News: Want a Job at Zara, Réalisation Par or British Fashion Council?

Monday, January 15, 2024

Want a Job at Zara, Réalisation Par or British Fashion Council?

In this week's Careers Newsletter, read BoF senior correspondent Sheena Butler-Young's latest: How AI Is Changing Fashion's Recruiting Process.

"You're hired!"

These days, there's a chance that job candidates receiving that news were handpicked — by artificial intelligence.

A growing number of fashion and beauty brands are turning to AI to help solve age-old recruiting challenges, from wading through piles of résumés to writing job postings. The technology is also seen as a potential way to reduce biases that human managers bring to the hiring process.

While many companies have used algorithms to automatically screen applicants for years, AI is starting to catch on as a solution for more specialised tasks, such as predicting a job candidate's future performance and providing real-time feedback to applicants and employers, including which of their hiring tactics are resonating the most. Some start-ups are even taking aim at executive recruiters, a profession built on the very human (for now) idea of matching exactly the right person to a highly specialised role.

When Skims was opening its first pop-up stores outside its home base of Los Angeles in 2022, it turned to Dweet, a London-based fashion jobs marketplace powered by AI, said Laura Buckle, senior director of global recruitment and talent at Skims.

Dweet's AI help write postings for temporary roles in New York and London, then served up a shortlist of applicants from a pool that today includes more than 40,000 people who had created profiles in the start-up's system. While much of the matching (between applicant and brand) is done by AI, Dweet does employ "talent managers" who manage feedback from both sides to help mitigate AI's shortcomings, said Eli Duane, Dweet's co-founder.

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