Can job candidates beat AI?

The global talent shortage is still a reality for many companies and attracting the right candidates requires ingenuity. A consulting company devised an interactive challenge for potential employees that tests if job candidates can beat AI.  

The skilled workforce shortage has been an ongoing issue for the last few years, especially in fields that require qualified expertise: technology, healthcare, engineering, or finance. 75% of companies worldwide are still dealing with hiring difficulties. The issue is set to permeate the 2024 hiring trends as well, and employers are predicted to face increased employee turnover during the first half of the year.

Coming up with creative ways to snatch talents has become the new norm for companies. Some are turning to AI solutions to revitalize their recruitment and candidate sourcing, screening, and interviewing processes. However, Synthesis CG, an interdisciplinary consultancy based in Lithuania, has gone in another direction to intrigue jobseekers and is challenging candidates to prove they are better than their AI to qualify for a strategist’s position.

Challenges in filling out a strategist’s position

The agency has devised a novel way to locate a strategist, who is required to have a special set of skills to help agency clients. The challenge stems from the need for different qualifications a good strategist should possess: an accelerated understanding of diverse business needs and data, expertise gained in different fields to address complex client challenges, the ability to apply analytical and conceptual strategizing skills, and willingness to work on large-scale projects as part of an interdisciplinary team.

“Potential strategists are a hard-to-find non-traditional audience that requires a non-conventional way to recruit them. That’s because a good brand strategist is not made in a “strategy school.” They come from all kinds of backgrounds — academics, business consulting, creative industries, and tech firms,” Gediminas Užkuraitis, partner and CEO of the agency, says. “We already know most of the people who call themselves strategists, so our goal with the campaign is to attract other people who would demonstrate how their brain works and show persistence to try multiple times until they get it right.”

Job candidates need to beat AI

The agency has created an interactive challenge to solve one of the issues of traditional recruitment — assessing the candidate based on their CV does not demonstrate their true skills and brainwork capacity.

The recruitment campaign presents a test for a potential strategist — to work against the agency’s AI-driven brand positioning tool CompOS and identify the correct Brandtype. CompOS, the world’s first AI-driven positioning method, analyses brands’ websites and identifies their Brandtypes. Based on the Brandtype selected by the engine, brands can see their most defining characteristics, as well as visualize the direction they want to take moving forward.

To complete the challenge, the candidate needs to match five brands with their respective Brandtypes and show whether their analytic methods can rival those of AI. Thanks to the test, candidates showcase their investigative skills in understanding different brands, as well as a strategic vision for them.

AI has already been widely applied in the consulting and creative industries. However, Užkuraitis believes potential employees must be as good or better than AI tools.

“For us as an agency to be relevant to clients in this day and age, we have to be better at understanding and applying AI than the companies who hire us to be able to offer new solutions,” the CEO added.

The AI challenge to locate a strategist is available here.

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