Ep 824: Is AI Creating Talent Debt?
Recruiting Future with Matt Alder - What's Next For Talent Acquisition, HR & Hiring?Show Notes
Inside most organizations, the pressure has shifted from proving that AI works to showing what it is worth in cost, productivity and headcount. Some workforce plans are now being decided on that basis before anyone has looked closely at how the work is done. The organizations getting the most from AI are treating it as a question of work design rather than technology.
So what does designing work around AI involve, and what does it cost the organizations that skip that step?
My guest this week is Matt Campbell, Managing Director at Alvarez & Marsal, where he leads the Talent, Organization & People practice and advises organizations on workforce strategy and organization design. In our conversation, he explains why most AI pilots produce an inconclusive result, a five-stage model of AI's impact on work, the ways organizations misread their own people, and why cutting too far, too fast creates a talent debt.
In the interview, we discuss:
- Why most AI pilots are designed to prove the wrong thing
- Who owns AI?
- Why big tech's approach to AI and headcount is the wrong template for everyone else
- The difference between a job and a role
- The five A's: avoid, assist, augment, automate and autonomous
- How to put numbers against cost, productivity and capacity
- The four things organizations most often get wrong
- Why unauthorized AI use gives employees the benefit and the organization the risk
- Talent debt and the cost of cutting too far, too fast
- Are you designing work around AI, and what does the future look like?
More from Recruiting Future with Matt Alder - What's Next For Talent Acquisition, HR & Hiring?
If you've not listened to Round Up before, it's a short review of the episodes that I've published in the last month to make sure you don't miss out on the valuable insights that my guests are sharing.
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?