Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing the world of work. That much is certain. For most industries, the big question is how it will change the way people work. With all the noise around AI tools – like ChatGPT – and what they can and can’t do (or what they should and shouldn’t do) it’s easy to forget one thing: AI can make social recruiting easier and more effective.

Any digital tools – AI or not – that enable recruiters to spend less time on repetitive and time-consuming tasks and more time engaging with clients and candidates have got to be a good thing.

Darren Westall, CEO of Paiger
Darren Westall, CEO of Paiger

Social recruiting is great, but building an engaging personal brand and consistency at every touchpoint can make serious demands on your time. This is where an AI assistant really comes into its own.

To discover how easy it is to enhance social recruiting with AI, we spoke to Darren Westall, CEO of Paiger, the AI marketing assistant built for recruiters and salespeople.

Build A Better Network 

People buy from people. LinkedIn has moved away from being a headhunting tool to being a social network for professionals.

– Darren Westall, CEO, Paiger

Let’s face it, posting job ads across multiple social media channels and job boards is a time-consuming task. Especially when you want to maintain consistency, avoid unintentional bias, and present a cohesive and appealing employer brand. There’s a lot of extra work involved. From manually entering details about a company and a role to setting up the correct metadata and choosing a captivating and on-brand image – it’s all time taken away from core activities. But it’s also a social recruiting essential. 

For professional platforms such as LinkedIn, in the last 5 years or so, the balance has started to shift. They’re no longer just another space to headhunt or be headhunted; they’re somewhere to grow a professional social network and develop a personal brand for both businesses and people. They’re also a space where companies can build their brand as an employer to increase their appeal to ideal candidates.

And yet, 95% of people and businesses don’t actually share content on LinkedIn. This represents a huge missed opportunity. For employers and their recruiters, putting together engaging social content can help tease out passive candidates. Get social recruiting right, and it can surface hidden talent. The challenge, as always, is the time and cost it takes to create this content.

Cut Through The Noise

I don’t expect a recruiter in the software development space to understand Python. I do expect them to know the average salary for a Python developer with machine learning experience, based in London.

– Darren Westall, CEO, Paiger

Getting the attention of passive talent across different sectors from healthcare to software development takes carefully crafted content posted in the right places. A good starting point is to think about where your potential candidates are, who they are, and which social networks they’re likely to spend time on. That information then determines where to invest in terms of social recruiting. 

Social media platforms are busy places. Standing out from the crowd is no easy feat and, according to the statistics, only 5% of people and businesses are posting. The effort it takes to cut through the noise requires creativity and confidence. Sadly, many brands feel they don’t have the right to occupy a particular space. They question their own authority: are they really the expert? 

Recruitment is one of those industries which can quickly become very niche. For that reason, there’s sometimes a lack of belief in recruiters who need to niche down further on their market. Often, all it takes is to remove writer’s block to enable recruiters to get posting. That’s where AI comes on. 

Inside The AI Toolkit

A job being shared on LinkedIn

Paiger is an AI assistant. Not only can it be used in social selling and business development, it’s also helping tech-savvy recruiters to streamline their social recruiting processes. From CV writing prompts to tips for starting a new career, with Paiger’s AI assistant, recruiters and marketers can instantly get content-writing suggestions. 

Not only that, but Paiger’s Ghost Writing tool automatically puts together content, leaving space around it for users to customize different aspects such as the company’s tone of voice, and the call to action. In this way, Paiger enables recruiters and businesses to build their personal brand by sharing relevant content to attract candidates or new clients. 

Of course, recruiters’ networks are also another great place to share employer value proposition (EVP) content – anything from downloadable white papers to blog posts. Whether it’s the results of an employment survey or recent employer news, sharing company content across these networks is a surefire way to boost visibility and engagement with a recruiter’s or employer’s brand. 

