Ep 808: The Starting Point For TA Innovation
Recruiting Future with Matt Alder - What's Next For Talent Acquisition, HR & Hiring?Show Notes
Innovation in recruiting is hard. TA leaders are experts at running their operations, but improving them in a structured way is a different discipline, and the AI revolution has made it one that no one can avoid. Before any function can innovate, though, it has to know where it is starting from, and that is where benchmarking becomes critical.
Recent research from the Recruiting Excellence Foundation, which has assessed the maturity of hundreds of TA teams worldwide, reveals that TA teams are struggling to move from operational to strategic.
So how should TA leaders get started?
My guest this week is Toni de Graaf, Co-Founder of the Recruiting Excellence Foundation. In our conversation, Toni shares what the global benchmark reveals, why so many teams are stuck in operational mode, and how to prioritize the improvements that matter most.
In the interview, we discuss:
Benchmarking TA maturity across the globe
The most surprising insight from the results
The two areas where TA teams struggle most
The difference between an operational and a strategic function
The impact of AI
AI and broken processes
Resource, capacity and value
Knowing your starting point
What does the future look like?
Take the recruiting excellence assessment
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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?