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

Ep 624: The TA Team Of The Future

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 Follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts.

Duration:: 25m
Broadcast on:: 27 Jun 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

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

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 mattalder.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 624, a recruiting feature with me, Matt Alder. Much of the conversation around 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 to have, they tend to polarise opinion and don't do much to move the industry forward. We need to have nuanced conversations about the practicalities of this process of transformation, and focus on the skills and roles that will drive the change we need. My guest this week is Andrea Langolescu, Principal Talent Acquisition Partner at Thermondo. Andrea strongly advocates for strategic talent acquisition and the importance of TA shaping its own destiny. She's done some significant work around the future roles talent acquisition is going to need, and has some highly valuable insights to share. Hi Andrea and welcome to the podcast. Hi Matt, very, very good to be here. An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you need? I'm Andrea. I was born and raised in Bucharest in Romania. I've been away from home since 2010 though. Professionally, I work as a principal talent acquisition partner with around 14 plus years of experience across tech and engineering, and my last nine years in Berlin have been spent with Zalando Wafer, and now I'm in a clean tech with a company called Thermondo. My goal is to elevate the role of TA, to be a key driver of business strategy innovation, and I have to say I'm tremendously passionate about this. My role as a principal is quite rare, especially in Europe, and I was fortunate enough to lead global projects like opening up a new tech development center in India for Wafer, a complete redesign for product management, the job family of product management at Zalando, company wide internal mobility programs, and I guess some of the things I'm most proud of is winning twice global innovation awards in talent acquisition, both with Zalando and Wafer. Above all, Matt, though, I am human. I'm passionate about cars, mechanical, anything, I guess, really. Architecture, music, arts, I paint as a hobby, and I won't shut up about how much I learn from TikTok videos. Fantastic. As I say, it's brilliant to talk to you. In terms of talent acquisition, innovation, and strategy, and looking to the future, it's impossible to have a conversation about that without talking about AI. As we know, AI is dominating discussions at the moment, and everyone, there's different views on what this effect on talent acquisition is going to be, but there's a very broad consensus that this is important. How are you seeing employees actually respond to it, though? Do you think everyone's having the right kind of reaction to this sort of challenge, this opportunity? From my experience, and also discussions I've had, at conferences or workshops such as Tech Wreck in 2023, there is obviously this enthusiasm for AI. It's super high. However, it seems to be a gap in implementation. Maybe we've all seen now the white paper or the research paper from Microsoft. It was saying something like 66% or 67% of leaders will not hire people without AI skills. Then 52% of people are actually secretly using AI tools at work, but they won't admit in doing so. And then I feel like we, especially in Europe, we are falling behind again on actually implementing these tools. So buying a tool or having access to a free tool online is not sufficient. I believe it's important to integrate them, especially in relation to the talent topic. Integrate them into the broader strategy aligning with your business goals. So first, you need to know your business goals and that work backwards. I have a few more things to say about this. I'm curious, though, if you notice this chicken and egg problem as well, maybe with the company wants people with AI skills, but they don't offer AI tools? Yeah, I think that's interesting. It reminds me of, I'm very old. It reminds me of kind of about the year 2000 when companies wanted people with internet skills. But then when this happened to me, when you got to work at their organization, there was actually very limited access to the internet and IT departments trying to ban everything. So I think it's a kind of quite a common tech conundrum, but it is quite crazy. And the adoption of the internet was a lot slower than the adoption of AI. So I think that's a big issue for companies. What do you think AI skills actually are? Funny enough, I haven't done a sufficient research on this, but I think, first of all, it's having, even if we don't go very much in depth, but having an understanding of what this is. What is gen AI? What are LLMs? What other kind of artificial intelligence tools are out there beyond the conversational ones that by now, I guess everybody is familiar with. And then I also think of automation tools in the same space. So, for example, make or zap your right, which make us faster and understanding how to use those. So these are first an understanding