It is stating the blindingly obvious that recruitment is a people business and unlike other parts of the retail industry it is not a place that is renowned for embracing technology. Maybe it should be more welcoming of the capabilities of tech especially as the power of AI could help HR and recruitment teams deal with the increasingly high volumes of applications they are receiving.

Even when there is a recognition that technology could be a potential problem solver there can be a frustration that the solutions in the marketplace have been designed by people who don’t understand the underlying issues. They are often tech people. It’s all too often the features in the solutions that are problematic for HR departments rather than the underlying technology.

Unless you have really lived through the problems and have a deep, deep understanding of the situation then there will be questions raised about why certain features and functionality have been included in HR-focused technology solutions. I encountered a software engineer who did not have a hospitality background or knowledge of the industry but was developing systems for the sector and he thought that recruiting people for waiter roles simply involved taking the first batch of people who applied. Job done. Simple as that!

It’s a perennial scenario for myself and other HR professionals of querying why solutions have been built in a certain way. Why do it like that? All too often it’s a case of the tech developers layering up the functionality rather than concentrating on the relevant ones that solve the underlying problems for recruiters. There seems to be a pressure on tech developers to add ever more features.

I’m a hospitality person working at the coal-face and heavily involved in the day-to-day job of handling recruitment. And I’ve been doing this for 30 years recognising the problems that are faced when involved with the volume end of the market.

This is exactly why I’ve become involved with creating a solution for the industry. All the way through the solution’s development the team has been laser-focused on what is needed by HR teams just like ourselves. We’ve been able to translate our experience into the solution. We’ve aligned with the problem and built the solution around this.

It utilises AI to boost the efficiency of the volume recruiting scenario. It’s a numbers game and our technology can screen every application and match all the relevant people with the defined criteria that will lead to interviews given to a healthy 25% of candidates. This is around 12-times the level when recruiting is handled manually because many of the applications received by retailers and hospitality companies will simply not be looked at because of the volumes involved and the time involved in the process.

Interviewing such a high number of people would be daunting for any time-strapped organisations but with AI-powered solutions there is the capability to use the technology to actually undertake the interviews. The technology also seamlessly delivers tailored feedback to both candidate and employer to a level of detail that is unheard of when interviewing for volume-based roles on a face-to-face basis.

With such technology the chance of finding the right people is massively enhanced whereas with the current methods the likelihood of overlooking highly suitable people is enormous. It provides the opportunity to reduce the high levels of people who leave companies after only three months and the recruitment process then has to start again. Yet more time required from the recruitment teams.

Such tech solutions also massively reduce the time to hire – taking it down from an average of 22 days between placing the job ad to the appointment of the suitable candidate to potentially much less. The myriad upsides to using technology within the recruitment process suggests there is an inevitability about a growing embrace of tech by HR departments that will lead to a more blended environment where a people-based department increasingly leverages technology to boost efficiency.

Ed Godwin, co-founder, Talent Unlimited