AI: It's The New Power Tool Everyone is Talking About

If you prefer, you can download the PDF of this Talent Pulse Briefing.

Artificial Intelligence is touching almost every corner of our lives and advancing at warp speed. Naturally, its reach has extended into the world of recruitment and candidate attraction. There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle, and we don’t have to if we apply these magical powers correctly. 

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

While Manpower walks hand in hand with our peers as new learners of AI’s benefits, we stand firm on a truth uncovered early on this journey: organizations must take great care not to lose their human connection as this shiny new tool hits the recruitment scene.

To help protect against some of AI’s unintended consequences, President Biden recently issued an executive order aimed at establishing standards for artificial intelligence. The sweeping order noted concerns over increased bias and job displacement, calling for a report on potential labor market impacts.

Correctly enhancing your Talent Acquisition process with AI is a big responsibility. Failing at this task could have seriously negative ethical implications. Yet, done right, organizations can leverage human-centered AI as an authentic extension of their own workplace culture. Exciting, right?

We think so — and like many organizations, Manpower is just at the cusp of uncovering what AI can mean to our daily processes and interactions while keeping the human element top of mind. Our own organizational commitment to this balancing act is clearly evidenced by our new huManpower campaign, as well as our powerful and personal Manpower pledge.

Making EVP the MVP

The Manpower Pledge is our Employer Value Proposition (EVP), and it forms the basis for everything that we do. To use AI effectively in recruitment and engagement, we need to know how to communicate our EVP to the people we want to recruit. This “True North” is not only useful for recruitment, but also for strengthening the bond with our existing employees.

Every Manpower recruiter pledges to:

Check out some of the cool ways we are leveraging AI while ensuring our EVP remains ever-present:

1.  Candidate Marketing. Think job board postings, snazzy social media campaigns, and refreshed branding strategies. AI is a valuable partner when it comes to adding some muscle to your messaging game. It can jump-start the engagement process. Yet — Human Alert — you’ve got to feed the machine the right ingredients to reach your desired outcome. What are those key factors?

2.  Automated Employee Engagement. Picture deploying a regular cadence of checking in on your employees to boost engagement that you can set and forget. The value in never again forgetting to “check in” and connect with EVERY member of your organization represents tremendous engagement value. Yet — Human Alert — once the employee engages back with the AI. For example, if an employee gets a check-in text and has an issue to discuss, you must be positioned to take the conversation from automation to real time connection.

3.  Automated General Communications. Just schedule, set, and forget messaging such as open enrollment reminders and other general organizational announcements. Not only that, sleep better at night knowing that this is one less item on your list. Yet — Human Alert — even general messaging is a fluid, moving target as your organizational culture changes and grows. You’ve got to have eyes on this messaging for quality control and be able to step in with adjustments as needed.

4.  Standardized Document Creation. Picture this: handbooks, safety instructions, formal job descriptions all available at the snap of your fingers. The possibilities are endless, and AI can help you finish a project that may have taken days before in under an hour. Yet — you guessed it — Human Alert! Even what may seem like the most transactional (dare we say sort of boring) document creation is still a special chance to put your organization’s human touch out there and speak to your internal stakeholders. So, let tech do its job but add the touches that make it true to life in your world.

We use AI for every step of our candidate interactions:

Sorry - You Can't Fake It Till You Make It!

Let’s revisit exhibit A, shall we? While the ability to embed your culture into the AI that is attracting your candidates may seem like a no-brainer, there are some prerequisite questions organizations must ask themselves. 

This type of self-introspection can be a tough pill to swallow, especially for those poised at leadership levels with limited — or slightly shaded — access to the “whole picture” of what it is like to work within the organization. However, using technology to communicate an employee experience that you simply cannot deliver (IRL as the kids say) could serve up future catastrophe as new members of your organization see the true writing on the wall.

Rebekah Kowalski, Manpower’s own VP of Manufacturing, shares the following words of caution surrounding this scenario: ”If you are losing talent out the back door it doesn’t matter how good you are at the front door. AI is not going to fix that.”

AI: Your Silent Partner - Not Your Replacement

The IBM Institute for Business Value puts it succinctly: “Generative AI isn’t replacing people, but people who use generative AI are replacing people who don’t.” It’s important to embrace AI and understand what it can and can’t do for you. For example, if you ask a bot to create content for you, don’t rely on the results of your query alone. A simple cut-and-paste job could come up quite short of your expectations when it comes to capturing the intended spirit and context of your words. Keeping a personal voice sprinkled throughout communications is as simple as inserting a personal greeting or folding in a reference to an interaction you’ve had in the past.

Human intelligence — also referred to as emotional intelligence — cannot be replaced, but we must be vigilant to maintain balance between the two.  In the words of Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, author of I, Human, “We have to use AI to unlock or harness our potential rather than to undermine or handicap our own experience.” He observes, “So far, the most consequential aspect of AI is not its ability to replicate or surpass but rather impact human intelligence.”

Some Bottom-Line Benefits of AI

Here are a few of the advantages that almost any company can expect to see with proper implementation of AI.

1. It enables data-driven decisions free of bias, personal intuition or inaccurate assumptions
2. Minimizes the costs and disengagement associated with performing mundane, repeatable tasks that can be performed by technology
3. Helps to create highly personalized employee and customer experiences
4. Can identify high-potential prospects
5. Cuts the time it takes to move from one stage to the next — such as from design to commercialization — which results in better and more immediate ROI

... And Some Bottom-Line Advice

What will the future hold? According to the World Economic Forum, “The interaction between humans and AI, as well as the ability to choose which decisions to delegate to AI, will be among the most important skills for decision-makers.” In any endeavor involving embedding AI within your recruitment strategy, we will say it again: start with a strong EVP and build from there. You will be rewarded tenfold if the external organizational profile you are building truly matches the internal experience.

Do you need help crafting or refreshing your EVP to align with the desires of the current workforce?

For information on all the ways we can help, connect with your Manpower workforce expert today.