Positioning job postings within a wider package of engaging value-added content helps to build trust, authority, and engagement with prospects. The difficulty is that recruiters have enough to do without concerning themselves with brand guidelines. With Paiger, any content shared on behalf of a company goes out with the right assets and follows brand guidelines.

Integration With PCRecruiter

For social recruiters using PCRecruiter, integrating Paiger enables them to automatically feed it with their new job roles, ready for posting across social media. All it takes is the PCR Job Board and a request to our technical team for your database’s Paiger XML feed. The AI then combines this information with a marketing approved-image, the relevant hashtags, and the correct brand guidelines before sharing it out to their social media channels – whether that’s LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram – all or just one. Job done!  

AI is making social recruiters more efficient by supporting them with automated content creation, so they can get on with more important tasks – like talking to candidates. Find out more about combining PCRecruiter with powerful integrations like Paiger. 

Book a FREE PCRecruiter demo

No matter what type of recruitment you’re working in, there are always going to be market trends. In the fallout from the pandemic and the ‘Great Resignation’, remote working not only became a viable option for some workers, but the preferred choice for many. This possibility has created new opportunities – and challenges – for those hiring.

Jeff Kaye
Jeff Kaye, Co-CEO of Kaye/Bassman International and Next Level Exchange

Jeff Kaye helped grow Kaye/Bassman to become one of the largest single-site search firms in the US. With over 30 years experience in the recruitment industry, Jeff’s seen just about every recruitment trend there is come and go.

For this blog post, we spoke to Jeff about the challenges of recruiting in a remote-first world and how companies and recruiters can adapt to ensure they’re getting the best talent available.

Supply And Demand

“Recruiters have to go where the talent lies. In the last few years, there’s been a low unemployment rate in the US, with candidates in feverish demand. On top of that, the pandemic created the possibility of a distance-based workforce.”

Jeff Kaye, Co-CEO, Kaye / Bassman

In recent years, many sectors in the employment market have seen increasingly fierce competition for the best talent. In fields such as software development and digital marketing, demand has been on the rise, leaving local talent in short supply. 

With the global pandemic opening up more opportunities for remote working, recruiters started to meet the talent where it is — whether that’s in a different state or another part of the world. The trend we’ve become accustomed to seeing is a less homogenized workforce from both the perspective of diversity and economics.

However, with most of the world now fully emerged from the pandemic and many countries facing up to economic uncertainty, there’s a sense that the hiring frenzy is poised to slow down. And it’s this supply and demand curve which correlates with what companies are willing to do to secure the best talent.

For many companies, there’s an increasing expectation that employees will return to the workplace in some capacity, either for a certain number of days a week or on a daily basis. For recruiters, the challenge comes in selling a company’s best offer in order to secure the right candidate. 

Earning The Right

“We’re likely to find less receptivity to remote-first positions except in cases where people have earned the right – by their background, their skills or qualifications, or their time at a company to demonstrate their suitability for a remote role.”

Jeff Kaye, Co-CEO, Kaye / Bassman
Working Remote

There’s no question that where people work has an impact on their effectiveness and productivity. Some people are more effective when they work from home, others perform better in the office, whilst others do better in a hybrid environment. 

Instead of falling back on a universal, blanket policy around where employees work, we’re starting to see companies evaluate the effectiveness of employees in a distance-based environment. In short, workers need to earn the right to distanced-based employment. 

At the same time, companies also need flexibility when there is a shortage of the right talent locally. In this scenario, recruiters need to expand the talent pool by county, state, or even country to secure the right candidates with the offer of remote working.  

Widening Recruitment Practice

Search professionals working in specific industries, such as medtech and pharmaceuticals, are already used to a national practice. On the other hand, there are more general recruitment firms who specialize by state or city.

To align with clients looking to fill open roles with national or even international talent, local recruiters will need to widen their capabilities, so they can quickly attract the right candidates for open roles. One approach is to push the possibilities of distance-based working. Another is to form partnerships with other recruiters within a larger network.

