Ep 816: Hiring For Judgment In The AI Era
Recruiting Future with Matt Alder - What's Next For Talent Acquisition, HR & Hiring?Show Notes
There is growing consensus that AI is eroding the experience pathways organizations depend on to develop human judgment. Entry-level roles are shrinking, hands-on work is being automated, and fewer people are building the experience their businesses need. This is a well-documented challenge. What remains far less clear is what the talent strategy response should look like. Most skills systems today are built to track whether someone can execute a task, not how well they make decisions under ambiguity. If judgment is becoming the most important capability in the organization, recruiting, learning, and assessment all need recalibrating around it.
So what does that recalibration look like in practice?
My guest this week is Craig Friedman, author of Enterprise Skills Unlocked and Talent Transformation Leader at St. Charles Consulting Group. In our conversation, he explains why current skills infrastructure misses the capability that matters most, what work looks like when execution is automated, and how organizations can start building judgment into their talent strategy.
In the interview, we discuss:
What does enterprise AI adoption currently look like
The long-term consequences of cutting entry-level jobs
What does work look like when the automatable tasks are taken away?
Why judgment is more important as a skill than ever before
The difference between judgment and critical thinking
Where does judgment fit into the skills infrastructure?
How can TA teams hire for judgment?
What does the future look like?
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AI is moving from a specialist technology to something employees in large parts of the organization are increasingly expected to be using. Skills, mindsets, and long-established habits are much harder to change than software, which is why meeting that expectation is proving difficult. If the challenge is mainly a human one, AI readiness is as much a matter for HR and talent leaders as for technology teams. So what does it take to get a workforce ready for AI, and what opportunity does that create for talent leaders?
Redundancies have become a constant feature of the talent market. AI is taking a lot of the blame, but the drivers behind this are much broader. Jobs and skills are changing faster than most organizations can keep track of and the conventional response is to restructure the workforce and then hire in the new skills that are needed. That approach relies on a ready supply of perfectly qualified candidates, and in a fast-moving skills market those candidates are increasingly hard to find. It also assumes that employers already have a clear view of the skills and potential within their existing workforce, which is rarely the case.
There is a lot of pressure on talent acquisition to adopt AI, and the discussion about how to do it tends to focus on tools and skills. With layoffs attributed to AI in the headlines, the people in TA teams have good reason to feel anxious about the technology they are being asked to use. That anxiety makes people less willing to experiment, and addressing it has less to do with the technology than with how leaders handle uncertainty.
TA leaders have to keep delivering for the business while they use AI to transform how hiring works. At RecFest USA in Nashville, AI was the main topic of conversation, although the people I spoke to talked about much more than the technology. So where should TA leaders be focusing their attention?