Recruiting Future with Matt Alder - What's Next For Talent Acquisition, HR & Hiring?

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It is becoming clear that company CEOs are taking AI very seriously, and it is starting to inform the strategic direction of many businesses. For example, 44% of CEOs responding to PwC's 2024 Annual Global CEOs survey believed that Gen AI will drive efficiency and boost profits in the next 12 months. 

It is now critical that Talent Acquisition leaders take AI seriously and build strategies that closely align with their business's strategic direction. Unfortunately, in most cases, this isn't happening with the urgency that the situation requires.

So, what are the barriers here? Do we fully understand the challenges, and what can TA leaders do to ensure they stay in step with the rest of their business?

My guest this week is Paul Maxin. Paul is a highly experienced Global TA Leader who has worked at a diverse range of major public and private organizations. Paul firmly believes in the importance of approaching AI strategically with a sense of urgency and shares some pragmatic advice on how best to achieve this. 

In the interview, we discuss:

Why TA is out of step with the rest of the enterprise

The challenges that stop TA from being strategic

The importance of scenario planning

Calls to action

• What questions should TA leaders be asking themselves?

• Data, measurement, and transparency

• Proving the strategic value of TA

• Auditing and the danger of AI being bias on steroids

• The continuing importance of the candidate experience

• An increasing risk of burnout

• What might the future hold?

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Round up is the monthly show on The Recruiting Future Podcast channel that highlights episodes you may have missed and gives you my take on some of the key learnings from the guests.

Episodes mentioned in this Round Up:

Ep 619: TA On The Brink Of Revolution

Ep 620: Hard Skills & Soft Skills

Ep 621: Rain, Whisky and Robots

Ep 622: Redefining Expertise

Ep 623: An Inclusive Candidate Experience

Ep 624: The TA Team Of The Future

Ep 625: What’s Next For Generative AI?

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Get my free whitepaper "10 Ways AI Will Transform Talent Acquisition" - Download Now

Trend Spotting - Find out how my digital course will help you shape the future of talent acquisition in your organization - Click Here

The hype around the arrival of Gen AI was off-the-scale crazy. Now that things have calmed down and the use of LLMs is starting to normalize, it can be easy to think that the hype was overblown. However, we are about to see some developments in technology that will change our mindsets entirely and start to bridge the gap between the initial hype and our current reality.

My guest this week is Jack Houghton, Co-Founder of Mindset AI. Mindset AI uses cutting-edge AI technology in the HR and Learning space. Jack talks us through the potential of Autonomous AI Agents to change how we work forever and help some of the initial hype around AI become reality.

In the interview, we discuss:

• The huge developments coming in the next 12 months

• How will removing the current friction in accessing Gen AI accelerate adoption?

• How Autonomous AI Agents will bridge where we are and where we are going.

• Tools, APIs, and logical reasoning

• How do AI Agents communicate in Swarms to build workflows and intelligently manage tasks?

• Ask use cases and Do use cases.

• What are the limitations and the implications for jobs?

• The importance of taking a strategic approach

• Where might we be in 3-5 years?

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Get my free whitepaper "10 Ways AI Will Transform Talent Acquisition" - Download Now

Trend Spotting - Find out how my digital course will help you shape the future of talent acquisition in your organization - Click Here

Much of the conversation about the future of talent acquisition focuses on absolutes. The questions debated revolve around whether there will actually be a need for talent acquisition in the future, whether robots will do all the recruiting, and whether most jobs will even still exist. 

While these discussions are essential, they tend to polarize opinion and don't do much to move the industry forward. We need to have nuanced conversations about the practicalities of this transformation process and focus on the skills and roles that will drive the change we need.

My guest this week is Andreea Lungulescu, Principal Talent Acquisition Partner at thermondo. Andreea strongly advocates for strategic talent acquisition and the importance of TA shaping its own destiny. She has done some significant work around the future roles talent acquisition will need and has some highly valuable insights to share

In the interview, we discuss:

• Elevating the role of TA and making it strategic

• The importance of understanding rapidly changing business priorities

• How are employers responding to AI?

• The enthusiasm vs. implementation gap

• What are AI skills?

• Removing silos in the talent function

• Disrupting the traditional career framework in TA

• What TA roles might we see in the future?

• What skills do TA professionals need to develop

• What is going to happen over the next 18 months

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Get my free whitepaper "10 Ways AI Will Transform Talent Acquisition" - Download Now

Trend Spotting - Find out how my digital course will help you shape the future of talent acquisition in your organization - Click Here

When we talk about employers becoming more inclusive, the focus is often on big strategic thinking and a long process of organizational change. However, companies can often make significant progress by taking small steps in important areas.

The quality of the candidate's experience is the critical first step in an organization's inclusivity, and recent data indicates that quality has been dramatically deteriorating over the last 18 months.

So, what practical and immediate steps can employers take to be more inclusive with their recruiting?

My guest this week is Advita Patel from Comms Rebel. Advita is a communication and workplace culture strategist who helps organizations cultivate a culture of inclusion. In our conversation, she shares practical, pragmatic advice on how employers can build inclusive candidate experience by improving the quality of their communication.

In the interview, we discuss:

• The importance of inclusive communication

• Being a comms rebel

• How can the recruiting process be more inclusive?

• Job descriptions and degrees

• Recognizing bias

• Taking micro-steps 

• The impact of poor communication on candidates

• What can employers and individual recruiters do to improve the candidate experience?

