“What I would recommend, above all, is to be curious”

In Fitzgerald Power’s interview series, we’re speaking to people, with different perspectives, who feel they can offer more to the workplace – from the water cooler all the way up to C-Suite.

For years, the typical recruiting process remained little unchanged. It would begin with HR searching for candidates to fill a position, and then the company manager would have its talent acquisition team briefed on what is needed. Once that’s done, they’d either start scouring LinkedIn and internal databases or simply put the word out. And, finally, the firm would invite third-party recruiters to help with difficult searches. Of course, as anyone who works in recruitment knows – headhunting can be a lengthy and challenging process. It takes a lot of time and energy to search for the right people and further time and energy to get them to consider the options. Searching to fill C-Suite positions can take weeks to several months to find an appropriate slate of candidates, interview them, go through the hiring process and ultimately find the right fit. However, instead of doing the drudgery work, modern recruiters have begun leveraging AI to home in on potential candidates with the right qualities, experiences, background, education, skills and appropriate licenses and credentials. “Everyone should educate themselves on AI,” Paul McArdle, Joint Managing Partner of recruitment firm The Panel and Talent and Recruitment columnist with The Currency, says. “Embracing AI in the recruitment world has lots of benefits. We just have to be curious in order to find out what they are.”

McArdle has been with The Panel – a recruitment consultancy based in Dublin, specialising in placing professionals in Executive, Accountancy & Tax, Banking & Treasury, ESG & Sustainability, Funds & Investment Management, HR & Business Support, IT & Business Transformation and Legal – since 1991, after working for two years with Hays in London, recruiting tradesmen for construction sites. “I did a B.Comm in UCD, finishing that in 1988, and then moved to London because there were no jobs here. The first job I got was recruiting bricklayers. I did that for two-and-a-half years, and hated it,” he laughs. “I had kind of fallen into recruitment, because I was always interested in people and could sell. But at that stage, I thought I hated it. So, I moved home, and my mother sent in my CV to what was then called The Accountants Panel, after seeing an ad in the paper no less, and I’m still here 33 years later… or, at least I am in October.”

He first heard of recruitment AI about ten years ago. “It had been in the ether for a long time, but I didn’t take it very seriously until about two-or-three years ago,” he says. “It was about when Chat GPT came out. That was, to me, a stake in the ground. Then, my interest in it took off.” In the beginning, he was curious and nervous. We recently did a Candidate Sentiment Survey with The Panel, where we assessed attitudes to AI. We saw that there’s quite diverse views of what people think when it comes to AI in the workplace. Some think it’s brilliant, some think it’s Armageddon and the rest are somewhere in the middle. The reality is that what AI can achieve, and is already achieving, is brilliant. It’s primed to take on more manual and repetitive tasks, meaning that employees can get on with the work they find engaging and impactful, something which allows for flexibility, growth and job satisfaction. We have our first AI product in The Panel at the moment, which means we can do things we couldn’t do six months ago. And that’s exciting. For example, one aspect that’s helping us currently is that we can enrich our searches with AI, as it can make better Boolean searches (Boolean searching uses operators: words like AND, OR, and NOT. These are logic-based words that help search engines narrow down or broaden search results) – which, in turn, allows us to look for better candidates and make better decisions when it comes to filling roles. That’s taking repetitive tasks and making them quicker, saving time, money, and effort for employees. The only thing is that we’re not yet at the stage where we can fully trust the written result from AI platforms. You will have to edit what comes out to make sure it makes sense, but it does the lion’s share of the task at hand which is great. But even that is improving all the time. We joke about and say that the worst day to use AI is today because it will be better tomorrow, and then better again the day after that.”

Indeed, the rise of generative AI has raised many new questions about how the technology will impact the workforce, such as: should we be nervous or excited? And how does this impact my career? Yet, while some believe that introducing AI to the workplace can only be a bad thing for human workers – which was a common belief when the internet was introduced to offices back in the nineties – McArdle insists that the opposite is regularly true. “For tasks that can be automated, repetitive tasks, AI can be brilliant,” he says. “It also reminds me if I’ve missed anything or should be considering something else, not to mention providing shortcuts, which we often need when we are time poor.”

AI can open up more possibilities for employees by enhancing their capabilities, McArdle says. And in fact, the stats back that up: a new global study from IBM showed that 87% of executives surveyed believe employees are more likely to be augmented than replaced by generative AI. That, in turn, varies across functions – 97% of executives think employees in procurement are more likely to be augmented than replaced, compared to 93% for employees in risk and compliance, 93% for finance, 77% for customer service and 73% for marketing. “AI is not going to replace truck drivers or dance teachers any time soon, so they needn’t worry,” he says. “As for those who are worried about being replaced, I would really recommend getting curious about it all, including your own position. What do you need to do to future-proof? Upskill? Pivot? Embrace AI itself? As Vice President of Engineering and Data Science and Group Manager of Data Platforms at Indeed, Donal McMahon told me in a recent The Currency article: “You won’t lose your job to AI, but you might lose it to somebody using AI,” so the time to consider is now.”

Even as AI becomes more pervasive in business, people still have a core competitive advantage. “The best example for this is the relatively new role of Prompt Engineer,” he says, “who are people employed to get the best out of AI programmes like Chat GPT, by knowing the best prompts to ask or configure to get the best answers to their questions.” However, business leaders are facing a host of talent-related challenges – from the skills gap to shifting employee expectations to the need for new operating models – that same IBM study reveals. As a direct result of the global skills gap, executives surveyed have estimated that 40% of their workforce will need to reskill as a result of implementing AI and automation over the next three years – resulting in 1.4 billion of the 3.4 billion people in the global workforce, according to statistics from the World Bank. “I don’t think companies are looking to recruit with AI in mind, presently,” McArdle says. “Or at least, I haven’t seen it just yet. That could be because people don’t know they need to, or if they do, they don’t know what exactly the parameters of those roles look like for now. Perhaps those roles will exist in a big way in a few years, in the same way that Prompt Engineers do now.”

Recruiters using AI see efficiencies in handling repetitive and time-consuming tasks, such as CV screening and initial candidate assessments. AI, too, can swiftly analyse vast amounts of data, identify patterns, source candidates and calibrate back and forth with the recruiter and hiring manager. Moreover, AI can help eliminate bias in the recruitment process by making decisions based on objective criteria rather than subjective judgement. These are things McArdle insists we consider before questioning AI. “Introducing AI can be done in many ways, depending on how it is managed,” he says. “for some, it’s a mental shift. And for others, it’s all about education. User adoption, for anything in the workplace, is a big thing. Employees may be hesitant, and that’s something to consider. Something else to consider is how tech-savvy your staff is. You may be a whizz, but I’m a Luddite and use my phone to ring people for everything. So being cognisant of your team is very important because how you present AI will sit differently with people.” Essentially, McArdle says, the best way to introduce AI to your team is threefold; “Insist that this new move will make their lives easier, not harder; introduce things softly, softly; and sell the benefits. And finally, show them that this new tool is very powerful and should be handled with care – then you’re onto something great.”

For more information on Paul and The Panel, check out his LinkedIn page here, or, the website here.