Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive into our discussion our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share with us the backstory about what brought you to your specific career path?
It’s funny because I never planned to be an influential member of the staffing industry. Early in my career, I worked with a golf products manufacturing company in a marketing role. Due to timing and circumstance, I found myself needing to find a new career and ended up walking into a staffing office under the assumption that they were headhunters. At that point in time, I didn’t understand how typical commercial staffing branches operated, but they reviewed my resume and thought I’d be a great fit for their local branch. Ironically, I interviewed at a couple staffing firms and received offers for internal branch positions from two different national staffing companies on the same day. I accepted the better of the two offers, and my journey in the staffing industry began.
What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
What makes AtWork stand out is our unique approach to the traditional brick-and-mortar staffing branch. We are a franchise concept, which means our offices are owned by local members of the communities that they serve. That local ownership results in a higher level of care, a greater attention to detail, and an overall better experience for our clients. This translates to satisfaction from the companies we find great talent for and our candidates who visit our branches seeking a fulfilling career. We know this because we measure the service we provide regularly, and the differentiation of having local owners is apparent in our industry-leading Net Promoter Score.
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
Thank you! Personally, I believe my work ethic, a high level of resilience, and an unyielding commitment to excellence is what has been instrumental in my success over my 17-year career here at AtWork. I joined AtWork in 2007, just a few short months before one of the largest economic meltdowns in modern history. During that period, I stepped up and did everything from mopping the floors, to leading our franchise training, to selling franchises, and even supporting operations. When faced with adversity, you stand up and do what needs to be done.
Let’s now move to the main point of our discussion about AI. Can you explain how AI is disrupting your industry? Is this disruption hurting or helping your bottom line?
I prefer to look at AI as an augmenter. We are seeing generative AI become a powerful tool to help our teams become much more efficient and deliver a higher quality experience for both our clients and candidates. Personally, I see AI as an opportunity to increase our efficiency and effectiveness as a recruiting organization, which will drive stronger bottom-line performance via reduced overhead costs. Embracing AI holistically in the recruiting space can potentially be problematic because an AI-based tool has an elevated level of risk for bias as it relates to employee screening. As improvements inevitably happen in these solutions, we will see these risk slowly diminish and ultimately create a much better/lower risk than even humans screening candidates for jobs.
Which specific AI technology has had the most significant impact on your industry?
The technology with the most impact at this point appears to be AI-enabled recruitment and screening bots. These are effectively recruiting “agents” who will engage with, interview and screen potential employees with the intent of matching them to an available job. While this technology has great appeal, it still isn’t perfect, and the experience lacks the human element that is typically involved in the recruiting arrangement. There is a measure of trust that a recruiter establishes with a prospective employee. They trust that the recruiter understands exactly what they are looking for and that they will find the best job fit for them.
Can you share a pivotal moment when you recognized the profound impact AI would have on your sector?
I was in an R&D session with a good friend of mine who has been in the software development side of staffing for many years. He showed me something he was working on that absolutely blew my mind. It was a chatbot that looked and felt like a very savvy IT recruiter. This chatbot not only interviewed the candidate extensively, asking the most effective interview questions in a logical manner, it engaged in side-questions related to the responses. It then asked the candidate to demonstrate their skills (this was a java development interview). The candidate’s answers shaped the follow-up questions. The entire experience was automated via AI, and the candidate didn’t know they were engaging with a bot. That was over a year ago, and the technology has only gotten better and better on this front!
How are you preparing your workforce for the integration of AI, and what skills do you believe will be most valuable in an AI-enhanced future?
The exciting, and possibly scary, thing about AI entering the workspace is the fact that you do not need to have a specific skillset to take advantage of it. Honestly, a willingness to try and use this resource is key, so change management has become a topic that we bring up often. Change is a constant in the staffing industry on so many fronts, so change here follows the normal course of business. The good thing is that embracing AI helps our team operate at greater scale, so it should be perceived positively and will only continue to grow in value as technology improves and new applications become apparent.
