During the SourceCon Spring 2024 Congres in Orlando, AI was, of course, the ‘talk of the town’. However, it wasn’t the tools that stole the show, but rather the sourcing tools (people aggregators) combined with candidate activation and recruitment marketing automation (RMA) tools that showed the direction of the future. And of course, the AI that they extensively use in their systems to search, match, and activate candidate activation programs (from approaching to enticing, activating, nudging, engaging, and maintaining involvement). Organizations like (whether combined or not) Seekout, Puck, Avature, Radancy, Gem, Sourcewahle, Woodpecker, Hire EZ, and Paradox are outlining the path to the future of recruitment and sourcing.
People Aggregators, RMA, and AI are the future of recruitment
There was a brief fear that the X-ray restrictions LinkedIn is implementing could be the end for people aggregators. However, this has not yet had any effect on the collection and availability of profile data from LinkedIn according to the companies and provide employee APIs like Coresignal, Rhetorik, and People Data labs.
People aggregators are more complete, faster, better searchable, cheaper, and have much more functionality than the most expensive versions of the LinkedIn Recruiter Seat. Many recruiters and recruitment organizations are under the impression that they cannot do without a LinkedIn seat, but nothing could be further from the truth. Moreover, this is where the adventure of AI within recruitment begins. These sourcing platforms -with a predominant focus on the English language making them interesting for international recruitment, but not always relevant for national European labor markets- with often more than 750 million to 1 billion current profiles (predominantly scraped from LinkedIn, GitHub, Meta, etc.) make it much easier for recruiters to search and match. All of LinkedIn’s database bugs have been eliminated, and much more freedom in searching is allowed, aided by smart AI. This results in more and qualitatively better matches. From these matches, recruitment marketing and candidate activation campaigns can be set up. Ranging from (social media) campaigns, and dripping email campaigns to personalized video content. Messages and videos can be quickly customized with the help of AI that combines profile data, target group, and candidate data into self-learning campaigns with much higher conversion rates. Talent pools can be better maintained and activated ‘at the push of a button’.
*AI is the engine underpinning searching, matching, and activating. Of course, you also need a lot of unique data that is provided via APIs and tools by people aggregators, candidate, and media data, and supported by AI used for personalized distribution with recruitment marketing automation (RMA) software. It is the future of sourcing and recruitment marketing and thereby for the entire recruitment industry, as presented in Orlando. Inspiring and -fair is fair- there, the hundreds of separate tools can hardly compete with. This technology must primarily be integrated into these new platforms that are significantly undermining the foundations of LinkedIn. Nice new years are coming. Luckily, … we could use some change.
Stay tuned for the latest developments in recruitment, recruitment marketing, and HR technology. Tune in next week for a new AI Friday, where we will explore another groundbreaking AI tool that can enrich your recruitment process.
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