of what this looks like. And then I think going slightly a bit beyond that and understanding how we can utilize a mix of these tools to help in some parts of our job. How can we mix and match like the same way you would do sourcing? Sourcing is not just one thing you do, right? You do a mixture of things. It's the same for artificial intelligence skills. You have to learn a bit about everything to be able to come up with a solution at the end. The other thing I would say is also an AI skill, though not so much, is understanding ethics and understanding compliance. I even know today people who, even though we have GDPR for, I don't know even how many years now, still do not understand the basic compliance requirements from GDPR. And maybe it's not an AI skill, but it's necessary if you're going to play with any AI. Absolutely. I think the the EU AI Act makes that even more even more important because it singles HR and recruiting out as high risk activities for issues with AI. Any other sort of thoughts on around that piece in terms of employers not being quite ready for this or responding in the right way? I think it also, yes, I think it connects to having an understanding. So having people in your organization who maybe are dedicated to research, right? Having an AI specialist in your organization or maybe in your talent department, who is responsible for finding out what could we do? What where do we want to go? And what can we do with the tools available on the market? We have fantastic things available and a bright higher meta view fabulous that AI driven interview notes and time saving. But a company or companies oftentimes missed the opportunity of actually delegating an individual or a group of individuals to do research. This is what this is where we want to go as a business. You're in this department. How will you research the tools that will enable your department to help the overall business goals? So I think this is something we are completely missing out on. And I suppose bringing the conversation specifically to talent acquisition, I mean, obviously it's been a crazy sort of few years for everyone working in the profession for lots of reasons. And that sort of still continues to just continues to rumble on and probably will do forever now in terms of disruption. One of the key parts of this is the need for talent acquisition to be much more strategic than it is when you have things like AI coming in and giving the opportunity to really reinvent the way things are done. How do you think that TA is still pretty much tactical? Are you seeing any kind of strategic thinking? How could it be more strategic? And why is it not as strategic as it should be? My first version of an answer would be to start crying because it's true. It's really sad, though. So I spent the last couple of days going through some of his research. And I agree with a lot of the things they were sharing. They're not that they need my approval or anything, but talent acquisition does need to evolve. And I tell you one thing that's mind-boggling is I read articles. I was looking for some research to take some pictures out and I found articles from McKinsey or BCG 2012 and 2010 talking about how talent acquisition needs to become more strategic. We are in 2024. So despite some progress, many organizations still view talent acquisition as a cost center. It's focused on filling positions and that's about it rather than actually being a strategic partner and involving them already from the business planning. So the first thing I want to touch on, we have to be involved in workforce planning from the offset. It should be mandatory. We can use data from TA to forecast the hiring needs to identify skills, emerging skills. We can use data from TA to identify internal talent pipelines and therefore help tremendously with workforce planning. We can use AI in TA for workforce planning or skill gap analysis, even talent development. However, this is another thing that really makes my head spin is how it's a constant regurgitation of this idea. TA is only a cost center and no advertising here, but honestly, I published an article about this. It was born purely from my myth-buster syndrome, I guess, or just this perpetual chicken and egg problem. You're a cost center, but actually if I would invest some money in you, you would not be a cost center, but I'm not going to invest money in you because you're a cost center. So it's just this constant topic. So I believe that we are not yet a strategic function, not in enough companies at least. I think we need to start investing in training the TA professionals, provide them with tools, technologies, and ensure that they have a seat at the table. Where does this start? I think we, let's try and meet in the middle. So let's start managing up us, those individuals in talent, and also the leadership should also look down and try to come in the middle. I think these rapid changes that we are seeing today, right, in my opinion also translate to rapid changes in business priorities. So it is my belief that like an insufficient integration of talent acquisition or talent, let's call it talent, it will just end up creating more silos that will keep impeding any development or any further alignment. So somewhere we need to accept that we need to do something