choosing a vendor, it is still one of the most important things to consider. It may also be crucial to inquire whether the vendor has the capability to retain your data even after your contract has ended with them, in order to avoid any possible data breaches.

5. Check the Service Level Agreements

SLA is the commitment on availability levels and performance of services offered. There are no specific standards to an SLA and thus it varies from provider to provider. Higher the price of the service, better the performance guaranteed, and this is usually negotiable. It is important to go through the verbiage of an SLA to clearly define vendors accountability and service assurances and choose the best plan according to your requirement with matrices that offer discounts on billing and other penalties if it is breached.

Stay Updated

Last but not least, once you have finalized a provider, do not stop looking for better alternatives. Be up to date with the market and what other providers are offering. If your service doesn’t match with the current market trend, be sure to ask your provider for an updated service and also, for them to inform you about changes in terms and conditions, if any, while your service is still intact with them.

Getting the right cloud vendor is essential for a company’s overall growth. Keeping these checks in mind while evaluating your options will not only help you to find the right cloud vendor but also let you manage your company’s operations unhindered and with peace.

Whenever a new technology emerges, it becomes easy to see what jobs it might replace. The challenge may be to envision what kind of new jobs may be born in the future. A decade ago, artists used to work with copywriters in order to prepare advertisements, but today with the help of computer-aided graphics the same is done by graphic designers, which took the scope of print media and creativity to new heights. The idea is that when we pass off some of our workload to machines, it broadens the scope of what was possible. We come up with new ideas, new innovations, and new kinds of work. In fact, many industries that are around today, like electronics, health, medicine, finance, and insurance, barely existed or did not exist at all a century ago. By that notion, it is never wrong to think of upgrading one’s skills with time. A report titled “Towards a Reskilling Revolution: A Future of Jobs for All” was released on Monday, 22 January 2018 at the World Economic Forum’s 48th annual meeting in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland. The conference was attended by more than 3,000 global leaders and industry experts. The report signifies a strong emphasis on job disruption and reskilling, it analyzed more than thousand job types that are in the crossfire of technology and pave the way to a major job disruption. According to the report, 1.4 million US jobs will be disrupted by the year 2026, due to technology and other factors, out of which 57% jobs will be women-oriented. However, the research also suggests that 95% of workers conjugated to the risk, would find quality jobs with higher pay if they have enough reskilling.

It is perceived that only 2% of workers would have a better opportunity to transition to new jobs whereas 16% would have no opportunities at all. However, at-risk workers who retrain for an average of two years could earn an annual salary increase of $15,000.The change is real and anxiety justified, however, new technologies often open up new frontiers of jobs that did not exist before. Imagine trying to explain what an ‘app developer’ does for someone in the 1960s. Focusing on machines that will replace jobs do not speak to how they might actually strengthen them. For example, when ATMs started rolling out in the '70s, they threatened to make human bank tellers extinct, however, banks quickly found that ATMs made it cheaper to open new branches, and the result was more branches and more tellers than ever. Since the arrival of ATMs, the number of bank tellers has doubled. Why? Well, once bank tellers were freed up from dispensing cash, they started forging relationships with customers, solving problems, and introducing them to new products like loans and investments. The net effect was that bank tellers became more valuable to banking.

What about the future?

Automation is accelerating and spreading to more industries faster than we've ever seen before. Machines are increasingly replicating skills that we once thought were unique to humans. AI algorithms are trading in the stock market, recommending products to us, and guiding airplanes through the sky. Robots are being developed that someday might be cooking your meals, running warehouses, or performing surgery, all by themselves. So, is this time different? Luminaries like Elon Musk seem to think so. He has predicted that soon, robots will be able to do everything better than us. And Stephen Hawking has warned that artificial intelligence will replace humans completely. Lots of people seem to think it's only a matter of time before these ever-smarter machines make most of today's workers obsolete. So, should we be worried? Well, yes, it is, just like it was different after the printing press was invented or the assembly line or tractors or computers or any other invention was made that changed the world.

All of these new technologies transformed the way we work and adjusting to them wasn’t simple, inexpensive, or immediate. But if the past is any indication, this radical leap forward in technology is at least as likely to create jobs as it is to destroy them, even if these new jobs might sound as strange to us, as an app developer does to someone who's never seen a cell phone before.

Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum stated that the only limiting factor considered in the world of ‘opportunities for individuals’, is that the disposition of leaders in creating investments in the process of re-skilling people, that has a direct impact on bridging worker onto new jobs. The importance of this investment will be massive for businesses, as well as, for workers who may find a new purpose in their lives. People with transferable skills like collaboration and critical thinking abilities will have the most beneficial transition in this period. As President John F. Kennedy once quoted, “Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.”

The staffing industry provides career opportunities and workplace solutions for some 16 million Americans each year which makes a vital contribution to the United States’ workforce and economy. The industry generated $428 billion in revenue worldwide in 2016, according to the “Global Staffing Industry Market Estimates and Forecast: May 2017 Update” released by Staffing Industry Analysts, where the US, Japan and the UK — made up a majority of the revenue. Temporary staffing generated 89% of the revenue, with the remaining 11% stemming from place and search. Staffing firms have had their plates full in 2017 between the talent shortage, technology adoption, candidate and client engagement, and ambitious revenue goals. Thus, staffing firms must choose wisely when allocating resources such as, time and money. Staffing firms have also taken a proactive approach to technology adoption: 64 percent of firms use an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to track candidate activity and 60 percent use a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system for business development.

Outsourcing various functions of a business is not a new practice; many use outsourced vendors for payroll, email hosting and other back office functions. Specifically, through offshore models such as, sourcing and screening which are a growing trend in outsourcing recruitment-related tasks. The significant cost-effectiveness of leveraging offshore labor markets is the major benefit of this business model. There is the simultaneous increase of their bandwidth and productivity, by releasing in-house recruiters from some of the more tedious tasks of their job.

Through online networking, inbound marketing and innovative staffing software, technology is evolving at an unprecedented rate, impacting all industries while the days of Rolodexes and newspaper ads are long gone, leaving recruiters and salespeople alike to build their books of business. There is also the growing importance of verified sales intelligence and predictive analytics. More than just a verified list of contacts, it is now essential to gather data on complex org. charts, technical environments, online behavior, and more. The more you know about a contact and their company, the more basis you have for building a solid foundation.

Staffing firms have high hopes for 2018, though a number of disruptions and challenges stand in the way of them looking to improve revenue and profitability. Expectations for the year can be met if the firms are able to anticipate and rise above these challenges. The talent shortage has been the most mentioned obstacle for 2017, it’s likely to continue for 2018, while more than 60 percent of all respondents rank it as the top three challenges, followed by pricing pressures (53 percent) and economic uncertainty (37 percent).

 Conclusion

The statistics above prove that the staffing trends have been improving for the best over 2017. Though downfall has been witnessed in both growth and low in demand at times, that does not seem to hinder the rate at which the staffing industry is growing. Today, the ladder of success for staffing is not looking to stop but is grabbing onto opportunities everywhere possible.