AI in Recruitment: Automating with Impact at ThoughtWorks

Even though AI can demonstrate sort of quasi empathy, you know, it can, it can be seen to be empathetic. It's not genuine empathy. And sometimes you need that human interaction to really get behind, you know, the, the real reasons that a candidate is looking, or not looking to leave their job or why they're looking at your job versus another one. You know, the best candidate tend to be interviewing simultaneously in multiple places. And that's where recruiters, I think, have to, have to still. They can leverage AI, but I think they still have to demonstrate the personal skills to make the difference. Hello.

You're very welcome to this special edition of the podcast. We're coming live from Barcelona, from Villarosa, actually, outside Ciches in Barcelona, where we bring together a bunch of fantastic TA leaders to discuss the hot topics of today. And joining me today, I'm delighted to have Marcus Thorpe from ThoughtWorks. And we're going to be digging into AI and automation and discussing, you know, how we're automating TA and recruiting in what ways. Mark is going to share some stories around what ThoughtWorks are doing and what he believes are some of the kind of key opportunities for automation and maybe some of the risks in that as well. But Marcus, perhaps before we dig into it, I'd love you to introduce yourself to our audience, maybe tell them a little about your career, what brought you not just to here in situ today, but maybe to where you are in your career. And maybe tell us about your passports, which you seem to have, many of, which is an international man of mystery.

Thank you. Yes, I'm Marcus Thorp. I'm currently global head of TA for ThoughtWorks. I've spent over 20 years, I think officially in TA. You stop counting at 20 years, but once you're over 20 years, so it's, it's definitely well over 20 years in, in, in talent acquisition, mostly in tech. I did one little stint in the Middle east working for a think tank that did economic and political research for the UAE government, which is another story altogether. All the rest has been intact. So I worked at, started working agency, as most of us did, on the dark side, as I like to call it, and then moved over in house, living in, in the Bay Area in San Francisco and took on a couple of contracts and then realized that in house was absolutely where I wanted to be. I've worked for some big international tech product firms like Google and Amazon and Skype and Twitter and yeah, most recently I joined eight years ago. Now, ThoughtWorks, we're a big technology consultancy, so we build Bespoke software for big Fortune 500 type companies. So basically big companies that have huge technical needs but won't have, you know, teams and teams of software engineers to help deliver them. Which basically means everything from starting a project through the completion of all the code and now the maintenance as well. We sort of have a managed services arm as well, but delving more and more into data science, data engineering, and we now even have a chief AI officer as our sort of the clients move more and more towards broadening their horizons from can you build us a website? To can you own the infrastructure to do complete supply chain management for us, that sort of thing.

What's the kind of scale of the organization? How many employees, how many people are you hiring in a given year? What's the size of your team, what's the scope in terms of geographies you work over?

Yeah, we're in five regions, five continents, which is North America, Latin America, Europe, IME, India, Middle east and APAC. And we're just under 12,000 people. We've had a couple of quieter years. We went from being a, a public company, well, from a private company to a public company. And now we're back to being a private company again, which is a story for another day. But we in a good year, and this will be a big year, it'll be north of 4,000 hires a year. Our record's about 5,000. This year we're on track for 4,000 and next year we're expecting it to be another 50% on top of that.

Wow. So kind of your team then. How big are they? Where are they based, how are they structured?

The team is about 230 or so now. We were at 300 at one point. At our biggest we were able to retain most of the team even when things went really quiet in 2023. They're all over. I have my, the structure of my team is I have a global head of sourcing and strategic hiring, which is exec hiring essentially there are heads of TA for each of the regions. I have someone who runs the program side of the thing of the of the fence and otherwise there's a recruitment systems team that supports us from an operations perspective. And then I also have the data analytics team reporting into me as well, which is super helpful because that level partnership makes all of those stakeholder meetings so much easier to facilitate. You get the right data, you can have the right conversations, the right narrative, you can steer the conversation the right way, etc.

From a business value perspective, literally what you are Doing is you're producing the product for the business like you are the sole resource. As in your team, you bring talent into the organization. The talent then gets essentially contracted out to customers. So the focus on TA must be pretty intense in terms of if you miss deadlines, you don't hit your numbers. It has a very direct effect, I imagine on revenue and profitability and ability to the job. Talk to me about that and that, that structure and how is that different perhaps to other recruiting teams?

Yeah, I mean if revenue is flat, we can just move people around from project to project and rotate them in and out of projects as soon as revenue goes up. And historically, almost to the moment that we went to IPO, we were growing by 20% year on year on a very, very consistent basis. And so that 20% of growth every year is entirely reliant on us bringing in new talents. Obviously there are backfills as well to facilitate. But that all of that new revenue growth is us finding the right people in the right place at the right time. That's changed over time. Historically it was all development and then the sort of the, the QAs and BAS that sort of surrounded it. Now we're moving away a little bit from that, but so we have to sort of morph what we're looking for and how we're looking for it. But it's all about predictable supply. It's all know we built a really good credible partnership with the business. We're seen as a trusted business partner when it comes to talent. We actually report into the chief operating officer versus sort of an HR function. The HR function is a parallel which is super helpful in terms of sort of direct access to the, to the board, etc when we need it. But we, we've had to build this sort of predictable model that we're able to say with a certain level of expectation that someone new coming into the organization take takes n number of days to ramp. As a recruiter, they'll be delivering hires in their second month, they'll be fully ramped in their third month and they'll be producing, you know, in excess of three hires every month, which isn't a huge number. But making sure we do that month in month out across the team to make sure that everybody is in the right place at the right time is critical. And we're constantly playing a game of we will plan at the start of a year as everybody does, but typically by the sort of second week in January, we've ripped that up and throw it out the window is demand has gone up and we're having to hire a whole new set of a whole new team of people in a location that we weren't planning to do. So the vast majority of our hiring right now is in what we call delivery regions. So we have Latin America, Brazil, Ecuador, Chile, India, parts of Asia like Vietnam and Thailand. They're sort of our delivery regions. We have Spain and Romania in Europe. And then the other, the other countries are sort of the sales regions. That's where the, that's where the big Fortune 500 companies will be based. But thanks to Covid, we've been telling clients for a long time that we could facilitate their work by distributing teams all over the world at a fraction of the cost. And they sort of were insistent that we'd have people, you know, team of 40 flying in all over the US to go to Cincinnati or, you know, Austin, Texas. And now they're sort of saying, oh, thanks for telling us we can actually do this in a remote basis so that most of the teams are being built up in these new locations. And that's where most of my growth is. But as you say, we are 90% reliant on TA to deliver any growth in revenue, which we expect to be somewhere between 10 and 20% every year.

