Artificial Intelligence & Employer Brand: The Possibilities Are Endless

Discover the potential of Artificial Intelligence in revolutionizing employer brandingI've been fortunate to work with artificial intelligence for the last 10 years and experience first-hand its earliest application across the talent sphere. Now there is a general hum around how it can be used to create communication to talent with some polarising views. I have a unique view having seen the advancement made over a decade and whilst I am all in, I am also fully behind the human as the strategist, not the robot.

I started at LinkedIn in 2013 where artificial intelligence was used to optimise member experiences across the platform. The knowledge gained about members’ skills and experience fed the algorithms determining the people to connect to, jobs to apply for, courses to take, companies to follow and articles to read. 

As a talent strategist, I leveraged artificial intelligence and machine learning to plan talent attraction strategies that were highly segmented across geos, functions, skills etc. in a way that was previously impossible. Artificial intelligence helped structure the incredible data that LinkedIn gained as it grew in strength to the powerhouse it is today.  

Following that, I fed my love for artificial intelligence by doing a stint with a workforce intelligence start-up, where I was knee-deep in the next generation of artificial intelligence and machine learning to build skills taxonomies – which is a structured list of the skills that a business/employee base/government/geography need to be successful. This allowed more accurate mapping of a role to potential candidates or existing employees, and the ability to create strategic upskilling (or reskilling) initiatives and more nuanced (or real-time) workforce planning. I embedded myself in ethical artificial intelligence and its part in reducing systematic bias across all end points in the talent lifecycle.  

Today, I'm loving using artificial intelligence to help organisations galvanise and empower storytelling for talent for impact and conversation. Understanding what content people are consuming to plan what they should write or video, identifying the best people for amplification, improving job descriptions (hurrah!) - to enable recruiters and internal mobility folk to do what they do best, armed with the best brand content from their people. It's much like LinkedIn circa. 2013 – at the cusp of education, adoption and insanely exciting technology. 

But won’t Artificial Intelligence take our jobs? 

This is one of my favourite myths about artificial intelligence – that it’s going to make humans redundant. In some ways this is technically true: the jobs that will be replaced first are the ones that are the most predictable and rule-based. These are the jobs where a machine can learn to do them faster and more efficiently than a human; for example, jobs like data entry, simple analysis and basic customer service.   

While this can incite fear, the best response is to have a growth mindset. To look on the positive side of things, there are also many jobs that will be created by artificial intelligence; for example, jobs in data science, artificial intelligence development and roles that require creativity and human interaction. 

In the talent space, generative artificial intelligence is going to be the biggest trend, and platforms like The Martec and DALL-E (which I have used for this article) are going to mean we can spend more time in ideation, design thinking and building relationships. After all the time most of us have spent on the admin and grunt work, how wonderful does a career with creativity and human interaction sound? 

Ultimately, artificial intelligence is only as good as the data it's given – it doesn't have a brain to think for itself. If we are careful about the data we're feeding artificial intelligence systems we can ensure it's ethically sound and unbiased, and it can only do good! 

The key question is: what are we trying to achieve by using it? What are the outcomes we are looking for? Are we trying to shift perceptions, engage a specific audience, free up capacity, save costs, collaborate with stakeholders, scale communications, be better at our jobs or save resources?

If you are intentional with your use of artificial intelligence, then you’ll have a better view of what tasks it can handle, and what you can focus on instead!

Revolutionising employer brand

Employer branding has traditionally been a very manual and elongated process – unmeasurable and intangible. Artificial intelligence has changed that by bringing in the ability to personalise, scale, target and measure impact with incredible accuracy. It has also helped reduce the time for employers to identify the right talent and enabled them to focus on a wider talent pool that was previously out of their reach.

With this in mind, it has enabled employer brand to be driven from a place of authenticity rather than a contrived piece of work that's possibly neither believable nor measurable. It's allowed practitioners to scale their efforts across functions and bring stakeholders to the employer branding table. More inclusivity across the business means better outcomes, and the ability to understand the tangible impact that a strong employer brand has on those outcomes.

And when I talk about inclusivity, I’m not just talking about the demographics of your workforce. I’m talking about the ability to bring people into your employer brand strategy that otherwise may have been excluded due to capacity and resources.

It’s also good to remember that the use of HR technology should be a rewarding experience, not just for the user or employer, but also for your people. When I think about LinkedIn, the use of artificial intelligence was about leveraging relevance to the member experience, and from a workforce intelligence perspective this promotes roles and careers based on skills potential rather than job title.

When I think about storytelling for talent, it is about making current employees or ‘brand advocates’ feel proud of getting their voices heard, or candidates feeling connected with actual humans.

When we built our AI-powered Employer Branding platform, we worked hand-in-hand with our early customers to ensure that the experience is built on: 

People

We use it to power the algorithms behind the platform's human intelligence – that is, identifying people at your organisation that have strong LinkedIn networks, interesting career paths, experiences you (and they!) want to share. 

Content strategy

One of the hardest things to do when trying to activate a people advocacy program is enablement. Our artificial intelligence language model helps people find their voices and write or video content assets based on what people actually want to hear. The platform has scanned over 8 billion pieces of content to help top talent answer over 30,000 expert questions to date!

Creation

Imagine helping thousands of employees across the globe get what’s in their heads onto paper or video? We use generative artificial intelligence to help prompt them get those thoughts out in a matter of seconds, and remind them that they actually know what they are talking about. Makes for a seamless and rewarding experience for existing employees.

Distribution

Augmented writing helps not only build out final written content, but can also create social copy for people to share on your various channels in seconds. It’s all very well creating this amazing employer branding content, then there’s saving time and effort on writing the copy to distribute it as well! 

If we’re talking about removing the mundane tasks from the human, imagine applying this to job descriptions. You can upload a (somewhat mediocre) job description and the platform spits out (there’s a thought) an infinitely better one! You win, the candidate wins, the hiring manager wins.

Reporting and analytics 

My experience has taught me that data is king and queen. With artificial intelligence’s ability to structure huge volumes of data and translate this into invaluable insights and more efficient processes, the possibilities are endless. And in the world of employer brand, we’ve barely scratched the surface!

As a LinkedIn member, you can see who viewed your profile, applied for a job and engaged with your company, allowing you to make strategic decisions. With our platform, you can see how many people can help you create content and how many people you can reach with that content. You can understand what people are talking about and create content that they actually want to hear. You can even help people create it!

But don’t perpetuate more of the same. The Martec platform has spent 4 years scanning over 8 billion content pieces, over 100,000 talent profiles and 300 trillion social signals to build an AI language model for talent built on research and employer brand communications so that the outcome is far from vanilla. The segmentation and personalisation possibilities are next level, but you cannot do it without viewing tech as an enabler for the human thinker.  Be outcome and results focused and AI can help you make magic - it can do what you’re asking it to do.

If you want to understand more about how humans and artificial intelligence can help you create authentic employee stories and talent communications, reach out at any time. We’re excited and want you to be excited too.