• The dangers of overly generic AI-generated language

• Candidates calling out employers in public

• Changing expectations of work and the importance of belonging

• Will AI make things better or worse?

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Get my free whitepaper "10 Ways AI Will Transform Talent Acquisition" - Download Now

Trend Spotting - Find out how my digital course will help you shape the future of talent acquisition in your organization - Click Here

It's been clear for a long time that the way we traditionally think about skills and expertise is out of step with our fast-changing and volatile world. This issue runs through the education system in many countries and also influences how employers attract and upskill talent.

So, what are the innovative approaches that could solve this problem?

My guest this week is Ed Fidoe, co-founder and CEO of the London Interdisciplinary School (LIS). LIS has been described as the most radical new university to open in decades. It offers degrees that use an interdisciplinary approach to solving some of the complex problems that business and society face. There are interesting lessons for employers here around the concept of interactional expertise.

In the interview, we discuss:

• What is LIS, and why was it founded?

• Building networks of knowledge

• Connecting academic learning to the workplace

• Enhancing employability by addressing the current mismatch of expertise between college and the workplace

• Intellectual curiosity and problem-solving

• Cultivating diversity of thought through diversity of background

• The power of interactional expertise in the knowledge economy 

• What future skills will be needed in an AI-driven world?

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Get my free whitepaper "10 Ways AI Will Transform Talent Acquisition" - Download Now

Trend Spotting - Find out how my digital course will help you shape the future of talent acquisition in your organization - Click Here

If you listened to the TA Leader interviews in Episode 619, you'd know that Recruiting Future recently collaborated with The Chad & Cheese podcast to host two face-to-face unconference-style events in Edinburgh and Glasgow.

On the day between the two events, we decided to combine podcast recording with tourism. What better way to do this than to use a campervan as a mobile recording studio and drive around the southeast of Scotland, taking in some of its world-famous coastal views? Well, that was the plan anyway.

Our plans took an unexpected turn as the weather had other ideas. But this led to some exciting impromptu discussions on AI and the future of work, sparked by a tour of a two-hundred-year-old whisky distillery, a flying visit to a seven-hundred-year-old castle, and a trip to the beach.

In this episode, we discuss:

• Is the resume dead?

• What's going on with skills-based hiring

• The differences and similarities between talent acquisition in Scotland and talent acquisition in the US

• Attitudes to risk

• The tricky balance between robots and humans

• What does the long-term future look like

• Do we have the right attitude towards the future as an industry?

• AI is already taking TA jobs.

• Why smaller employers may have an advantage

• What happens when AI is just baked into everything?

• What is going to change in the next three years

Follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts.

Get my free whitepaper "10 Ways AI Will Transform Talent Acquisition" - Download Now

Trend Spotting - Find out how my digital course will help you shape the future of talent acquisition in your organization - Click Here

The shortening shelf life of skills, shifting business priorities, and the surge in AI-driven job applications are compelling many employers to rethink their candidate assessment and selection processes. This shift towards skills-based thinking is fostering greater integration between talent acquisition and talent management. By combining data on soft skills, hard skills, and career aspirations, employers can leverage a unified dataset to gain a comprehensive view throughout the entire employee lifecycle.

So how can this be done, and what advantages can it bring?

My guest this week is Jason Putnam, the CRO at Plum. Jason has been driving the charge around the scientific assessment of soft skills for a while and has recently incorporated data on hard skills into their methodology. Jason has some important insights to share on the future of assessment and the implementation of skills-based hiring.

In the interview, we discuss:

• How the market is evolving

• The changing balance between talent acquisition and talent management

• TA's responsibility for retention

• Combining hard skills and soft skills

• Pace paradox versus business latency

• Focusing on the skills you need rather than the skills you have

• The evolution of the recruiting process

• Building alignment between talent acquisition, talent management, and hiring managers

• The importance of one universal dataset

• The role of AI

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Download My Free Whitepaper - “10 Ways AI Will Transform Talent Acquisition” 

https://recruitingfuturefeast.com/transform

Check out my new course on planning strategically for the future - Trend Spotting

https://matt-alder-s-school.teachable.com/p/trendspotting

Round up is the monthly show on The Recruiting Future Podcast channel that highlights episodes you may have missed and gives you my take on some of the key learnings from the guests.

Episodes mentioned in this Round Up:

Ep 611: Doing Hiring Differently

Ep 612: AI-Powered Job Seekers

Ep 613: Talent Automation

Ep 614: Reinventing The Recruiting Process

Ep 615: Building Inclusive Hiring Practices

Ep 616: AI And The Art Of The Possible

Ep 617: The Practicalities of Skills-Based Hiring

Ep 618: Breaking The Rainbow Ceiling

Follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts

A full transcript will appear here shortly

Get my free whitepaper "10 Ways AI Will Transform Talent Acquisition" - Download Now

Trend Spotting - Find out how my digital course will help you shape the future of talent acquisition in your organization - Click Here

During May, Recruiting Future combined forces with The Chad and Cheese Podcast to run two face-to-face TA leader meet-ups in Edinburgh and Glasgow.

TA is on the brink of a revolution, and people expect significant changes in the coming months and years. While there was some anxiety about potential future scenarios, there was genuine excitement around the potential of AI, skills-based thinking, and a more integrated approach to talent, making recruiting better for everyone.

This episode features eight industry leaders talking about the practicalities of the revolution ahead:

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