about it. And I don't think we're there, we are there yet. Maybe not in Europe. I would say that maybe some companies, maybe the newer companies or the states are a bit more advanced than we are. But I think we are not quite there. Yeah, I think it's an interesting point. And I think that whole thing about corporate priorities. And I think what's kind of really interesting that is that going back to our conversation about AI skills, its employers increasingly will need skills that are in shorter and shorter supply, because things are changing so quickly. And I would hope that that would provoke a much more strategic look at talent across the board in a really holistic way in terms of what skills do we have in the business, how can we develop people and how do we get skills into the business. And that's a strategic conversation about the future of that particular business. I would hope that that would help to sort of drive some of the change that we want to see. Provided that we understand what skills we need and how those skills look like for us. So kind of sticking with that theme about TA, and it's fairly clear that a number of things are going on, but artificial intelligence in particular is going to be a big disruptor in this space, particularly we were talking about this before we hit record in terms of job seeker use of AI and how that has the potential to sort of break recruiting processes. How do you think TA is going to change over the next few years and what might a TA team look like in the future? You know, I don't have a crystal ball. I am, however, taking your course transporting, so I'm getting closer to that crystal ball. But I imagine two things. I imagine multiple things, but I want to double down on two. One, to make any change possible, I think we need to understand the talent function as a whole and remove the silos. And two, I think we will need to build roles which do not exist today. Starting with the latter, in my workshop, but I mentioned before, a tech wreck in 2023, the workshop was about, more or less about this topic, right, emerging roles, just ditching the traditional career framework for talent acquisition. And we came up with these emerging roles for talent acquisition and beyond talent acquisition. In order for us to be a bit more agile and data-driven, how everybody says that they would want us to be in TA, they need to first invest in some of tools and intelligence platforms. The expansion of this talent acquisition to a talent function, I think, Marjuri does a great job, Marjuri Sina. She is an OLX, they've done a fantastic job and moving the teams from just purely reactive hiring to proactive talent planning. Then you have predictive analytics, then you have internal mobility, DEI mapping in the mix. So this function, in my mind, should expand. Talent acquisition will be obviously a part of it. But even today, we are still mixing upwards and we name talent acquisition recruitment. So it's still happening. I'm not quite sure that's all it is. I think, yeah, that's an interesting point because they are sort of used interchangeably recruiting and talent acquisition. But actually, you can very much look at it as recruiting is a part of what our acquisition does. Yeah, at least that's what my experience has developed to be. I think, and also in my role as a principal, this even becomes even more apparent. I want to go back to the idea of maybe inventing some of the new roles and I will not be touching on things such as, oh, we can use tools now that we can review CVs. I want to touch on the roles that we might see in the future. Some of the things, one of them was a talent designer. This was an expansion from the talent management specialist, which now using AI and human skills. They can help optimize talent lifecycle, right, from attraction to retention. How does that talent look like? Think about skills, taxonomies, think about looking at what is already internally available in the company. So it's an expansion from the talent management role, which we maybe had in the past. Talent intelligence analysts, I mean, or talent intelligence experts, I think I mentioned this a couple of minutes ago, having someone in the organization who is responsible for understanding what data should we be looking at and what tools should be used to look at it and how then to take it a step further. This comes in hand-in-hand with an automation expert, not necessarily in talent, but overall as a company, I think it is absolutely essential to have at least one person doing this. Another thing, talent marketing, this should be a role that uses AI from day one, right? It is so helpful to use artificial intelligence tools or even just gen AI and the marketing skills to promote your employer brand, your value proposition and really build a solid way of attracting, reaching out to diverse and qualified talent, faster way and a more intelligent way. And even on this, the candidate thing, and maybe this is the last thing I want to mention, is the candidate experience. This was always, it's not an AI-specific role. However, we should refocus this completely and create personalized, engaging experience for candidates beyond the gamification piece, yeah? So really use AI to communicate, provide feedback in real time, help them prepare for interviews. The