Beyond the Expo: UNLEASH World 2023 Insider Series with CleverConnect

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How has the recruitment landscape shifted in the last 12 months?

Florian Schrodt: I would say the challenges didn’t come overnight. We know that labor shortages, demographic changes and new demands are rising. So, the question is, “What are we doing to respond to the changing market?” Therefore, we deep-dived into our analytics, into market analytics, and into our own analytics and into the new behavior of our target groups.

How has your partnership with CleverConnect changed the strategic direction and key metrics for Medbase?

FS: In a nutshell, our partnership was fantastic, because it gives us a lot of new opportunities, especially in finding and attracting new talent. And the question is, if you have a labor shortage, for example in PG or pharmaceutics, just three to five people are looking for a job per vacancy – that’s almost nothing.

So, where can we find and attract our people? And for us, the answer is not applicant management, but lead nurturing and relationship building, and therefore CleverConnect with the CRM helped us a lot to go new ways, in a very consequent way. We have CleverConnect CRM as a new core system for talent acquisition.

How should recruiters approach passive candidates and the skills shortage challenge?

Carl Hoffmann: I think, when you look at that from a very high-level, there are two ways to tackle it. I mean, one is with immigration, and getting people in the market. That’s not what we do. The second, is to move more to a proactive recruitment strategy. And, like Florian said, you need to find ways how you can proactively reach out to candidates and really convince them of joining your company. 

It’s much more about building a sales and marketing mindset in your organization. And, how we are doing this, is we have combination of a career site, that is really tailored to the candidate experience and making sure that you have a very high conversion of candidates through matching technology and making sure that they find the right vacancy very fast and have a very personalized journey. And the second, is more the backend which is our candidate relationship management, where companies then can really measure everything and where they can nurture all the leads they are collecting, and make sure that at a later point in time they can win them for their vacancy.

What about emerging trends for AI in recruitment?

CH: When it comes to AI, we need to be very careful to not mix up things. First of all, I think the technology is there and the innovation and it’s here to stay. And I’m a big fan of it! I use it every day. And there are lots of use cases that you can explore also for HR and recruitment, but I think it’s more the responsibility of the users to make use of those new options they have when creating job posts or when parsing a CV; it’s not necessarily the responsibility of the software vendor.

I see our responsibility much more in creating a good usability, for instance, by having a co-pilot in the system that is really leading you through certain steps and make sure that you can find what you’re looking for very fast. The second element is also to get some control around AI, because you want to make sure that it’s not going to get out of hand and know one knows what to do. Having some rules about how to use AI as an end user is our responsibility, to really create a container for AI.

And for those skeptical about implementation?

CH: Similar to what I said before, I think you need to provide a container and communicate very clearly that you want to embrace that new technology but at the same time, explain what you’re expecting, like how to operate with it. So, identify some rules – what are you allowed to put into the AI system and what not, to make sure that people trust that technology and are using it.

It’s more a change management process that you need to implement in your organization, from my point of view.