The unprecedented volatility in the Talent Acquisition jobs market in the last three years illustrates that many organizations still see TA as a transactional function turned on or off according to hiring demand.
This is a big problem. While the development of ever more sophisticated AI promises much for TA, it also represents an existential threat to the survival of any business function seen as transactional and easy to automate.
So, how can talent acquisition prove its value to the business and live up to its enormous strategic potential? Perhaps the first step would be to understand that value properly.
My guest this week is Toby Culshaw, Global Head Of Pipeline Strategy & Intelligence at Amazon Worldwide stores. Toby publishes a lot of thought-provoking content about the future of TA and has strong views on how TA should position its value within the enterprise.
In the interview, we discuss:
- Talent Acquisition's significant challenges
- What is holding change back and why TA is at risk
- What TA does versus its actual value to the business
- Taking a tiered approach to TA operations
- Breaking down silos in HR
- Taking a consultative and advisory role
- Adopting new, more meaningful metrics and KPIs
- Advice for TA leaders on where to get standard
- "Talent Nexus" and a future outlook of even more significant change and disruption
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Support for this podcast comes from Smart Recruiters. Smart Recruiters is your all-in-one platform, but faster, smarter hiring, making recruiting easy and effortless. Smart Recruiters are making some big changes, revamping their user experience, adding AI features and refreshing the UI. I know from experience that they truly are a company that really values the recruiter and the practitioner. They understand the intricacies of the recruiting business, and this has always been reflected in their functionality and customer support, so it's exciting to hear that they're making a bunch of updates. If you're ready to be part of the future of talent acquisition, head over to SmartRecruiters.com and find out what they're up to. Trust me, your team and your future hires will thank you. Hi there! Welcome to Episode 640, a recruiting feature with me, Matt Alder. The unprecedented volatility that we've seen in the talent acquisitions jobs market over the last three years illustrates that many organizations still see TA as a transactional function, a function that gets turned on or off in line with hiring demand level. This is a big problem. While the development of ever more sophisticated AI promises much for TA, it also represents an existential threat to the survival of any business function seen as transactional and easy to automate. So, how can talent acquisition prove its value to the business and live up to its enormous strategic potential? Perhaps the first step would be to understand that value properly. My guess this week is Toby Culpshore, global head of pipeline strategy and intelligence at Amazon Worldwide Stores. Toby publishes a lot of thought-provoking content about the future of TA and has strong views on how TA should position its value within the enterprise. Hi Toby and welcome back to the podcast. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. It's always a pleasure to have you on the show. Please could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do? So, Toby Culpshore, I do talent intelligence stuff at Amazon. I'm a bit obsessed with talent intelligence, labor market dynamics, all that sort of stuff. So, I run groups on it and do podcasts on it, webinars and seminars and all this sort of stuff. So, I'm a bit obsessed with anything related to talent intelligence, workforce planning, that sort of stuff. You are indeed very prolific with your output in terms of the things that you do and everything that's out there. And you've kind of been writing a lot in recent weeks about the future for talent intelligence, the future for talent acquisition. And I thought it would be great to have you on the show and sort of talk through all of that. Before we do though, let's talk about the actual current state, the current situation. So, what do you see as the biggest challenges for TA at the moment and what's kind of holding what is sort of very necessary change back? Yeah, so I think TA's feeling squeezed frankly at the moment. We're seen as a resource at the cost center that you turn on and off when companies are recruiting. We're seen as a transactional resource. If you're not recruiting, we don't need TA, turn it off. The problem generally with that mindset is a lot of the change and transformation and we need to do. We can't do when we're on full run mode and we're under a pump then to deliver. So, in busy markets, it's really hard to do a lot of this change of transformation. Then in a quiet market, you've had a team cut. So, it's very hard to do this change of transformation and we're really feeling the squeeze. I think there's some elements where we've set ourselves up for a difficult ride. The way we set our KPIs and what we see as success, which we can get into. Beyond that though, there are some circumstantial stuff. It is a tough market. You're getting a lot of pressure externally. So, companies are cutting their cost base aggressively and we're seen as a resource that if we're not owning say internal mobility and we're not owning that internal piece, what is the value of the function that bases itself around putting butts in seats if you're not putting butts in seats? I think that's where we've found ourselves squeezed in the last 18 months or so. Let's dig into the KPI part of this because a lot of this is about TA proving its value within the organization and a key part of that is data and proving that value. What's going wrong at the moment? What are metrics that people are looking at? What should they be looking at instead? What's the situation with that kind of analytic side of things? I think that there's, and I've been writing about this piece for far too many years now, most TA teams in my humble opinion were created initially to get rid of agency spend. So, our initial KPI's were around doing things cheaper and getting rid of that spend and cutting that spend down and then once we got rid of the agency spend it was an increased efficiency play so it was continued focus on that cost per higher and keeping that cost per high down and it's the classic time quality cost piece. Once you've got that nailed you're looking at, okay well how do we do this faster because we've addressed the cost piece so let's try and do it faster than we were before so we'll bring that time to high down and then once you've got that kind of as tight as you feel like you can measure you start looking at quality piece and quality of high has been bands around for many many years now and I think most companies are still struggling to know what it is, how it works, what to do, etc. But the problem is for me it's all basing itself on the wrong premise of what our value is. I think for me there's two different pieces there's what do we do and what is our unique value and unique selling point and the two for me very very very different things what we do is fill jobs you know you hear the mantra right people like place right time right cost you know absolutely that's what