Ep 829: What TA Leaders Are Talking About Now
Recruiting Future with Matt Alder - What's Next For Talent Acquisition, HR & Hiring?Show Notes
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?
I recorded seven short interviews at the event, and they fall into three themes. Those themes are the value that talent acquisition brings to the business, the risks that employers now have to manage, and what comes next for hiring.
My guests are Jamie Leonard, Founder of RecFest; Stef Nikitas, Director of Talent Acquisition at Ace Hardware; Julia Levy, a former Fortune 500 talent acquisition executive; Jim Stroud, Head of Market Strategy and Industry Engagement at ProvenBase; Lorna Erickson, Co-Founder of Expert Interviewers; Mark Chaffey, Co-Founder and CEO of hackajob, the company behind Archer; and Ben Russell, Co-Founder and CCO of SonicJobs. In our conversations, they discuss who should own quality of hire, how employers are responding to legal risk and candidate fraud, and how AI is changing the way candidates and employers find each other.
In the interview, we discuss:
The growing conversation about how TA aligns with business goals
Who should own quality of hire and how should it be measured?
The compliance and legal pitfalls around AI and pay transparency
How to check for candidate fraud without making the process harder for real candidates
The lack of trust between candidates and recruiters
How job seekers are using large language models to look for work
What generative engine optimization means for employers
Is agent-to-agent hiring the future of talent acquisition?
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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.
The world of work is changing quickly, and the way people move between roles is changing with it. Hiring for senior positions looks very different from the way it did even five years ago, while many people still approach their own careers with instincts shaped by a market that no longer exists.