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?
Follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts
Support for this podcast comes from Plumb. Plumb is a revolutionary workforce solutions provider that knows when people flourish business thrives. With their powerful new platform Plumb Thrive, you can unlock science-based data to help you measure and match human potential to job needs. Plumb Thrive provides personalized career insights, improves quality of higher, and creates high-performing teams from a single, simple to use platform. Want to learn more? Visit www.plumb.io and discover all the ways that Plumb can help you thrive. There's been more of scientific discovery, more of technical advancement and material progress in your lifetime and life, and of all the ages of history. Hi there, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to the June Roundup episode of Recreating Future. If you've not listened to Roundup before, it's a short review of the episodes that I've published in the last month to make sure that you don't miss out on the valuable insights my guests are sharing. A huge thank you to plumb.io for their supportive roundup. I think the approach they're taking to skills-based thinking is both highly innovative and highly pragmatic. You should definitely check out their website to find out more. As we move into the second half of the year, it really does feel that we're on the cusp of some very big changes in talent acquisition. As people start to plan for 2025, there are some big questions around AI, skills, and talent acquisitions ongoing role that need to be addressed. I'm continuing to focus on these questions to make sure I can bring you the insights you need, not only through this podcast, but also via my new online course, go to mattalder.me/course to find out more and the other content that I'm putting out there. June's podcast episodes really reflected this, offering a deep dive into the direction of travel for AI, skills, and talent acquisition. For me, the absolute highlight of the last few weeks was combining forces with Chad and Joel from the Chad and Cheese podcast to run two TA leader events in Scotland. Episode 619 features eight interviews with TA leaders that we recorded live at the events in Edinburgh and Glasgow. While there was some anxiety about potential feature 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. In the episode, talking about the practicalities of the revolution ahead, you can hear from Danny Canes from Babcock, George Dobbin from Sabio, Susan McRobots, who's an independent HR consultant, Nikki Patterson from Solutions Driven, Ewan Cameron from Willow, Nicole Sinclair from Diagio, Ewan McNair from Egon, and Joe Grant from EY. The shortening shelf life of skills, shifting business priorities, and a surge in AI-driven job applications, are compelling many employers to rethink their candidate assessment and selection processes. The 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 life cycle. So, how can this be done, and what advantages does it bring? My guest on episode 620 was Jason Putnam, the CRO at Plumb. Plumb has been driving the charge around the scientific assessment of soft skills for a while now, and they've recently incorporated data and hard skills into their methodology. Jason had some important insights to share, both on the future of assessment, and on the implementation of skills-based hiring. Episode 621 features some content I recorded with the Chad and Cheese show, on the day between our two TA leader events in Scotland. 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. Our plans took an unexpected turn as the weather had other ideas, but this led to some exciting, impromptu discussions on AI and their future of work. Sparked by a tour of a 200-year-old whiskey distillery, a flying visit to a 700-year-old castle, and a trip to the beach. It's been clear for a long time that the way we traditionally think about 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 on Episode 622 was Ed Fido, co-founder and CEO of the London Interdisciplinary School, or 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 businesses and society face. There are interesting lessons for employers here around the concept of "interactional expertise". In our conversation, Ed discussed building networks of knowledge, cultivating diversity of thought via diversity of background, reconnecting academic learning to the workplace, and the future skills that will be needed in an AI-driven world. When we talk about employers becoming more inclusive, the focus is often on big strategic thinking and a long process of organisational change. However, companies can often make significant progress by taking small steps in important areas. The quality of the candidate experience is a critical first step in an organisation's inclusivity. A 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? On episodes 623, I spoke to the brilliant Avita Patel from Coms Rebel. Avita is a communication and workplace culture strategist who helps organisations cultivate a culture of inclusion. In our conversation, she shared practical and pragmatic advice on how employers can build inclusive candidate experiences by improving the quality of their communication. We also talked about the impact of poor communication on candidates, the dangers of overly generic AI-generated language, and people's changing expectations of work. Much of the conversation about the future of talent acquisition focuses on absolute. 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 important, they tend to polarise opinion, and don't do much to move the industry forward. We need to have nuanced conversations about the practicality of this transformational process, and focus on the skills and roles that will drive the change that we need. My guest on episodes 624 was Andrea Lungalescu, principal talent acquisition partner at Thamondo. Andrea strongly advocates for strategic talent acquisition, and the importance of TA shaping its own destiny. She's done some significant work about the future roles talent acquisition will need, and we talked about removing silos in the talent function, the disruption of the traditional TA career framework, and the skills that TA professionals will need to develop for the future. The hype around the arrival of GNAI was off the scale crazy. Now that things have calmed down, and the use of LLMs is starting to normalise, 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 that gap between the initial hype and our current reality. My guest on episodes 625 was Jack Horton, co-founder of Mindset AI. Mindset AI uses cutting-edge AI technology in the HR and learning space. Jack talked 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. We talked through the huge developments in AI that are coming up in the next 12 months, ask use cases versus do use cases, the implication for jobs, and the importance of taking a strategic approach. A huge thank you to Plum and Willow for sponsoring Recruiting Future during the month of June. So onwards into July and the second half of the year. I'm really looking forward to speaking and podcasting at RecFest UK next week. If you're coming along, then please come to my session on the TA team of the future, which is taking place at 9.30am on the AI stage. There's lots of great content coming up on the podcast, including some interviews that I'm going to record live at RecFest. Make sure that you don't miss out on any of the conversations by subscribing to Recruiting Future wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks very much for listening. I'll be back next time, and I hope you'll join me. [Music] [ Silence ]
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?
Follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts
