Interview: Ankur Anand, group CIO, Nash Squared

Exploiting technology

Anand says his responsibilities at Nash Squared cover two main areas. One is ensuring the firm’s day-to-day technology runs smoothly, which he describes as table stakes for any CIO. The second and more important part is using technology to help the business grow.

“I ensure that technology removes friction,” he says. “We continue to grow the business by using technology because data can have a big impact in our industry. I need to have constant conversations with the business and peers in the industry to understand what’s happening and ensure our technology is ahead of the curve.”

Success isn’t just about implementing technology. Anand says Nash Squared is, first and foremost, a people business. The systems and services he introduces will only have an impact if employees understand how to use these tools effectively.

Being CIO, therefore, also involves a strong cultural change component. Bringing people and technology together is a responsibility that Anand relishes.

“It’s a very broad role,” he says. “On one hand, you are thinking about the business and focusing on how to improve the top line. On the other hand, you have cost pressures. You need to ensure that the bottom line continues to improve. However, as a business in a competitive industry, we must push the value curve far ahead compared to what it used to be five, 10 or 15 years back.”

Anand says the general direction of travel for digital transformation is to deliver value from the firm’s explorations into emerging technology. When he joined the company, the firm didn’t have a CIO. He replaced a chief technology officer (CTO) who focused on keeping the lights on and ensuring the business had basic operational systems. There was an opportunity to do more with digital and data, which led to the creation of the CIO role.

“I started to think about how we could get value from technology,” he says. “I came in, looked at the cost base and optimised operations to ensure that the delivery model was right. We were using some expensive consultants but not driving value from them because we were keeping the lights on. I ensured we had the people with the right skill sets. And through that process, I started shaping the technology strategy.”

Transforming operations

One of the main objectives was to integrate systems and data sets. Nash Squared is an acquisitive business with a long history of purchases. Anand wanted to create a single view of customer data.

“The priority was to get the data journey right across the organisation,” he says. “That was quite an interesting learning period for our business. The insights they started getting as a result of that process were shaping how we would run the company in the future.”

“We continue to grow the business by using technology because data can have a big impact in our industry”

Ankur Anand, Nash Squared

With the right enterprise data foundations in place, Anand considered the culture of change, which meant bringing people along as his team introduced new technology. He says effective change management processes start with buy-in from people at the top of the business. “We had a good experience in this area,” he adds.

While one of the key components for business change is AI, Anand has proceeded with care. “I don’t want to jump into the bandwagon of AI, because there are so many shiny tools, and recruitment is always talked about as one industry where AI is going to do wonders,” he says.

Across the organisation, Anand and his team worked with their line-of-business peers to think carefully about what people wanted to achieve with AI. The core of the approach is improving the day-to-day experiences of employees and job-seeking candidates. He says AI and data are used to improve the company’s understanding of jobseekers’ requirements – and this process involves answering some questions.

“What information do we capture through our day-to-day interactions? How can we convert these day-to-day interactions into structured data? And how do we get that structured data into our people’s hands, so that, whether they are screening a candidate or matching them to a role, AI can enable our staff to make better decisions. The work has been about AI becoming an enabler for our people, rather than automating the jobs of our staff.”

Exploiting data

Anand describes the enterprise application of AI as an ongoing journey: “You finish one project, and then you look at, ‘Where can I do more?’”

The company has focused so far on creating a clear segmentation of its candidate and client base. This segmentation supports a deeper awareness of the requirements of the people who use Nash Squared services. With this insight, Anand says people who work for the recruiter can tighten their understanding of the labour market and new leads and opportunities.

“One important area is data augmentation and enhancement, where we are converting everyday conversations into data,” he says. “Take interpretive insights, which are basically a combination of our own technology, our machine-learning algorithms, along with other AI algorithms. We are also deploying a telephony solution that doesn’t just transcribe conversations but actually converts that discussion into insights.”

Anand explains how these technologies join up. He gives the example of a recruiter talking to a contractor about their skills, industry experiences and anticipated daily rates. The details in these conversations are translated into metadata, pushed into the company’s Bullhorn CRM platform, and used to develop deeper candidate insights to match candidates with job openings.

[Our] work has been about AI becoming an enabler for our people, rather than automating the jobs of our staff

Alongside these foundations, the company is developing its own proprietary AI services, semantic models and intellectual property, including via graph technologies. Anand says his team continues to explore ways to use AI to help the firm’s consultants work productively and effectively. Fresh developments are already on the horizon.

“We are also working with a partner who has an existing product that they are enhancing for us,” he says. “It’s an AI pre-screening tool, which we can send out to all our candidates, and, through that, we can identify what skills they have. Then we can think about how we market these candidates. Basically, we’ll have all the metadata needed to manage the talent pool.”

Across all areas of emerging technology, Anand says his team has strived to reduce potential issues.

“These are machine-learning models that are pretty much based on our learning and testing,” he says. “We took an enormous amount of time to ensure the right level of accuracy, so that we can remove bias and hallucinations.”

Developing the brand

Anand explains the direction of travel for Nash Squared, which owns tech recruiter Harvey Nash, over the next two years: “If I can grow my business three times or four times to what we are today, with the same technology, that’s what I want to achieve for our business.”

He says the aim is to create a trusted brand for candidates, which is known for using digital and data to place candidates as quickly and effectively as possible. Anand says this brand should know its candidates’ skills “inside and out” yet recognises it’s a challenging aim.

“That’s a very difficult capability for our business to achieve,” he says. “Many recruitment companies have candidates, but they don’t know much about them. For our employees, the advantages are related to speed – speed gives them the ability to do more for candidates and to earn more, so it makes them happy as well.”

However, if the company gets its approach right, Anand says there’s an opportunity to become the first brand people think of when they consider a tech-enabled recruiter that can help them find the right job opportunities. Just as Uber has used technology to become synonymous with taxi journeys, so Anand wants to create similar name recognition.

“I want to make Harvey Nash the same kind of brand in recruitment,” he says. “So, when someone is looking for a technology contracting job or a permanent IT job, the first name they think of is Harvey Nash.”