Welcome to another installment of our Power Women in Recruitment Month. Throughout October, we will celebrate some of the incredible women that make up the recruitment industry, highlighting their career achievements along the way.
In this clip, Zaidy Ramirez, Chief Technology Officer at K2 Partnering Solutions, shares insight into how K2 Konnect is changing the way recruitment professionals build relationships with clients and candidates.
Can you share a little about your role and path within the recruitment industry?
Zaidy Ramirez: Currently, I’m the chief technology officer for K2 Partnering Solutions globally, and I’ve been within the staffing industry since 2005. I started working for a talent management solutions company as a developer, so I come from a very technical background. Since then, I worked as a developer all the way up into the C-suite and it’s been quite an experience, not only as a professional but also being able to see all the trends and the different technologies come into life; and now we are actually looking at digital transformation, artificial intelligence, and doing things that are probably going to replace the manual tasks of humans. It’s really interesting to be in those shoes from when in 1995 we didn’t even have internet, to now, actually being in a place where a lot of our tasks rely on it.
What is K2 doing to embrace digital transformation in recruitment?
ZR: We’ve been focusing on improving our data. From that, you can see trends in your data which will help you gear and strategize your business. But we’ve also been participating in a lot of human cloud innovation. We’ve created K2 Konnect, which is basically a way for our consultants and clients to communicate with us and with other consultants.
It’s been a big change because until five years ago, all of these administrative tasks used to be very manual, very Word process-driven. Let’s say you have to send a document, you probably used to fax it. Nowadays, it’s actually done through a portal where you can create your timesheets, expenses, and interact with people that are within your technology atmosphere. Let’s say SAP, Salesforce, RPA, AI, whatever the consultant is working towards, they can contribute to our community. It’s been a big change and definitely an improvement for our business.
Have you seen a change in the way recruitment professionals build relationships with candidates and clients?
ZR: I’ve had the chance to see it firsthand. Before, our sales department and recruiters were very friendly, obviously very polite introducing and addressing clients’ requests. But now with the internal team, the development team, they have been able to forecast some of the stuff that we have done internally and actually inform our clients what we’ve done while showing them the product. So the flagship of this is K2 Konnect and show how we’ve managed to internally transform our processes from paper into a digitalized world.
If you’re interested in hearing more insights from Zaidy, check out her article on how her journey to K2’s C-suite started with a passion she found for coding at age 13 in Peru: Leaders Shaping Recruitment.