Access to a wider network of trusted advisors, means the recruiter maintains the client relationship but works with another recruiter to source potential candidates

The advantage of partnership is that a recruiter with local knowledge and talent in one city or state, can collaborate with another firm working with a company in a different location. This helps them extend their reach — especially when it comes to surfacing passive candidates.

Partnership is also beneficial to industry-specific recruiters who have a client looking for talent outside their specialism. For example, a recruiter working for medical and healthcare clients might have a talent pool of doctors and nurses. But what if a client needs to fill an open role in finance? 

Access to a wider network of trusted advisors, means the recruiter maintains the client relationship but works with another recruiter to source potential candidates.

The Software Needed

“The better the content inside your ATS, the better you’re going to be in targeting the right individuals.”

Jeff Kaye, Co-CEO, Kaye / Bassman

The quality and freshness of data on the best candidates can go a long way in giving recruiters a competitive edge over their rivals searching for the same talent. As does the reliability of the search function to surface candidates from your talent pool. 

Another important part of any ATS is the integration with your CRM. In the past, an ATS was simply a home for the data recruiters needed to put to use on a phone call. Now, an ATS has to integrate with a range of communication channels – social media, text, voicemail, and email – which are all used for candidate outreach. Deeper integrations between an ATS and CRM – even email sequencing functionality – offer competitive advantages to recruiters within the current employment landscape and beyond.

Every day, PCRecruiter’s hybrid blend of ATS and CRM functionality helps thousands of recruiters like those at Kaye / Bassman make the right hires. See what PCRecruiter can do for you. Discover our tech.

On February 21, 2023, Main Sequence Technology, Inc was awarded a patent by the United States Patent Office. US Patent No. 11,586,760 B2, entitled “SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR ASSOCIATING MULTIPLE LOGINS TO A SINGLE RECORD IN A DATABASE,” relates to PCRecruiter’s unique method for handling the multiple ways through which the same jobseeker might access the job board.

On February 21, 2023, Main Sequence Technology, Inc was awarded a patent by the United States Patent Office. US Patent No. 11,586,760 B2, entitled “SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR ASSOCIATING MULTIPLE LOGINS TO A SINGLE RECORD IN A DATABASE,” relates to PCRecruiter’s unique method for handling the multiple ways through which the same jobseeker might access the job board.

Diagram from US Patent No. 11,586,760 B2

The patented method allows for one consolidated applicant record in PCRecruiter while reducing the chance of a duplicate. It also prevents anyone from seeing information in the record that wasn’t provided using that login.

The PCRecruiter Job Board has been leveraging this technology for over two years to great success. The typical use case for this solution is to handle the problem of people applying for jobs and using a different log-in on a subsequent visit.

For example, let’s say Joanne Jackson arrives at the job board and uses her LinkedIn account credentials as a password in creating her account. She enters her resume, contact info, and other details. Now suppose Joanne returns to the same job board a year later, but this time, forgetting that she had used LinkedIn on the same recruitment agency’s job board in the past, she uses her Facebook account as her signup authorization.

Candidate Flow Diagram
A diagram used during the development of this feature, describing how it affects applicant data flow.

Although PCRecruiter is able to identify her as the same person based on her name and email address, it would be a security risk to display the old information to a new visitor using different account credentials. After all, if her Facebook login were to become compromised, she wouldn’t want someone to be able to log into the job board with that account and see potentially sensitive information she had entered while using her LinkedIn account.

Instead, PCRecruiter’s patented tech allows both the new and old login details to be associated with the same record, while only allowing the applicant to view and update the information that was entered while using the same credentials they have logged in with.

Furthermore, this prevents scenarios where a candidate who exists in the database but did not self-register on the job board might be stopped or delayed during their apply process by a ‘password reset’ or login operation. Even if the email, name, or resume is already on file, PCRecruiter will allow them to apply without losing or compromising any of the stored data in their record.