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

Ep 626: Taking A Strategic Approach To AI

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 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? Follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts.

Duration:: 26m
Broadcast on:: 07 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

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 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?

Follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts.

"Hi, this is Matt. Just before we start the show, I want to tell you about a free white paper that I've just published on AI and talent acquisition. We all know that AI is going to dramatically change recruiting, but what will that really look like?" For example, imagine a future where AI can predict your company's future talent needs, build dynamic external and internal talent pools, craft, personalized candidate experiences, and intelligently automate recruitment marketing. The new white paper, Ten Ways AI Will Transform Talent Acquisition, doesn't claim to have all the answers, but it does explore the most likely scenarios on how AI will impact recruiting. So, get a head start on planning and influencing the future of your talent acquisition strategy. You can download your copy of the white paper at matalder.me/transform. That's matalder.me/transform. "There's been more of scientific discovery, more of technical advancement and material progress in your lifetime than mine, at all the ages of history." Hi there! Welcome to episode 626, a recruiting future with me, Matt Alder. It's becoming clear that company CEOs are taking AI very seriously, and it's starting to inform the strategic direction of many businesses. For example, 44% of CEOs who responded to PWC's annual global CEO survey this year believe that Gen AI will drive efficiency and boost profits in the next 12 months. It's now critical that talent acquisition leaders take AI seriously, and build strategies that reflect their own businesses' strategic direction. Unfortunately, in most cases, this doesn't seem to be 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 Maxson. Paul is a highly experienced global TA leader, who's worked at a diverse range of major organisations in both the public and private sector. Paul strongly believes in the importance of approaching AI strategically with a sense of urgency, and shares some very pragmatic advice on the best ways to achieve this. Hi Paul, and welcome back to the podcast. Thanks Matt. It's great to be back. Thank you very much for inviting me to come back. Congratulations to you and everyone that's joined you over the years on now more than 600 episodes. It's amazing. Thank you, yes. It's been quite epic. Always a pleasure to talk to you. For people who may not know you or your work, could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do? Sure. I've been around for such a long time, but I'll try and give it as a quick introduction. I've been in talent and talent acquisition for the whole of my professional life pretty much, which is a few decades now. But in key tours of duty, I spent a lot of time with Unilever a number of years ago as a global resourcing director, and PWC before that for a number of years. So I've got a mixture of consulting and FMCG backgrounds. I then moved to the financial conduct authority, so a complete change of plan back in 2013. I think it was 2013, 2014. And really since 2016, I've been doing my own thing. Advising companies on talent acquisition, strategy, transformation, and how to deploy that. I've had some great clients, Zolando, a public recipient, NHS England, and Zegos, and a variety of sectors as well. And I also do some advisory work for some HR tech companies to just to become clear on that, that one specifically real links, which is in the employee referral and employee engagement space, so employee advocacy space. So broadly that's me. I've been around the block a few times and probably had to reinvent myself too, like we all have. Absolutely. I know exactly what you mean. So you've obviously worked strategically for quite some time. You've worked with a range of different types of companies, but some very large companies, where obviously AI is absolutely sort of dominating the narrative at the moment, as everyone sort of gets to grips with what it can do now and its possibilities and all this kind of stuff moving forward. How are you seeing sort of big companies enterprises reacting to that? And do you think that TA and HR are kind of out of step with the rest of the enterprise when it comes to the way that they're looking at AI? Yes, I do actually, just probably looking at the second part of the question first of maybe answering in reverse orders. I mean, I know reading reports at Davos this year and also, I think it was a PWC report that came out earlier in the year when they interviewed UK CEOs that stated that certainly well over 40% of FTSE 100 CEOs are already believed that they're using generative AI in the workspace. And a significant proportion of leaders, those leaders believe that their businesses won't be viable in, well they say 10 years, but maybe less than that, if they continue along their current path, maybe the current path not transferring digitally quick enough. TA, I think one of the reasons that I think the TA is potentially behind the curve in this space. I think there are a number of reasons. Competing priorities operationally, difficulties getting by in. Regardless, generally, talent acquisition has been reactive. Typically, the receiver plan and fill roles. We've talked about not being reactive in recruitment and talent acquisition for a long time, but generally, certainly in terms of volume roles, it is quite reactive and time cost and speed is still part of those discussions. There's been less discussion then around skills assessment within the workforce. I don't always see talent and talent acquisition aligned with workforce planning and technology and the impact of that on not just current skills, but future skills as well. And we talk about a skills based recruitment very much in the vernacular now, but in many respects, it's tasks. What tasks will be required to further enable and enhance a business's profitability and success in the near future and the subsequent future. So in short, I don't see or haven't heard those detailed scenario planning conversations taking place within TA and HR to the extent that they're connected to the conversations that are taking place at the top table within the businesses that they work within and support. And what are the dangers for talent acquisition as a function by not being involved in those conversations are up to speed or taking some of these digital developments that could be quite