opportunities are endless in the candidate experience piece. No, absolutely. That all makes perfect sense. I think that personalized candidate experience at scale is the huge benefit that AI can bring to all of this. But as you say, it needs someone to look at that and understand that, understand experience design and all of those kind of things. Final question for you. What advice would you give TA professionals now in terms of the skills that they need to develop, how they should be managing their careers and really kind of looking forward to the future, which as I say, there is a consensus that it will be very different, the roles will be very different from the roles that they are now. I will stay on the don't be afraid of tools path and I found this quote from Sam Altman, right? The CEO of OpenAI and he says, people always make the mistake of calling an idea smaller, stupid because they don't understand how it's going to evolve. So maybe this goes to the very beginning of our conversation where we should enable companies or we should support companies or we should push companies to invest now. And then back to the skills, I think the first thing I would suggest is emotional intelligence. And it's funny coming from me because I actually took professional coaching and still am to become more emotionally intelligent myself. But the good thing is with JNI tools and now with GPT 4.0, you can actually use this to support yourself in becoming more emotionally intelligent. They can act as your coach if you cannot afford a human version of that. So EI, it would be my first one. I don't know if it's a close second, but the strategic thinking, and I know this is a very widely used term, but what I mean in this case is nothing changes if we don't change. And if we don't understand that we have to step out of this transactional, sure, I will hire that unicorn for you. No questions asked. And look at how our roles impact the organization, not even our department, our organization. Think about skill gaps. Think about expanding your own role that I think we will be having the same conversation again in 12 years from now. So strategic thinking. Text of Venus, I think this is something I shouldn't even mention. But understanding how these technologies work, how they can be applied to talent, it will obviously give us a competitive advantage. And another quote I found really interesting. It was from a professor from Stanford. She said, artificial intelligence is not substitute for human intelligence. It's just a tool to amplify our creativity. So I found this really beautiful. Yes. But still, it's important that we are tech savvy and then data literate. But beyond just understanding how to look at numbers, how do you tell a story based out of them? And then, how do you use that for predictive analysis? How do you use tools for it if you can't do it otherwise? But data literacy, I think we can't get away from it anymore. Absolutely. And I'm just going to add in a little extra question because I'm curious to get your thoughts on this. We talk about these changes and how they're going to happen. We also talk about the barriers to them and that TA takes a very long time to change. How do you think this is going to pan out? Do you think we'll see much change in the next year or the next two years? What sort of time scales have you got in your mind over this? I think we have to change. I don't think we can afford to be left behind. So this is maybe an optimistic view. I do believe that in the next year, we will already see some proper improvement in relation to a number of things. One, understanding that we need to get out of very specific role allocation in talent and we can expand on the roles the individuals have in the talent team. Two, I think, even with AI Act and with companies becoming being a bit pushed really by this involvement of artificial intelligence, I think that talent acquisition or talent will have to catch up. And I do believe that in general CEOs or sea level in organizations, we'll want to get this function up. And I believe that we have sufficiently intelligent CHROs in place or CPOs in place who will understand the necessity to pool talent with them, so not leave us behind. Again, maybe this is an optimistic view. And I think we will probably get to learn a lot from other functions. Like we've done in the past, my role is borrowed from engineering. And we will probably have an understanding of what other functions are looking like, what are they doing, what tools are they implementing, how are they behaving in business. And we will probably be adopting some of that in our talent domain. Now, that's me being optimistic because it's sunny in Berlin. Otherwise, it can also be having the same conversation in 12 years from now. But I really don't think that's the case, because the access to data is there, the desire is there, I feel. Absolutely. Andrea, thank you very much for talking to me. Thank you for having me. My thanks to Andrea. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also subscribe to our YouTube channel by going to matalder.tv. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com. On that site, you can also subscribe to our newsletter, Recreating 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. Bye. [music] [BLANK_AUDIO]