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Technology & Digitalisation

Technology & Digitalisation

We have strong foundations in technology and data, with long-term expertise. Our ‘data funnel’ automatically enables us to process tens of millions of data points daily, turning them into meaningful signals and actionable insights for our clients, candidates and consultants, at a scale and depth.

However, given rapid advances in technology and Generative AI, we believe now is a good time to enhance our overall digitalisation, technology infrastructure and stack of applications.

Technology and data empower our consultants, giving real-time insights and freeing up their time to improve productivity. Our goal is to give our colleagues best-in-class tools, allowing them to better service clients and earn fees. A key part of our focused strategy is therefore our ambition to become the most technology-enabled recruiter in the world. This will involve some investment, but we also expect to deliver efficiencies as we consolidate our systems, which were previously run more on geographic basis.

During the year a Group-wide project was initiated to transform our IT infrastructure to better support the operations of the business. This led the Directors to conclude that certain intangible assets would either no longer be used in the Group’s operations or that their carrying value was impaired and this resulted in an impairment charge of £22.5 million.

LEADING OUR TRANSFORMATION

“Hays is on a mission to transform and evolve into a more globally integrated business, with IT and data as a pivotal driving force. To help us with our future technology journey, we have partnered with Cognizant, a leading global technology and consulting company. This strategic partnership will enable us to transform Hays’ technological landscape and deliver operational efficiency and innovation capabilities.
This partnership will enable us to focus on delivering exceptional recruitment services to our clients and candidates worldwide.”

Tim Fulton

Chief Technology Officer

 

The Hays data funnel: Driving more value from data
than in-house HR teams and our competitors

Our long-term commitment to technology places data at the heart
of our business.

Generative AI in recruitment

We aim to be recognised as market leaders in the use and optimisation of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and we are developing a responsible AI strategy globally. Generative AI brings vast possibilities for Hays and our customers. In time, our ambition is to deliver enhanced customer service using AI across all processes.

AI also brings significant challenges around data, data protection, legal compliance and ethics. We believe the use of AI tools and resources will present great service and productivity opportunities going forward, and our strategy is based around driving efficiencies in a highly responsible and compliant way.

We have numerous positive use cases, and we are working closely in partnership with key suppliers to evolve business tools. This will identify opportunities to incorporate generative AI into key Hays workflows and help evaluate our processes. The key aim is to ensure that our colleagues have insightful tools, boosting productivity and helping provide clients and candidates with the best user experience and service possible.

AI has significant potential to improve all stages of the recruitment process for clients and candidates, and our consultants, including:

  • summarising job requirements
  • creating job descriptions and web adverts
  • curating Talent Networks
  • analysing key market trends and developing strategies
  • identifying skill shortages for candidates and offering training.

More specifically, the graphic above shows some practical use cases which are already in progress:

We still firmly believe that the human will remain central to recruitment processes. For example, in a world where Generative AI can produce perfect CVs and cover letters, there is real value in the process of having expert consultants curate short-lists.

Talent Networks offer clients unique insights and solutions – and help to find candidates faster

Talent Networks are the community ecosystems we have built to support our consultants, built on top of our vast 'digital data lake'. They optimise our digital candidate sourcing strategies, largely operating in real time, and reducing our time to shortlist.

We believe the scale of information we bring is a differentiating asset. We add value by presenting customers with real-time information to significantly enhance their decision-making, and their ability to engage the right talent to grow. Consultants can also demonstrate to a customer, in real time, where a particular role sits in terms of supply and demand, salary and local market knowledge.

Supported by our automated marketing technology, we constantly source skills that our customers need, building relationships with candidates from their first digital interactions with Hays.

Hays MyLearning and upskilling/reskilling

An important service we provide to candidates is via Hays MyLearning, our online learning portal. MyLearning gives an additional level of candidate service, going beyond the expert career advice our consultants give daily, and demonstrating personalised insights on how candidates can develop additional skills to better equip themselves for future success. MyLearning also benefits from our experience in understanding many hundreds of thousands of career journeys.

Using millions of data points amassed over time, our algorithm maps skills against roles dynamically. We can link candidates to training specific to a range of pathways for their careers, based on the successful careers of others with similar skills. MyLearning is dynamic, learning from new data added daily, and we also offer it to customers as a way of white labelling their own training and upskilling.

In the last 3 years over 30 million minutes of learning has been consumed via the MyLearning portal, and in FY24 we had nearly 100,000 enrolled users. New enrolments were up 13% YoY, and we saw an increase in consumption per user, up 5% YoY. We saw particularly good progress in the UK, including a doubling of users via the Hays Outplacement UK section of MyLearning.

Conclusion: differentiating through expert-led and data-driven customer service

Hays was an early adopter of using data-driven technology insights – at scale – in recruitment. We have strong foundations and a clear vision to be a leader in technology in our industry. However, given the rapid advancements of Generative AI in recent years, now is a good time to be assessing our needs, and planning for the next decade for customer service and experience.

This represents a major opportunity as our customers rightly demand better services than ever. These demands create opportunities to win recruitment market share and grow in related talent and workforce solutions by delivering an outstanding service, backed by people, technology and data.