Interview by: Nada Sobhi
Publisher: Mahmoud Mansi
Artificial intelligence (AI) is pretty much the talk of every business and platform. The human resources field is no exception.
Research & Markets estimates global artificial intelligence in the HR market to reach $5.26 billion in 2023. This figure is forecast to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.26%, reaching $10.70 billion by 2028.
When you look at AI in the HR industry, you’ll likely see it is most widely used in the recruitment sphere. However, AI is taking the HR industry by storm.
While we’ve not reached the point where AI is hiring and firing people, it has affected various HR functions. From recruitment to payroll to regulatory compliance to performance management, among others.
One HR tech company that’s incorporating AI in its business is Ubidy. In our interview with Ubidy’s Managing Director and CEO Evan Shellshear, we talk about AI’s impact on hiring and the HR industry.
We also discuss the differences in recruitment between the Middle East and other regions, how Ubidy helps companies, and more.
Q: Tell us a bit about Ubidy, what it does and what problems it solves.
Evan Shellshear: Ubidy is the world’s only global, online business-to-business recruitment agency marketplace. We connect employers to hundreds of the world’s best specialist agencies from all corners of the globe.
Our mission is to enable this one-to-many connection between employers and service providers, particularly in the HR industry.
Employers come to us when they have challenges like being spread out across the globe and unable to manage working with various recruitment agencies. The result is a lose-lose situation.
The recruitment agencies lose out because they’re unable to effectively interact with the large enterprise. At the same time, the employer, or large enterprise, loses out because they’re unable to effectively interact with the agencies.
Ubidy also helps by scaling the number of recruitment agencies, allowing companies to find niche and specialized agencies that locate niche and specialist skills.
So, the agencies we work with tend to be smaller, more focused, more specialized agencies that do one thing, but do it incredibly well. They’re much better than larger and more generic agencies in their particular niche.
What we’ve done over the years is picked out all these specialized agencies, which can deliver niche and specialized roles quickly and cost effectively.
As a platform, Ubidy provides the opportunity to engage with these agencies.
Companies can just put up a role and ask for high-quality resumes. Ubidy uses machine learning algorithms to connect the employers’ job requirements with the agencies capable of fulfilling that role.
Q: Based on your experience with clients in the Middle East, do you think their needs are different from those in Australia or Europe?
Evan Shellshear: When companies search for candidates, they’re simply looking for the best people who fit their needs and business. What changes the whole hiring dynamic in the Middle East is that many of those ‘best people’ often come from outside the country.
For example, if you look at a country like the United Arab Emirates (UAE), only 10% of the workforce are locals. The rest are immigrants and expatriates.
Similarly, in Saudi Arabia, roughly 40% to 60% of the workforce are Saudis, whereas the rest are expatriates and foreigners.
The recruitment process needs to take into account that many of the hires are expats. This changes the hiring dynamics. Compare this to countries like the US or Australia, where the market is usually big enough to accommodate hiring needs, so you don’t need to worry about visas or relocation.
So, when you think about hiring in the Middle East, the expatriate element is an important point to consider and be aware of.
Q: How has Saudization and Emiratization affected hiring?
Evan Shellshear: When Saudi companies seek Saudi talents, the process becomes longer and harder because there are fewer candidates available.
This also puts pressure on wages for certain roles and skills, especially digital skills.
For example, if a company is hiring a petroleum engineer, you’re not likely to see much pressure there because it’s a common role in the region.
However, we’re noticing an increase in demand for candidates in other industries like data science. There’s massive demand for these skills, which increases wage pressure because there are few Saudi candidates to meet this demand.
These few candidates are getting job offers almost every week and it’s harder for companies to maintain and retain these in-demand talents.
Q: How does Ubidy help businesses with their hiring needs?
Evan Shellshear: Ubidy makes the entire recruitment process much simpler and easier for global enterprises. What’s exciting is that it’s a brand-new technology. It really started in its infancy.
I believe Ubidy was the first company to commercialize the approach in 2016, though we began testing it before then. We bought the software to the market to see how it works.
It’s only in the last 3 to 4 years that this technology has made strides. This recruitment agency marketplace is considered cutting-edge.
Q: Does Ubidy vet every recruitment agency that applies to join its platform?
Evan Shellshear: Yes, absolutely. Agencies usually join Ubidy by invitation. An employer would say they want to work with this agency, but they don’t want to go through the entire procurement process for this enterprise. The procurement process can be too long. It might take 6 months to procure this agency and they want to use them now because they have hiring needs right now.
We have a set of requirements and questions that we ask agencies. These questions relate to hiring, diversity, and other criteria. Once they pass these checks, we onboard them on to the Ubidy platform.
Over the past couple of years, more recruitment agency marketplaces have emerged. Their target has been to attract as many agencies as possible. This isn’t our goal at Ubidy.
Our goal is to have the right agencies to ensure that 1) there’s enough work for all the agencies, 2) every employer can get the roles that they need filled, especially those with challenging niches.
Q: Can recruitment agencies apply to join Ubidy?
Evan Shellshear: Absolutely! Our door is always open for recruitment agencies to apply. They can send us an email and we’ll vet them to make sure they’re a good fit. If they are a good fit, we’ll invite them to join.
We want to make sure it’s a good outcome for both the agency and the employers. Both sides need to win from this experience.
If you’re a recruitment agency and would like to apply to Ubidy, visit their website here.
Q: We’re seeing AI becoming part of almost every industry, every conversation out there. What kind of role does AI play in the HR industry as a whole and in hiring specifically?
Evan Shellshear: Using AI can be a great way to automate processes but we need to be incredibly careful when using AI.
Amazon is a strong example of this. In 2014, their CV filtering software, which was supposed to speed up the hiring process, ended up being gender-biased. It ignored all women’s resumes for technical roles.
When using language models like ChatGPT, we need to understand what they’re designed to do, which is understanding text and writing. But what we’re doing is taking those models and applying them to all sorts of situations, which may not be what they were developed for.
For example, an HR person may give ChatGPT a CV and ask them to summarize the main points in it. Some may go even further and ask ChatGPT if “it thinks” this person is a good fit for a certain role.
ChatGPT operates based on prompts. It wasn’t built to guarantee a fair and unbiased evaluation of people’s skills for jobs. But we now use it for that.
When we do this, we take software that wasn’t designed for this role and apply it to hiring situations, which leads to many hiring challenges. If we’re not careful, we’ll run into the same problems Amazon had with its CV filtering tool.
At the moment, AI is just a means to an end. Whether it’s fair, biased or unbiased, whether it reinforces social stigmas, is another issue people don’t consider when using AI and this is a core focus of ours at Ubidy.
Q: Where do you see AI being used in HR?
Evan Shellshear: I think it’s everywhere. From role creation to attracting and sourcing to screening and shortlisting, all the way to background checks and hiring, AI is being used every step of the way.
People are trying to build tools using AI. Whether these tools succeed or not is another story. They may fail because they don’t have enough value. However, the problem that arises is that these new tools may bring current preconceived notions and prejudices into these new roles.
Big companies need to understand what baggage, or problems, the AI tool’s algorithm is bringing to them. These problems may arise from the data the AI tool is trained on or the company’s data itself.
Q: What’s your advice for companies planning to use AI in their HR operations?
Evan Shellshear: My advice is that they need to be really careful with how they are using it, what biases they’re bringing on. They need to be clear on what is the problem they want to solve and how they plan to use AI to solve it without creating new challenges.
Companies also need to ensure that they have the right internal capabilities to develop the tools – just engaging an external consultant is unlikely to lead to success on its own.