You mentioned you're in the business eight years, so you've gone through some crazy changes in terms of the talent market. So in 2025, how would you describe the market for the talent that you're looking for? Obviously high tech, highly skilled engineering, software engineering talent. You know, is it a candidate's market? Is it an employer's market? How would you describe it or compare it to other years?

I think 2020 to 2021, 2022 were the, the absolute insane years in terms of, you know, it was completely candidate driven, it was a big resignation, etc. Now the, a lot of people are a little bit more entrenched, a little bit harder to get out of a job, but there's still plenty of talent looking if you ask them the right way and search hard enough. I think intelligent sourcing, developing sourcing in a new way to make sure the, the, the messaging is individually crafted rather than mass sent is critical. It's about, you know, we target 70% of our hires to come from either sourced or referral. We're trying to, we're trying to remove the reliance historically that we had on inbound candidates. We'll still post roles, of course, but we, the quality, the throughput is nowhere near as it is, as good as it is for source candidates for Example, So all the reliance is on that. So it's constantly about evolving the sourcing team, making them do a better job. Our response rates are really good. We have a good brand in most of the locations. Whenever we go somewhere new, like we're sort of expanding into latam in new countries now we have to build that presence up. But it's about making sure the message is the right one and then that the candidate experience is exemplary. It has to be. You know, it's completely pointless being able to sell from a source of perspective, recruiter perspective, if that's not authentic and sort of seen throughout the interview process. So everybody has to be talking from the same hymn book. So now it's sort of. Yeah, I say it's, it's, it's not easy right now, but it's a lot easier than it was in 21, 22 people are hiring. The fact that we have clients coming to us for more work means that they're looking themselves and sometimes we're actually competing with the companies that we're, that are our clients for that same talent. And we have to work out who's going to, who's going to employ them and how we're going to have them work on, on a client site. There's a lot of work which is sort of staff augmentation, which we historically haven't dealt with very much, but in order to get some of the revenue back, we were looking at staff augmentation work to a certain extent, which allows us to get a foothold in a business, but the margins are a little bit lower and therefore a little bit more complicated to find the right talent at the right price. In certain parts of the world, like India, constantly salaries go up by 10% a year and we have to try and stay ahead of it. It's a constant battle to make sure that our ranges are competitive enough to be able to attract the talent, you know, because my biggest resource, most precious resource that we have is interviewer time. We're a professional services company so we're constantly reminding our, our consultants that they work for ThoughtWorks, but, but typically they use client email systems, client client laptops, etc. While working on client sites. And they sometimes forget to check their ThoughtWorks systems, which means we're, you know, having to find novel ways to remind them about the interview they're about to facilitate or hopefully facilitate. So that's a constant battle. So I can't, we can't possibly waste any interviewer time. We have to maximize every interview. So that's why we focus so much on the, the most effective ways, most efficient ways of making hires like sourcing and referrals. It stops burning through those interviews at a rate we can't afford to do.

You mentioned into your time and maybe we can start this. We want to talk about AI and automation. Often people want to go straight into the conversation of what are the tools that you think are interesting and sexy stuff, which I think is the wrong way around. I'd like to maybe start with what are the, what are the use. What are the areas that you're trying to automate and why? Like, first of all, what problems have to be solved before we dig into a solution for that that may or may not be out there? What are the kind of bigger problems that you're saying, okay, if I could solve a problem or problems with automation or with different technology, these are the things I need to solve for what are those things that at a high level in your type of recruiting and volumes, you think of, okay, I need to make XYZ better. And why would you need to make them better or more automated or faster?

Yeah, I mean there's an awful lot, you know, I think over the course of the last year, I've always sort of, I've always sort of liked historically to geek out on new technology that happens in ta and I thought I was pretty okay with AI, but that was sort of about AI, generative AI. And now the world is changing entirely into agentic AI, which allows basically to have all these little helpers running around doing things in an automated or semi automated fashion and then learning over time and making things better. And there's a power there which is fantastic. I don't think there's any part of TA that can't be supported in some way by artificial intelligence or machine learning of some description. So for example, you take sourcing. You know, outreach can be tailored based on the individual, you know, if you've spoken to them previously, if you, if you know, have information about the company they work for, you can basically be running competitive intelligence all the time to understand the movements in and out of your competitors and who's going where and gives you new places to go target. If you look at your workflows within the process themselves, you can set scheduling.