Generative AI Use Cases || Season 1 Episode 6

How can staffing and recruiting firms use generative AI to help their businesses? 

In this episode, the team discusses how firms can apply generative AI to their greatest advantage.

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Transcript

Unknown: 0:00

Music.

Scott Montminy: 0:13

Well, Greetings, friends and welcome to Now Hiring! A podcast about trends in staffing, recruiting and talent. I'm Scott Montminy, and I'd like to thank Ceipal, founder and CEO, Sameer Penakalapati, along with his trusty cmo Andy Weiss, who are both here leading us through what we all hope are some very thoughtful conversations about our industry. And in this episode, gentlemen, we're going to explore with all of our wonderful viewers and listeners, the world of generative AI, it's a hot topic right now. Has been for a while, and it will continue to be. How can it help or hurt your business, though, that's what people really want to know. What does it mean on a practical level? So Andy, and before we get some practical tips and examples from Samir, I just wanted to ask you, from the perspective of someone that is knee deep right now in an AI business project, along with Samir, I wanted to ask, how do you find it hurting or helping, making your day better or worse, so far from a high level, and what should people expect to extract from it? It's

Andy Weiss: 1:16

got a great question, I think, from a practical standpoint, the way we're looking at using AI on a day to day basis is, how can we kind of plus up the things that we're already doing? It's very easy to get wrapped up in kind of the bright, shiny object of what it could potentially do, but the real work is in, how does it amplify or magnify the things that we're already doing, so not relying solely on the AI to do the work, but how can it make us better, faster, smarter, and inform the human side of what we're doing? And so I think Sameer, that's some of the things that you've been thinking about from a business standpoint, and also from a staffing standpoint like that, that human kind of component and and bringing that in alongside, you know, the capabilities of Gen AI and what it can do. So what do you from a macro standpoint, from a staffing industry standpoint, what are you seeing, and where do you see some of the best use cases coming away generative

Sameer Penakalapati: 2:21

AI is defined misconception that it's going to hurt the staffing industry. In fact, it's it's going to do opposite. It's going to help tremendously to improve the way the industry works. Lot of things we talk about, you know, how do we improve the productivity of the recruiters. How do we get access to the information and data much more smoothly to the hiring managers and also generate required analytics about the whole talent availability and and talent churn, the skills availability, all of that information will be extremely valuable for the companies, the hiring managers who operate the need of hiring for the businesses. So, yeah,

Andy Weiss: 3:13

who's your thinking about that? Is there? Like, hey, here's the ideal state of where a software platform like like sepal comes in, along with AI, along with the stuff that the recruiter has been doing kind of on a more traditional day to day basis. Like, is there this perfect blend in an ideal state that we're trying to arrive at?

Sameer Penakalapati: 3:36

Yeah, you know, if you broadly classify the recruiter time, or they just segregate the recruiters, you know, segment that used to be traditionally, 60% of their time goes towards sourcing the candidates, and then 20% of the time goes towards really managing candidates, getting hold of the candidates, you know, goes in between. There's choppy communications between candidate and recruiter, and the real 20% is when they actually spend time and building the relationship with the candidates, understanding their needs, mapping their needs with the business and the requirements of the job, and actually creating a huge value, because, end of the day, that 20% of the time is what is more valuable than all the other things, but it is a necessary need of actually finding those candidates before you talk to anybody, right? Yeah, AI is going to help tremendously to to to compress that 80% of the time and leave most more time to the recruiters and the candidates in between, so that actually they can better understand their expertise business needs and map that appropriately and and tremendously improve the productivity of the business because you have the right person. Are for the job. So

Andy Weiss: 5:01

it's not like it's hey, here's the tool, here's a technology tool, and you know that you're going to spend more time in it. The idea is it's going to help you off, offload some of that so that you can spend more time with your candidates, on those relationships with your clients and customers. Is that That's

Sameer Penakalapati: 5:22

good, yeah, like for example, I will give you a few simple examples, right? And used to be the recruiters expertise defined by how efficiently they build the structure strings. That's That's how they used to define how efficient the recruiter, the way how they build the search strings, Boolean bullion strings for, you know, searching the candidates. Now, with this generative AI, with a few instructions, it could probably build the most efficient such string for you to search for appropriate candidate through internal database or external job portals, and now that puts everybody into the same level playing field in terms of, you know, the building that such string,

