Disrupt the recruitment industry to remain competitive

Remain competitive

PersolKelly was facing a challenge that many companies know all too well; that is, labor-intensive work processes with too many dependencies leading to slow or even delayed results in an industry where a speedy response makes a significant difference in results. The process of gathering requirements, sourcing, interviewing, contracting and beyond was demanding an excessive amount of time from their recruit agents.

Their CTO sought to find a way to streamline the process by introducing modern technology tools into the workflow. With this target in mind, they began the arduous journey ahead to reach the pinnacle of an optimised work process, which leads to maximized workflow and, ideally, immeasurable business value!”

First glimpse of AI

Like all journeys undertaken, success is often sampled early on; this early success is welcome, and in PersolKelly’s case, it helped fuel the excitement for the project that was underway. They began by identifying where automation could potentially be a game changer for them. To maximize the value and decrease development time and cost, they found a partner who could deliver the AI-powered solution they so ardently wanted. They accomplished this through APIs to significantly decrease fulfillment time. Time saved is money kept in the bank!

The design phase got underway with a healthy vision of what they wanted to build and a unified team of stakeholders.

Disruption

Just as everything was running like a well-oiled machine, as it usually goes, a gremlin or two popped up in the works. AI for all its benefits has the often forgotten downside of massively disrupting the workforce and in some cases, outright eliminating the need for a wide range of positions.

Naturally PersolKelly is dedicated to their workforce and had to consider this matter carefully before blinding forging forward. After a number of more senior executives had a chance to discuss the coming disruption the project would create, and strategize a mitigation plan, additional effort was needed to shape the product into precisely what the target users needed.

Challenging integration

The setback and slight design shift caused a hiccup once the project build got underway. Suddenly the build team found that integration with the partner’s APIs became much more complicated than previously scoped during pre-onboarding & sales calls.

In short, the Slash build team would now require nearly triple the amount of time to integrate all the necessary APIs as the partner was not as ready as they have presented themselves to be and the shift added strain.

Worth the effort

Now, that may all sound like quite the downer, but we are here to tell a story of success and triumph, and that is what we shall do!

After considerable time and effort, the Slash team were able to integrate smoothly with the partner’s APIs making the product deliver on its design promise. This lead to a greatly improved relationship between PersolKelly and Slash as we showed we could deliver on the design that we proposed.

The user acceptance testing was successful, demonstrating the quality of the product built by Slash.

KEIICHIRO “K1” SUZUKI, CHIEF PRODUCT AND TECHNOLOGY OFFICER, PERSOL ASIA PACIFIC

Strong ties

That relationship continues today with Slash staff augmentation; four of our developers have become an integral part of the Persol internal team, providing first class development support!