Recruitment Insights: How Procurement teams are leading the way in resolving the country’s recruitment challenges.

How Procurement teams are leading the way in resolving the country’s major recruitment challenges.

Since the pandemic and Brexit, the issues facing businesses around recruitment have been compounded. Central is the challenge of labour shortages across almost the entire market. We all well aware of the impact of these shortages on Logistics and Supply Chain. To combat this issue, businesses are significantly ramping up their recruitment campaigns in order to attract large numbers of people to apply for openings.

Richard Marshall, owner of specialist Procurement job board Supply Chain Online, confirms the trend, noticing a 25% uplift in demand from blue-chip clients in the last six months alone. He commented “Savvy companies are investing in large, high-profile candidate attraction campaigns” and explains “Supply Chain Online is perfectly positioned to meet this need with our market-leading recruitment advertising platform, ensuring our clients reach the UK’s largest candidate talent pool of Procurement and Supply Chain job seekers”.   

The goal for recruitment across almost every business function, is to throw the net as wide open as possible and to attract as many people as possible from a range of different sectors. Accessing people with transferable skills from different sectors is a big trend.   

In turn the focus for internal talent teams and line managers has again shifted to, how to sift this huge candidate pool, and ensure that talent isn’t missed in the actual sifting process? And how to achieve this without tying people up in endless hours of interviews, calls or reviewing hundreds of CV’s?  And, if this legwork is delegated across the team, how to ensure there is no unconscious bias and the scoring system is standardised? 

Of course, there are traditional solutions like CV word search and video-interviewing that can help with this sifting. But there are inherent problems with these tools in meeting current challenges. What if strong candidates don’t include enough key words on their CV’s? Who reviews the video interviews and what criteria are they using?

Procurement teams are looking to the supply base for new technology to resolve these problems and answer is “Artificial intelligence” (AI).

Across multiple categories, innovative procurement professionals have identified and sourced AI technology to enable their stakeholders to drive productivity. In Legal there is now AI technology that reads contracts; in banking AI is used to read cheques and detect credit card fraud.

And now (at last) there is AI technology that enables companies to manage and assess large pools of job applicants. AI that enables businesses to interview hundreds of candidates and rank them objectively against technical and behavioural criteria.  It is called VireUp - and procurement leaders are getting very excited about it.

Perhaps the most powerful aspect of this technology is that it totally eliminates bias.  Bold claim, but it stands.  VireUp’s AI-powered interview solution allows companies to interview all candidates, rank them and then make shortlisting decisions, without:

• Seeing the candidate’s face
• Hearing the candidate’s voice
• Knowing the candidate’s name
• Looking at the candidate’s CV

Zero bias.

Efe Pazarceviren (VireUp’s co-founder) has been impressed with the response from procurement, commenting “the reaction to the VireUp solution from procurement professionals has been incredible.  They are excited that the tool removes bias, drives diversity, delivers genuine standardisation and does not require investing time and effort in internal training/change. And no laborious IT reconfigurations. It is an easy sell for procurement to their HR stakeholders”. 

This is super new technology and when Efe first spoke with me about joining VireUp, I spent a long time trying to find the catch. I was also concerned about a robot making decisions that might not be transparent.  There is no catch. It delivers what it claims and this is explainable AI - meaning you always know why the candidate was given the score they received.

These challenges of eliminating bias, driving diversity and achieving standardisation across large applicant pools have been a top corporate priority for many years. The old recruitment model is finally changing and procurement, it is apparent, is leading the charge to meet these imperatives. 

Contact: Lucy@bennellassociates.com

For more information on VireUp contact: efe.pazarceviren@vireup.com