Scott Montminy: 6:14

can that work in reverse, Sameer as well, like, can we use Boolean strings to create better job descriptions, and maybe pull words together and word clouds and whatnot to create a job description that's actually going to attract more candidates. Yeah, absolutely

Sameer Penakalapati: 6:29

right. You want to be very concise and very neutral job like in a lot of talks about, you know, a lot of these job descriptions are like, you know, the bias, like the built in bias, like unconscious bias, built into these job descriptions that now, with the generator, you can build very neutral job descriptions and are very concise and clear and set the expectations of the candidates. And lot of times, you know, the job descriptions were written by the planning managers who are not trained to create these neutral, efficient way of, you know, building the jobs descriptions now with the given the content that whatever the requirements you have, you also chart, you know, either chart, GPT, Google, Gemini or other things, other llms, You ask them but you create the concise job description with a very neutral voice that you are not unconsciously building a bias in generating the job descriptions. So

Andy Weiss: 7:31

yeah, so the recruiters are using, or starting to use more, AI, but that's that's just one side of the equation, like the candidates are probably using it too. So how do we like, what's the what's the ethical balance like, what's the like? How do we as a staffing firm, as a recruiter? How do you like, juggle the the knowledge or that a candidate, you know, hopefully that it's a real candidate that you're talking to, which could be getting harder and harder, but also that they are who they they're representing themselves to be on paper and interview questions and stuff. Because you and I could be having this, this conversation, and I could, you know, I've seen demos of things where you could be asking me a question and, you know, an AI tools listening to it and giving me potential responses, either based on my background or what I think you want to hear. So how do we kind of balance that? What are your thoughts on? Yeah,

Sameer Penakalapati: 8:31

you're right, and they have these options equally available. And then chart GPT, or any other generative AI platforms don't discriminate one against the other but, but, you know, when we you would see lot more tools out there will be available in the near term about, you know, dealing with this kind of challenges, right? For an example, you would like, if you have a specific job description for a specific client, for a specific industry, then the recruiters knowledge can be utilized to really ask specific questions that are not like mimicked by these llms because they don't have this information in advance. So there's one way is to ask the question specific to it, but then those preparations can be done with the help of an LLM so recruiter can ask those questions with the help of llms and there, with their their own specific knowledge about the industry, and the combination of that kind of, kind of intelligent way to bring those questions and get the information from the candidate, and he could do that, you know, I mean, I'm not saying it's going to be a foolproof solution, one word the other, but I think there are ways you could still manage it. But, you know, I'm sure there are ways and tools that helps to even detect who's a real person and how are they doing it. And, you know, this is just, we're just starting this, this expansion of the AI. And who knows, we're going to see a lot of things that's going to change in the near future. And AIs are llms, and AIs are, you know, evolving itself every three months. And this is something that we have never seen, this this speed of evolution of the technology. And I think it's going to be fun, right? And we're going to see a lot more things with their time.

Andy Weiss: 10:21

It's super exciting. And Scott, Scott, before we close out, just in a in a word, Sameer, like, what's your, what's your? One hope that AI will bring to staffing in a word or a phrase here is,

Sameer Penakalapati: 10:35

I want to say it right, and if it's not about the AI is going to hurt the industry. Not using AI is going to hurt the industry, and, more importantly, the companies. So I'm saying you adopt AI and you find a solution that fits to your industry and to your business, and then be, you know, take advantage of the capabilities that AI brings in. So the challenge that you're going to have, the companies will have with not adopting AI, and if the companies that adapts AI uses responsibly, and I think, will lead the pack, and they will do take advantage and grow this business tremendously. So not using AI is going to hurt more than AI.

Scott Montminy: 11:19

Sameer, you've been a great evangelizer for AI for a long time now, and leading this discussion for a long time. So although you say it's just starting now, it really started a while ago, and it's just now accelerating and blowing up. So Something tells me this will not be our last conversation on this podcast about artificial intelligence and generative AI in particular. So I want to thank you all for the time, and thank everyone for joining us. And you can do so on Spotify, find us on YouTube, wherever you can find us. And we ask you to like and subscribe, and we thank you for it until the next time. We're Now Hiring!