Reed, with its mission to improve lives through work, stands as a leading recruitment company, managing around 100,000 job advertisements annually for both itself and its clients.

Kortical, a UK-based AI platform and consultancy startup, has been delivering cutting-edge artificial intelligence solutions to leading enterprise clients such as Santander, Deloitte, and Charlotte Tilbury since 2016.

The collaboration between Kortical and Reed was born out of the necessity to streamline Reed's job posting process. Traditionally manual, this key recruitment process was time-consuming (ranging from 5 to 90 minutes per posting) and suffered from inconsistency. The objective was clear: leverage AI automation to save time, enhance consistency, and ensure high-quality, SEO-optimised job postings.

The project aimed to revolutionise job postings at Reed by:

• Reducing the time spent on creating job postings
• Enhancing consistency across postings
• Improving SEO performance
• Increasing job satisfaction among team members by easing their workload on a burdensome task

A consultative approach laid the groundwork, with Kortical and Reed first spending the time to identify AI use cases that apply to the recruitment sector. These ranged from ideas in the job seekers area, to help screen candidates, different types of recruiting chatbots, candidate engagement etc... They were mapped from easy to difficult to implement, considering risk and value to the business. Job posting emerged as a top priority, leading to the development of an AI roadmap.

Reed provided the principals around what constituted a perfect job posting, the sections, how it was to be formatted and also supplied a few examples of what good job postings looked like. Kortical used this to create a prompt that ChatGPT 4 can understand and embed into an AI chatbot that Reed's recruitment consultants can interact with day in day out.

As they typically have a job description and details about the company and hiring process, these can be pasted into the AI powered chatbot in whatever form they come in and KorticalChat will output the perfect Reed approved job posting every time.

The AI chatbot can also help those starting from scratch with their job posting so it can cover both user experiences, those with a draft and those without.

KorticalChat was chosen vs Bing, which they currently have free access to but the chatbot outputs were not as good and the senior team couldn’t control what each user prompted the chatbot, so it wasn’t fit for purpose. They also didn’t have the internal knowledge to use Azure, host it and set up a UI as well as creating the prompt and as KorticalChat is a pay as you use model, it is a cost effective and much more accurate with the job postings generated.

At its core, the project utilises ChatGPT, a natural language processing (NLP), machine learning transformer model, chosen for its advanced capabilities and the more context it can hold in its prompt. We used Azure to host the model in the EU, to ensure that it meets GDPR data protection standards. The trade off is speed even though we are using the Turbo model, there is a lag vs ChatGPT 3.5 model however the outputs are worth the small wait as they are much more consistent, warmer in tone and in this use case better outputs really matter.

KorticalChat's user interface houses the custom prompt and chatbot interface that Reed's recruitment consultants engage with, ensuring a seamless user experience.

A pilot group was instrumental in refining the chatbot's functionality, a best practice for enterprise AI deployments to ensure scalability and reliability. The pilot ran for 4 weeks. There was an initial call to launch the Job Posting Bot, and weekly catch-up calls to gather feedback from the team leaders. They helped Kortical with the direction needed to adjust the prompt to ensure better chatbot outputs, ensuring that it had the key features they would expect to see to meet Reed's high standards.

Deployment: Implementation was kept simple with no integrations and made the AI chatbot accessible company-wide via a link. The chatbot integrated smoothly into Reed's job posting workflow.

Training: Minimal training was needed, thanks to the chatbot's intuitive design. An introductory email sufficed, supplemented by the bot's self-explanatory first message.

Security: The data is encrypted at rest and in transit. KorticalChat is ISO27001 accredited and this has robust security measures embedded throughout the organisation. Microsoft's single sign-on ensured that access was restricted to Reed employees, aligning with enterprise security and privacy protocols.

Insights: One of the key benefits about using KorticalChat is the visibility it provides to the senior team, allowing them to monitor both questions and outputs across the team. This visibility into what recruitment consultants are inquiring about shapes the AI roadmap more naturally than the traditional method of distributing surveys.

Within days, the chatbot was used by over 400 employees!! At Kortical, we have never seen such a quick take up for an AI technology implemented in a business before. The levels of usage have maintained, with an estimated saving of over 4,000 hours annually demonstrating the significant potential of Gen AI in enterprise transformation. This dramatic time saving translates into an ROI of over 700%, far exceeding expectations.

The response was overwhelmingly positive, with users praising the chatbot's ease of use and significant time savings. Team leaders need less vigilance over this part of the job role and can ensure that their team concentrates on more revenue driving activities such as finding more roles vs doing the behind the scenes admin to support those new job roles.

While there was a lot of confidence between Reed's product team and Kortical, that AI could help alleviate administrative tasks and augment the team’s experience in the business, small steps were needed to bring both senior management and the wider business along the Gen AI journey. The pilot AI bot was a great step in showing that KorticalChat was accurate and useful so that it could bring real power to the user’s ability to help them do their jobs.

Addressing data security and privacy concerns is also critical for enterprise AI deployments. On a practical level Info Sec concerns about GDPR compliance and security were mitigated by utilising an EU version of ChatGPT and implementing Microsoft single sign-on, ensuring the tool remained exclusive to Reed employees.

This first AI bot and the positive experience has been a springboard to uncover more AI projects throughout Reed and their partner companies.

The pilot phase was crucial for gathering insights and making necessary adjustments, minimising disruption and maximising efficacy. Staging the AI rollout, starting with a proof of concept, is best practice for enterprise AI adoption to ensure scalability and reliability.

The advice for other companies? Don't hesitate to try it, with KorticalChat it is easy to set-up your custom AI chatbot and the Kortical team are always on hand to help you get started.