Welcome to CPO Rising’s all-new feature, the Future of Work Influencer series, which will highlight innovative voices in the evolving world of work. This exciting new series will be a go-to spot for progressive thoughts on how technology, transformational thinking, and revolutionary ideas are changing how work gets done. Be sure to check out past articles in this series here.
On tap for this week’s Future of Work Influencer feature: a conversation with Sunil Bagai, CEO of Crowdstaffing.
Christopher J. Dwyer: Sunil, thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us. Tell us a little bit about your background and how you ended up in this industry.
Sunil Bagai: My background is primarily in technology. I’ve lived in Silicon Valley since the age of 5 and through osmosis from an early age, I learned to appreciate the role that technology plays in the world. I’ve also had the good fortune to work for companies such as IBM, Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, and multiple startups over the past 25 years. I got into talent acquisition in 2005 when I started a staffing company.
We started inviting other suppliers to help fill our roles and over time developed our own marketplace and technology to collaborate easier with those partners. We realized there is a major need for a solution that breaks down the silos and provides value to everyone in the hiring ecosystem, so we started to build out the technology. It became my mission to solve some of the inherent challenges by providing an innovative solution that serves all ecosystem participants. It’s been quite a journey to date, and at this moment with Crowdstaffing, I believe we are on the cusp of the next big revolution in hiring, so it’s a very exciting time.
CJD: You and I have frequently chatted about the evolution of online and digital staffing. Why do you believe these outlets have grown almost threefold over the past few years?
SB: The growth is happening for two reasons. First, the world is going through an exponential growth curve in technology innovation. Any industry that technology touches is transforming. This is causing major investments to take place, new industries to emerge, and a growth spurt in hiring. Second, businesses have a major need to be able to hire with precision and at scale. If you look at hiring scorecards, they are pretty poor for the industry. There were over six millions jobs open in the US in mid-2018, 33% of jobs are still open after 90 days, and over 200 candidates must be reviewed for each opening before a hiring decision is made. Businesses need better hiring results and outcomes. Unfortunately, the legacy staffing approaches don’t really solve for that. The online and digital staffing solutions have technology at the core and are using data, algorithms, and automation to drive new and more effective ways to hire to meet today’s business needs. That’s why you see the growth in online and digital staffing.
CJD: One of the (many) positive attributes of the digital staffing realm is the concept of “intelligent matching.” Do you think that this aspect is what sets apart the impact of digital staffing from a quality and depth perspective?
SB: Intelligent matching is a key component of designing a modern hiring solution, however it is only one of the algorithms that makes a hiring marketplace function at optimal levels. At a bare minimum, there needs to be a matching component that matches a candidate to a job. Keep in mind that these technologies work 50-to-80% of the time depending on the quality of the job description and resume. When they work, they absolutely save time and effort. When they don’t work well, that’s when things get messy and you still need human intervention. Our algorithms actually find recruiters in the marketplace that have proven their abilities previously to recruit candidates for the exact requirements in the job description. It removes the guesswork for companies having to continuously onboard new suppliers and give them time to perform.
We match candidates to jobs, and also match jobs to recruiters and candidates to recruiters. Other algorithms we have implemented that are providing huge gains are “job prioritization” and “job distribution.” In a marketplace, you need a way to prioritize jobs so that you can dynamically assign the best recruiting resources to focus on them. Additionally, you need to manage for “hot spots” in the marketplace to eliminate situations where every recruiter is going after one position because it is determined to be more favorable than others. The combination of the algorithms we have implemented drive marketplace efficiencies, ensure resource balance, and produce optimal levels of position coverage and hiring outcomes.
CJD: What “human” elements should remain a critical facet of hiring and staffing?
SB: Hiring is a human business at the end of the day. You can’t eliminate the human from hiring at this point because the algorithms are not good enough. They might be in 10 years, but for now, recruiters continue to play a very important role in hiring. AI is not smart enough to understand the motivation of a candidate, sell a candidate on why a position may make sense, understand why a candidate will choose one position over another in a competitive environment, assess for people/culture fit, and much more. Most AI is purely looking for a skills match, and, as I said earlier, is only 50-to-80% accurate at best. For these reasons, we believe AI, automation, and algorithms have a big role to play in reducing time and effort in hiring activities, but in our opinion, humans still matter in ensuring accuracy, handling the softer elements of hiring, and creating a positive experience for candidates.
CJD: From your perspective, how does the “Future of Work” continue to evolve in 2019?
SB: The Future of Work will continue to evolve as digital transformation moves through the entire hiring funnel. Businesses that are tracking all of their hiring activity digitally in a holistic ecosystem that connects all parties will be able to start measuring and optimizing for much better hiring outcomes. Technology is also starting to enable more collaboration among companies, suppliers and candidates so that everyone in the talent chain can collectively work together versus in small, narrow talent pools. It’s really an exciting time, as many of the limitations from an old hiring model start to drop away, including costs. The lowest hanging fruit will be massive gains in efficiency, but ultimately, we’ll see much better hiring outcomes.
Outside of hiring, there are other use cases that I am interested to see evolve such as solving for medical benefits for freelance workers, creating a way for subsidizing education and re-training so workers can get up-skilled faster on in-demand skills without incurring huge costs, and new implementations of AI around improving workforce performance.
Connect with Sunil on LinkedIn, and, for more information on Crowdstaffing, please visit https://www.crowdstaffing.com.
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