Ep 812: Who Trains The Human In The Loop?
Recruiting Future with Matt Alder - What's Next For Talent Acquisition, HR & Hiring?Show Notes
For the last few years, most corporate conversations about AI have been about efficiency, automating tasks, and reducing headcount. That conversation is now starting to change, with more attention on what constant AI use is doing to the human capabilities organizations depend on.
Judgment sits at the center of this. It develops through years of hands-on experience, often in exactly the kind of junior work AI is now taking over. With many employers also hiring fewer entry-level people, developing the leaders of the future is becoming a serious challenge.
So how do organizations use AI to amplify human capability rather than erode it?
My guest this week is Johan Roos, Professor in Strategy at Hult International Business School and author of the new book Human Magic: Leading with Wisdom in an Age of Algorithms. In our conversation, Johan shares why the AI conversation is changing, the human capabilities that now matter most, and the practical choices employers face in developing judgment for the future.
In the interview, we discuss:
The dual mood of AI anxiety and excitement
Moving the AI conversation beyond efficiency
Amplification versus erosion of human capability
The five human capabilities that matter most
Why judgment comes from experience
The risks of cutting entry-level hiring
Thinking in tasks, not people
Building an agentic workforce without cutting jobs
Early warning indicators of talent risk
Bionic collaboration and what the future looks like
https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/recruiting-future-podcast/id963756980?mt=2&ls=1
https://open.spotify.com/show/4u3Gl0l4pGBtIHOJZjLTrx?si=49641466567e44d6
https://www.linkedin.com/in/drjohanroos/
A full transcript will appear here shortly.
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?