Data science breakthroughs underpin AI and how ETZ customers get more value from agency data

The road to AI was paved by business intelligence

The marvel of AI continues to astonish us. Large Language Model (LLM) chatbots such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini that use Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning and Deep Learning algorithms keep improving, providing outstanding practical capabilities for learning, communication and business.

The road to advanced AI capability is due in large part to the field of data science that has developed rapidly since its birth in the early 2000s. Throughout the 2010s data science made explosive breakthroughs. This created a radical shift in traditional thinking around statistics and business analysis and led to a broader definition. This now encompasses machine learning, data engineering, and business insight generation.

When you use ETZ software, in particular our BI tools, you are using technology that has been an instrumental stepping stone to what is certainly one the most powerful innovations that has ever been devised. There are some clear examples where we might see it in action.

Perilous personal filing…

Despite the best efforts of IT teams to control data through IT policies, employees often create their own personal filing systems, and like anything else, digital files simply proliferate to take up the available space. 

Imagine that someone suddenly resigns from your company after 15 years of service, leaving a considerable personal filing system – a ‘digital estate’ of files. Very often this is business data randomly mixed with personal files and IT managers simply won’t have time to sift and know what’s important and will likely archive the whole lot, for fear of losing something important. This could be thousands of files taking up many gigabytes of disk space. 

…Laborious investigative intelligence

As another example, take the matter of a law enforcement investigation. Such an enquiry might throw up any number of data sources that might need to be looked at to see if they yield evidence. 

Telephone calls, mobile cell site tracking, social media activity, online searches, use of web apps, photo and video files, emails, text files… the list of data types for analysis is often pretty extensive. These file types differ vastly in their makeup, and their relationship as part of an evidence trail can be complex to unpick. When it involves tens or tens of thousands of files it is difficult to carry out effectively with a manual process.

Personal filing unravelled and case solved!

In both these cases, software resulting directly from advances in data science research and development makes the process of sorting through these masses of unstructured data quick and effective. 

The personal files within legacy data from ex-employees can be analysed and deleted. Those relevant to the business can be analysed for intelligence and archived, saving time and storage costs as well as potentially yielding valuable insights.

In a law enforcement enquiry, a thorough analysis that ensures little, if anything, is missed is quickly carried out to discover investigative intelligence that may be locked up inside the mass of different file types. Whether it’s personal associations, communications interactions or visual evidence, incriminating or perhaps even exonerating intelligence can be extracted.

ETZ Business Intelligence across your agency’s data

The power of this technology is used to generate reports based on the data that ETZ processes, allowing your recruitment business to uncover trends and intelligence in some key areas:

• Productivity analysis – ETZ’s timesheet data provides insights into recruiter productivity, to monitor the performance of recruitment consultants. 
• KPI tracking – Track the performance of your recruitment consultants by defining KPIs that identify benchmarks and let you set performance targets.
• Cost management – ETZ allows recruiters to see labour costs without being distorted by the cost of expenses that contractors may have incurred.
• Regulatory compliance – ETZ’s timesheet data supports compliance with Agency Worker Regulations (AWR) and provides alerts to prevent breaches of AWR rules.
• Detailed reporting – ETZ provides transparency through providing some detailed reporting allowing you to see hours worked, expenses and overtime. 
• Caspian – For agencies that want more BI, Caspian is ETZ’s standalone business intelligence tool that is used to centralise and analyse unstructured data of different types from across the software applications that you use across agency operations. 

Find out more in our blog Are you maximising the use of ETZ data in your agency?

Get a smarter recruitment back-office with ETZ

ETZ’s leading recruitment back office software solution streamlines the back office processing of your recruitment agency. Our complementary solutions to our leading timesheet and invoicing solution, are ETZ Comply for onboarding and document management, and Caspian for business intelligence. These give agencies further capability to streamline and uncover opportunities.

To find out more call us on 0800 311 2266 or book a demo.