Ep 806: The Real Trends In Talent Acquisition
Recruiting Future with Matt Alder - What's Next For Talent Acquisition, HR & Hiring?Show Notes
Over the last year, I have been using AI to develop a searchable archive of the content in every episode of Recruiting Future, 3 million words from over a decade of unscripted conversations with practitioners and thought leaders across talent acquisition. James Whitelock, host of The Marketing Rules Podcast, has been doing the same thing with his own archive of more than 200 episodes over seven years.
Between us, we now have over a thousand real conversations we can interrogate for trends, and the picture that emerges is an industry caught in familiar tensions: fighting to prove its strategic value, grappling with AI that moves faster than it can be adopted, and trying to figure out which parts of hiring should stay fundamentally human.
So what do years of real conversations reveal about where talent acquisition actually stands?
In my conversation with James, we compare what our respective archives reveal about TA's shifting identity, the real pace of AI's change, and the tensions the industry keeps returning to.
In the interview, we discuss:
Using AI to turn podcast archives into industry intelligence
TA's journey from growth engine to cost center and back again
How the AI conversation has shifted over time
Adaptability as the critical skill for TA
Is TA becoming a marketing function?
Standing out when AI content all sounds the same
Ring-fencing the parts of hiring that should stay human
Bias in humans and bias in AI
What does the future look like?
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More from Recruiting Future with Matt Alder - What's Next For Talent Acquisition, HR & Hiring?
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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?