Balans turns lab labour market transparent with AI

Director-owner Erik Ester tells about their philosophy: “Dreams are the fuel for happiness. You can’t start fulfilling them early enough. We ask people about their dreams and then see together what type of work fits them. The other day, someone said, ‘I want to drive a Ferrari.’ By jointly looking at the number of desired days per year, we found a suitable job, with enough salary to rent a sports car from time to time. We take making dreams come true very literally. Just last year, we jumped out of a plane with someone and gave singing lessons. If you look at things from people’s talents, the possibilities of realising dreams are unprecedented. Especially with the help of smart software.”

Balans chose 8vance two years ago, as the market leader in supporting software for the recruitment and selection process. Erik explains why: “I have an IT background and don’t want to have to duplicate operations. 8vance helps us best in our matching decision, by suggesting suitable vacancies and suitable candidates for every vacancy.”

Erik continues: “We can work at lightning speed. Thanks to the built-in ATS and a link to AFAS, the whole process from recruitment to payment is now automated. Clients who want to match themselves can even find, deploy and pay out candidates without our intervention. However, most clients choose to use our expertise in the placement process and fully outsource recruitment to us.”

Erik has a clear goal in mind: “We currently cover all vacancies in laboratories and process engineering in our database. Now we also want to bind all 250,000 potential workers for these sectors to us. We will make the labour market transparent for them. We know what is suitable for you, partly by linking the results of personality tests to vacancies. The more data we have, the better it works. AI predicts when someone wants to change jobs. Through an e-mail campaign with targeted advice and personalised opportunities, we can accurately determine this moment. This allows us to advise both the candidate and the client at the right time about the possibilities and steps to take.”

Although Erik believes hugely in the potential of AI, he knows that even in the future, the human factor will remain indispensable. “Just as AI makes better diagnoses than doctors, it is still important that a human makes the final decision. With us too, we see AI doing a great job in pre-selection, but a human eye remains necessary for the final successful match. It is impossible to calculate all matches by hand for such a large dataset; but technology again cannot cover all aspects crucial for a match. In our sector too, some jobs will disappear, but in return new ones will appear in which humans interact with AI.”