Recruitment, staff augmentation, and talent acquisition have always been tricky tasks for organizations. The quality of an organization’s recruitment strategies decides the quality of the workforce, and ultimately the quality of the company’s products.

Staff recruitment and augmentation have always been similar throughout all industries, but the pandemic gave organizations a chance to stand apart by implementing new technologies for better practices. While some organizations still prefer the traditional staff augmentation approach to extend their teams, some have been looking into AI-based recruiting techniques and others are still jumping back and forth, trying to figure out which option is the best.

In this article, we have outlined the pros and cons of both traditional staff augmentation and AI-based recruiting techniques to help you figure out which option is apt for your organization.

Traditional Staff Augmentation

Staff augmentation allows organizations to extend their teams with temporary high-skilled workers. There are several advantages of traditional staff augmentation:

  1. Expertise – If your project requires a skill set that your team doesn’t have currently, staff augmentation allows you to access the required expertise for as long as you actually require it.
  2. Flexibility – It offers you the flexibility to extend or reduce your team size as quickly and efficiently as possible.
  3. Cost Savings–It facilitates massive cost savings by reducing the costs of employee training, on-boarding, overhead incentives, long-term costs, etc.
  4. Trials – It enables companies to assess potential team members for the future by employing them temporarily, evaluating their skillset, and seeing how they fit in with the in-house team.

Even though staff augmentation sounds like a great option, there are a few pitfalls that you must take into account before opting it:

  1. Management Costs – Extending a new team requires effective management to ensure that the temporary members are working efficiently. This increases management costs for the organization.
  2. Lack of Institutional Knowledge – Some of your projects may require in-depth knowledge of your organization, which only existing employees have. Educating augmented staff with that knowledge may require a lot of time, money, and effort.
  3. Higher long-term costs – Sometimes, leveraging staff augmentation for a significant time period tends to be more expensive as compared to hiring an in-house employee. As these augmented staff members are experienced individuals, they happen to cost more.

AI-Based Recruiting Techniques

Artificial Intelligence-based recruiting techniques provide exceptionally seamless processes to identify candidates and learn about their skills in the early stages of the application process. Artificial Intelligence can enable organizations to identify the best candidates and increase the quality of the recruitment process. Here are some benefits of AI-based recruiting techniques:

  1. Removes Human Biasness– Even without realization, human biases can play an important role in the recruitment process. With artificial intelligence, the risk of human biases is eliminated entirely, and the candidate is only hired on the basis of pre-decided standards like skills, years of experience, etc.
  2. Enhances Efficiency–Artificial intelligence helps organizations eliminate manual tasks like identifying eligible candidates out of the massive pile of resumes. AI-based recruitment techniques are programmed to function with optimum efficiency, quality, time management, and cost-effectiveness to reduce the time & resources spent on such tasks.
  3. Improved Engagement – You can introduce chatbots and virtual assistants to enhance engagement with candidates. They can help recruiters to maintain good response time, enhance candidate experiences and facilitate better interactions throughout the recruitment process.

Artificial intelligence plays a significant role in improving the recruitment process. However, there are a few challenges that organizations may face while implementing it, such as:

  1. Accuracy and Reliability Issues–Recruitment techniques based on artificial intelligence can sometimes prove to be unreliable or inaccurate due to very tiny loopholes that an organization may fail to consider. Such loopholes can cause the company to lose a good candidate.
  1. Excessive Keyword Dependency – AI based recruitment techniques often function by depending on certain keywords to shortlist the candidates. However, this can serve as an unfair advantage for candidates who are familiar with the working of such techniques but don’t possess the required skillset themselves.
  1. Rigidity – AI based techniques are rigid as they screen applications based on the targeted keywords. This may cause the company to overlook perfectly qualified candidates with non-traditional backgrounds.

AI-based recruiting techniques and traditional staff augmentation have their own sets of pros and cons. It is the requirement of an organization’s project that decides the suitability of these approaches for that particular company. However, a hybrid model with features of both of these approaches can prove to be fitting for all organizations. Companies can leverage the time-efficiency and enhanced engagement offered by AI-based techniques without giving up the cost efficiency, expertise and effectiveness of human managementoffered by traditional staff augmentation. But, organizations must realize that it is important to evaluate all of their requirements against the pros and cons of these approaches before making the final decision.