What are the biggest challenges in upskilling your workforce for an AI-centric future?
Willingness to change is critical. One of the biggest challenges that we will face is our resistance to adjusting our processes to accommodate these new technologies. What seems like a simple adjustment could mean the success or failure of the implementation of an AI-enabled tool. The failure to adopt AI and related technologies could mean a lack of competitiveness in the future of our industry.
What ethical considerations does AI introduce into your industry, and how are you tackling these concerns?
When screening potential employees with AI there a risk of selection bias. Admittedly, this risk is present in humans, but a human’s perceptions and biases can change or be molded, while AI technology is relatively unchanging based on pre-developed code. At this point, almost every AI developer in the HR/staffing space is aware of these risks and are looking for ways to improve or remove bias (or the perception of bias) in the hiring process. Time will tell if they will be successful in this endeavor!
What are your “Five Things You Need To Do, If AI Is Disrupting Your Industry”?
1 . Embrace the change with continued learning and training. Stay on top of trends and developments, especially those relevant to your industry. Invest in tools and training to ensure your team is prepared and ready to take advantage of them quickly.
2 . Focus on data in your organization. AI typically works better when there is higher quantity and quality of data available. Build processes preparing for the inevitable AI solution.
3 . Integrate AI into business process. Constantly ask your team to identify use cases for AI in their day-to-day operations. Find solutions and implement them gradually. When you build a culture that embraces these tools, your team’s effectiveness will only increase.
4 . Focus on ethical use. Obviously, we need to use these tools the right way. Ensure there is transparency and clarity on how these tools are used.
5 . Collaborate, collaborate, collaborate! Make sure you team is working together, including those who are adept at implementing and utilizing technology, along with those who are not. Engage key stakeholders and make the value-proposition apparent across all levels of the organization.
What are the most common misconceptions about AI within your industry, and how do you address them?
The most common misconception is that AI is going to take our recruiters jobs away! At this point in time, AI is only a tool to help recruiters do their jobs more effectively, not to replace their jobs. At AtWork, we still want to engage with humans when it relates to something as personal as their employment and income, so AI will remain a tool that will not directly threaten our recruiters or talent acquisition professionals.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Do you have a story about how that was relevant in your life?
One of my favorite life lesson quotes of all time is attributed to CS Lewis: “You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” I have always set my goals high, with the expectation that I can and will achieve them. I don’t focus on the past; I focus on the future and what I need to do in order to achieve those goals today. Another similar quote is from George Eliot (aka Mary Ann Evans) who wrote that “it’s never too late to be who you might have been.” I was leading one of the Largest Staffing / Franchise companies in the United States at 32 years old. I never doubted that I had the ability to do that. I set my goals, worked hard, and I earned it.
Off-topic, but I’m curious. As someone steering the ship, what thoughts or concerns often keep you awake at night? How do those thoughts influence your daily decision-making process?
For a leader in the staffing industry, an “up at night” concern that is always on my mind is the health of the US employment market and its alignment with the available talent on the market today. With unemployment rates staying relatively low across many markets in the US, I’m concerned that there is a big disconnect between the types of jobs are that available today and the skills or abilities of the talent that is on the job market. That Skills Gap has continued to grow over the years and will only continue to grow unless we start changing and adapting our educational systems to align with the current demands in the workforce.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I see a tremendous issue with a lack of affordable housing for people across the US. There are homelessness issues facing hundreds of thousands of people (likely far more than that because the numbers are hard to confirm), and the problem continues to grow across America. The lack of housing, coupled with extraordinary increases to costs of living have only exacerbated the problem. We need to be focusing on ways to provide adequate housing to more individuals and on services that help rehabilitate people who are currently considered homeless.
How can our readers further follow you online?
You can follow me online via LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonleverant/) or email me directly at [email protected].
Thank you for the time you spent sharing these fantastic insights. We wish you only continued success in your great work!