fundamental in terms of how they shape the future of business. I'm not taking them seriously enough. Today's model of talent acquisition broadly hasn't changed over the last 20 years or so in terms of operational processes. There have been some tweaks around it, but the conversation taking place in many respects is not that much more advanced than when 20 years ago at the dawn of the applicant tracking systems taking over from the from the roller decks, which is it's going to remove the repetitive in inverted commas, boring tasks and enable us to do more interesting, creative things. And we're having that conversation now with the advent of AI or machine learning AI and more generative AI. So that conversation in and of itself doesn't seem to have matured much over the last 20 years. And in the same way that over 40% of of company leaders believe that their businesses will not be viable if they continue along the current path, the danger for talent acquisition is that as an industry in a profession, it won't be viable unless significant changes to the way that we undertake that and support businesses are made. And the only way that we can really do that is to in some ways take a step back and do some back to the future in some ways, but to do some significant scenario planning, not just within TNA TA having the conversation within themselves, but TA having conversations across the businesses and across business in a more joined up approach to as best predict what the future might look like and course correct then along the way. But there are other variables coming downstream as well, not least of which governance around the impact of AI as well. So within the EU, the Artificial Intelligence Act, which was passed by MEPs earlier on this year, specifically states that the use of AI in recruitment falls into a high risk category, requiring a high quality data set, clear user information, specifically human oversight and accuracy and cybersecurity. And it kind of has the potential to be GDPR on steroids, because the potential fines for non-compliance are significant. They can range from stated ranges from 35 million euros or 7% of the global turnover, whichever is the greater for the most egregious cases. I suppose to dive into just that piece for a second. One of the things interesting about that is, as you say, the employer is the person who is liable if an AI tool that they're using is discriminating or breaking the law in any way. And I think that that puts a big, because AI is now being baked into all the software that's out there, even a TA department that didn't think that they were using AI could well be using it. And that's got a huge implications there for taking this seriously and having a proper strategy on there. Very much so. I mean, the calls to action, the questions that certainly TA leaders should be asking themselves, I think, when they go into the scenario planning, how are they going to take ownership of the strategy and change and transformation within talent acquisition? And to do that, you need to, some of the basics are there, decide what you need to measure, what data do you need and why, how will you ensure the technology and the AI still works? So to do that, you need to set clear standards and transparency, test all the tools that you have and reorder them. I think crucially run randomized control trials as well, so that testing tools against random selection. You need to do that. Engage employees as well as candidates to enable them to have a say and validate tools for specific roles within your organization that you're trying to recruit and don't trust vendors toward their own product. I think those are crucial health check questions and calls to action that frame any scenario planning that you have to have joined up across organizations. And obviously, a big part of this is also how the process needs to change. And I guess that people need to be taking a very close look at the end-to-end way that they do hiring because the implications of some of this technology on that are, again, enormous, not particularly in terms of candidates themselves using AI to apply to more jobs more quickly. Yeah, sure. So the candidates themselves using AI and then the impact of corporate AI to not be overwhelmed by thousands upon thousands of rapid applications. So that's, in some ways, a little bit of a dystopian scenario, but an entirely plausible one. And that therein lies the risks as well because the risk of filtering out applicants, if you have inbuilt bias in your programs and your AI, can and or will lead to all sorts of problems because you'll just be reinforcing existing biases only on steroids, as it were. So it's a significant challenge to overcome, but there absolutely need to be some significant thought that goes into that. But that's why, around taking ownership of strategy and transformation, you still got to decide what tasks you need and how we used to talk about careers. I thought that I had a career in recruitment when I first got into it 30 years ago. But really, the change that we've been through is that we now talk about lifelong learning in the workplace and a lot of skills adaptation and how do we learn, how will we learn to retrain, not to be able to be the programmers to develop AI, but to actually utilize the AI that's available to us and to do that in a transparent way. One of the issues with this is obviously the recruitment process itself. And there was some fundamental things going on, particularly with the ability for candidates to use AI to apply for more jobs more quickly. And I know that that is something that many organizations are already seeing. So there is a very pressing need to, as you say, take a step back and really analyze that process and make it fit for purpose in the new world of technology that we're in. There is, I mean, in many ways, the recruitment process and processes haven't really changed that much in the last two decades since the advent of applicant tracking systems. End-to-end processes have broadly been the same and are broadly similar across different types of organizations. And what has changed sometimes is around basic efficiencies, sometimes how to speed up that process or those processes or where there are blockages in the processes. The challenge now is not around process efficiency. It's around completely reimagining and reinventing what a good talent acquisition and recruiting process will look like and then how to implement that. And you can't do that without good scenario planning. But yes, it needs to be done rapidly as candidates will have and are having tools at their disposal to multiply and potentially overwhelm organizations that are using a process model that broadly hasn't changed for the last two decades. And that's why it's so pressing. And I think we also need to put this against the background that it's been an incredibly volatile time in talent acquisition. So at the end of the pandemic, we saw lots of recruiters being hired. Over the last 18 months, we've seen, you know, wholesale changes in talent acquisition teams, people being laid off, you know, all the way up to TA leaders being laid off. It's been a very, as I say, very volatile time. And I suppose that some people listening are struggling to sort of prove the strategic value of what they do within their organization against this backdrop of hiring and firing that's been going on. What would your advice be to TA leaders to have that conversation and be able to prove to the stakeholders within the business that what they do, you know, that they are, this is a strategic function. And there are some vital things that need to happen to move the business forward from TA. Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? For a long time, it's in the case that the C-suite or CEOs are being kept up at night because of do they have the right people to deliver business success and business outcomes? And will they have the right people in the near future to do that too? And yet, you know, that in and of itself makes people and talent strategic. And yet, for too long, recruitment and talent acquisition has been seen as a cost and how to save costs rather than an investment into business growth. And I think that's just for those strategic talent acquisition leaders that aren't having those conversations with their chief people officers or however they get access to the C-suite, then they have to be proactive rather than reactive in doing so. Some of that will be with data that's out there. And also because of the, as you say, because of the really challenging economic climate that there is currently, and certainly for larger organisations with geopolitical challenges that they're also around currently in the Middle East, Russia, Ukraine, elections in the US, the UK and elsewhere, there's a perception there's a kind of degree of stasis around over the course of the next few months waiting for the outcomes or to see what outcomes are like to be of those geopolitical. That is the time and space, as it were, for talent acquisition leaders collectively, both within their organisations and across organisations, to start to have the opportunity to make the case for a complete reinvention and re-establishment of talent acquisition processes and strategy outcomes. But that has to be based on what organisations need in terms of how roles will change, the learning that is needed, and how tasks will change. And talent acquisition can't do that scenario planning in isolation the rest of the people in learning organisations, but more especially in isolation from the business. So it's really around getting a multi-layered, multifunctional task force together in this time of stasis to do that scenario planning so that they can work through some of what those challenges will be, and then bit by bit start to develop and implement change and course correct along the way. I think what you said there about reinvention is really interesting, because I think that's the real key to this. It's being bold and going out there and saying this is a complete reinvention of what we do. It's not tinkering, it's not about investing in technology to make things slightly better. It's rethinking the whole thing from the ground upwards, isn't it? Yes, it is. And it's quite interesting in terms of the service sector and the consulting sector, that's what they deliver to their clients, but it's a challenge in delivering that to themselves sometimes. That scenario, it's as applicable for manufacturing as it is for hospitality, as it is for consulting, as it is for offshore sectors as well. It is a complete reinvention and re-imagination. Now, it's not necessarily a revolution of how to change overnight, but you do need to have a three to five year plan or a one to three to five year plan on what that will look like over the near future. Absolutely. And as a final question following on from the idea of a three to five year, what do you think the future does look like? Where do you think we're going to be in three to five years? What will a reinvented talent acquisition function be like? One of the things that we haven't yet talked about is experience. And by that, I mean a candidate experience because almost that we talked about candidates using AI to apply for jobs, but also the experience that candidates will have in going through or being impacted by a reinvented and reinventions in recruitment processes as a result of taking advantage of AI. I'd just like to add that into the scenario planning agenda because for one reason or another, I fail to mention that and it is crucial. But the next one year is around what is talent, what is potential rethink jobs, tasks and skills. I think the next three years, within the next three years, there will probably be some very high profile cases that will have put people organizations at risk and they will be learnings from that. So that in five years time, by that time, we may well get to the safer, more transparent AI for good than maybe we will do in the next one to three years. Funnily enough, because of rapid change, we talk about burnout. There's a risk of greater burnout over the course of the next three to five years, unless we adapt and learn ourselves. And we will continue to have a multi-generational workforce and within the rethinking, we will also need to perhaps adapt how that multi-generational workforce will combine to have collective successes. We live in interesting times. We do live in interesting times. And the point being, it's not just what TA and TA can do for itself, but it's how TA can work across disciplines within organizations and further their own agenda by being seen as an investment in people's skills and roles that lead to organizational corporate success. Paul, thank you very much for talking to me. Thanks, Matt. As always, it's been a pleasure. Thank you very much for inviting me on. My thanks to Paul. This is a really important area for talent acquisition. And I recently launched an online course designed to give you the insights and tools that you need to transform TA in the age of AI. You can find out more by going to matalder.me/course. That's matalder.me/course. You can follow this podcast on Apple podcasts, on Spotify, or via your podcasting app of choice. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com. On that site, you can also subscribe to our newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track about everything that's coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I'll be back next time, and I hope you'll join me. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]