Genie Journal

Sophisticated AI: Re-shaping the construct of a workforce
By Nick Grime

The idea of what makes a ‘standard’ workforce is changing. Why? Because there is no longer such a thing as a ‘standard’ workforce, which means there certainly isn’t a ‘standard’ way of bringing talent to said workforce, either – particularly as, thanks to technology, traditional means of internal resourcing and external recruiting are shifting.

Today, we’re seeing many organisations looking to reimagine their workforces to navigate the new talent landscape, and giving themselves a competitive advantage in the process.

Technology has a vital role to play.

The agile workforce

Where organisations once needed a large core of ‘owned’ permanent talent, the pandemic has accelerated the trend towards building more flexibility into workforce makeups. One that blends a smaller core of permanent staff with a flexible pool of expert on demand talent that can be accessed at the moment of need.

A report from Harvard Business School, Building the on demand workforce, found that 60% of business leaders would prefer to “rent”, “borrow” or “share” talent with other companies. 90% of business leaders also reported that, with this in mind, they expect talent platforms to be somewhat or very important to their organisation’s future competitive advantage.

Intelligent AI matching

This is where sophisticated AI can take centre stage. AI can power the key components required for success, such as validation, matching and serving resource to requirement at exactly the right moment

Don’t get me wrong – AI in resourcing and hiring isn’t new. It’s used at many different points of project resourcing or talent acquisition processes in recruitment, whether that be in sifting through CVs, applicant tracking or as part of an assessment process.

However, a higher level of sophistication can deal with the front end of that flow, streamlining operations from the get go by focusing on the most important part of the chain: the matching of the right talent, to the right task, at the right time. It can bring the right skill set to a potential project, determine the talents’ interest and availability, and even assess the fit for a particular team dynamic

The strategic benefits of sophisticated AI

Companies can make real strides by implementing the use of AI on a centralised talent pool.
That’s because sophisticated AI makes for a far richer data set, and can help with more human elements, such as giving insight into a workforce’s diversity makeup. For instance: do ethnic minority groups price themselves at less than their peers? Or do those that network with their company peers less often get forgotten when projects are being resourced? Sophisticated AI can identify this, and make steps to ensure a fairer resourcing process for talent. Insights like this have the potential to be a huge differentiator when competing for access to the best people in a fast-moving talent landscape.

Maximising workforce utilisation

Strategically, sophisticated AI can also help maximise workforce utilisation. This doesn’t just mean using tools to bring on additional, external talent in an effortless manner; it actually begins with internal workforce application. Think about what it could mean if you had a way of tracking, in the live, the specific utilisation of your different teams, for instance. AI could allow business leaders to track and target 80% utilisation, leaving staff the time and headspace to think creatively about new opportunities in the remaining 20% of their time. This type of insight can have a profound impact on a business’ bottom line, allowing corporates full visibility and thus the ability to bill out time far more accurately.

What does success look like?

For companies, success in this context comes from having a reliable workforce, with the right breadth and depth of skillset mix, with minimal output required to correctly bring the right talent together with the requirement in hand. Having a pool of talent accessible at the click of a button is becoming increasingly appealing and a huge advantage for a business, not to mention time and cost saving.

To date GENIE has saved hiring companies c. 15,000 hours of time when resourcing talent by making over 40,000 automated matches against project resource requirements, proving that the use of sophisticated AI can successfully enable the benefits of workforce agility across searching, resourcing and handling the admin, to name a few.

As for talent? Success comes in flexibility and variety. The ability to diversify your work by being amongst the talent networks of multiple entities, be that departments inside companies or the on demand talent networks of multiple companies at the same time, is becoming more and more tempting.

So, is it time to let the resourcing and recruiting robots take over?

Sophisticated AI shouldn’t completely replace humans in the decision-making process of who to resource against highly skilled tasks. Not yet anyway.

What it can do, however, is remove the need to search and thus offer new possibilities in terms of how workforces are assembled. By letting resourcer or recruiter robots work alongside us, companies can more easily access the right talent at the right moment from their modern, agile and healthy workforce.