Nothing instills fear and confusion in recruiting leaders these days like talk of the imminent tectonic shift represented by artificial intelligence, and its resulting impact on the human workforce. Unfortunately, much of the zeitgeist around AI has been informed by media hype and not by a technologist’s worldview. We were lucky to speak with Gavin Wilkins, Group IT Director at Harvey Nash Group, one of the world’s most celebrated professional recruitment and outsourcing agencies. As a computer scientist, Wilkins cuts through the hype and misconceptions concerning the impact of rapidly proliferating technologies on recruitment as an industry, and clearly defines what agencies need to do in order to remain competitive and relevant in the next ten years.
RIX: The landscape surrounding the recruiting world is changing quickly. What shifts are you most excited about? For instance, Google introduced Google for Jobs, a product taking aim at job boards that will likely make quite an impact on the industry.
Gavin Wilkins (GW): I’m not a recruiter, so I look at it from a different perspective. I see lots of shifts in the business and the markets we operate in, but I think I’m more nervous than excited. They create opportunities for us to evolve – but they are challenges. Very little excites the business per se from a technology perspective. We see some interest around video interviewing and deep learning but I think mostly what we’re seeing is the business urgently looking for ways to meet some of the challenges and opportunities that are coming to bear with the shifting global landscape. You mentioned Google; they’re actually a threat, but not in the way you might think. We’re seeing some the best recruiters service accounts like Google and Amazon, and then get lucrative offers to work directly for such companies and leave their third-party agencies.
