AI in Assessment, Early Talent & Future Skills ft. Rob Davies

And so from your perspective, we're here to sort of unpack some of the things that are kind of happening from AI.

But how has that changed candidate behavior towards kind of AI tools in the mainstream? What have you kind of seen?

Yeah, I think the two biggest things I think that we're seeing from an AI piece with candidates is volume, first of all, in terms of just the ease at which they can now apply for multiple positions.

So we've definitely seen an increase in applications, which puts a lot of stress on the kind of operating model that we would have had in place previously.

The other piece that it does as well is the quality of the application flows further down the recruitment funnel.

When I think about experienced hire, people are using AI to match their CVs a lot more closely with job descriptions.

Therefore, on paper, they're looking a lot stronger and requiring a lot more sort of screening time from our team.

In our early careers world, we're seeing some amazing innovation from candidates where they're using avatars and put in lip syncing into it and content over the top of it and almost having a completely synthetic application.

So you see lots of weird and wonderful uses of it and each impressive, but equally causing challenges that previous models weren't set up for.

Yeah, I think everybody, as you touched upon, everybody looks the same, don't they, in terms of that application process.

And I've spoken to many organizations that aren't as sophisticated enough in their processes.

They've either sort of tried to do it manually in the past and tried to deal with that application process.

And they just say to me, Darren, everybody's the same.

You know, everybody's the same in their applications.

That's the thing that you've got to kind of think to unpack around it.

But what do you think kind of the risks that kind of are presented from AI in the process?

I'll start with the risks so we can talk about the opportunities hopefully for a bit longer because that's always better.

I think the risk is entirely that.

You're not getting a genuine representation of either somebody's approach to the way that they work or their capability of being able to do the job.

So people can get so far down the funnel and really, really clever people can get a little bit further and get in through the door.

So that's probably the biggest risk in terms of getting people on board that aren't the highest quality candidate and aren't able to kind of fulfill the role that you need to do.

There are a whole host of other risks in terms of like, we try and kind of sweep things up in background checks and things like that.

So people aren't kind of leaving out information that's important for us to know as a regulated business, for example.

But generally we're, Our kind of North Star is always finding the best talent and the best person for the role.

And if we're not doing that because AI is masking, then that puts a big risk on our business because we're a time business.