we do we fill jobs we're there to fill but that's you know recruit for years we've been talking about that we're talent acquisition and in the same way buying transformed into procurement and it was that much more holistic view of their supply chain supply chain management procurement management TA is kind of trying to broaden that perspective and broaden that mindset but all of our metrics and kind of key mechanisms are still based around that recruiter mindset of filling the job and ironically not even a recruitment consultant but I think we often miss that consultant bit which is one of the key value pieces externally is that consultative advisory piece and I think that's the bit that we really need to double down back into is to really say well where's our value in this chain if we look at the overall lifecycle management of TA talent what what do we do this unique what do we do that's different where's our value in this and for me and I am incredibly biased but for me I think the thing that makes us unique is we talk to more of our competitors every single month than the rest of our organization probably does in the entire year you talk to more competitors than your sales teams do you and you can dig into their product range better than any of the competitive intelligence teams can and you can understand what's going on internally and culturally what's going on from a compensation perspective what's going on from an organizational design perspective what's going on with their leadership and that what the how it's landing with the workforce you can do so much but we don't bubble any of that to the surface because we get fixated on filling jobs and our conversations are around filling jobs so I think we really don't as an industry we understand what we do I don't think we understand what our value is no absolutely and you talk about TA taking a pivot being reactive to proactive and really going from being a cost to really sort of illustrating that value what are the elements of that give people a bit of a kind of a bit of a a sort of a sketch of what that might look like the kind of things that a business kind of really needs from a TA team and how they should be talking about what they do yeah so I think there's there's a couple of things to think about and I'm I think that there's two ways of approaching you know either go like evolution or revolution and there is a part on me that sits there and thinks we've just got to fundamentally change the paradigm we've got to change the conversation we've got to move upstream we've got to have much more strategic impact and obviously doing the talent intelligence work I do now that that's kind of where we're we're focusing on at the time is those big decision points and that that big impact low volume etc that's going to be really hard for the vast majority of TA to pivot to for two two reasons as a skills capability competency piece which it's just a new muscle to learn and develop and also a volume piece you know if you've got a TA org of two three hundred four hundred people if they're all trying to do that at the same time you're going to overwhelm the business and there won't be that many decisions generally being made you're just going to drown drown the business in there in consulted over the device but underpinning all of that is the data analytics and the insight that you have to get much more comfortable playing with get much more comfortable understanding get much more comfortable bubbling up and synthesizing and it can sound terrifying it can sound intimidating but but it really isn't most recruiters if you go to them and say we've got a red flag in sight a b and c with function and x y z y we're not recruiting there anecdotally they're better tell you anecdotally they'll know their market they'll know their candidates they'll know their competitors because as we say they're talking to them all day all day every day so they they know the market really well we're just not very good at capturing that so you we've got to get a lot better at saying how do we capture this how do we synthesize it how do we bring it together how to anonymize it because you know quite often this stuff depending on your your region you might be able to use it because of the GDPR equivalency where you can't necessarily use all this stuff at an individual level but how do we get these themes and bubble this information up so that it's not necessarily at the hiring manager level it's not necessarily the individual recruiter level build taking these key themes and bubbling them up and surfacing them to leadership to say we've got some issues here or we've got some opportunities here so that could be something as simple as you know we can't hire software engineers to give them a location because our compensation is out of sync with the market one or two anecdotes doesn't work you suddenly take that and say we've got a thousand people that we've spoken to and this is what's going on suddenly you can have that difference yeah i think it's interesting that because you kind of really highlighting the issue that people have they've they've got to fill these jobs they've got big TA teams you know how do you make that how do you make that strategic move and again one of the things that that you've kind of written about before is is almost kind of a tiered approach to to TA with sort of different things happening for different levels and types of job tell us a little bit about that yeah this one kind of gets a bit contentious well for some she's what it was doing that for me it's it kind of makes sense so i genuinely think that the old 80 20 or 80 percent of recruitment is business as usual and the value add within the process that we as a TA function add is limited it's a process administration piece it's a ad response down selection of candidates etc etc i don't see a way where in the future that sort of work isn't hiring manager self-service and to be clear this is me tv talking nothing to do with my employer but i can't see why we would want to hang on to that work why we wouldn't want the business just to be able to self-service it and move faster particularly as the tech improves that makes it a lot selecter they they can hire managers can hit silver medalists in the system they can recycle a lot more efficiently you're not having that huge amount of waste in the process through the ats and etc so i think you do end up with a tier system and i as a hiring manager i would quite happy going and say do i want a recruiter from day one support to me or do i want to give it 60 days where i'll give it a go myself see what the ad response is like and if i need to you know in case of emergency break glass talk to a recruiter cool i'll click the button tier two kicks in and we talk to recruiters and then you have kind of the the roles that you know they're going to be difficult um so more of the kind of sourcing search type piece where you focus your time and money and effort and resources um i think at the moment we're we're almost like IT or HR were at 20 years ago before you had a move to local's country and self-service so the whole kind of all-rich model type piece i don't think TA is really nailed that i don't think we've already got to grips with and this comes back to where our value is we're holding on to stuff that isn't actually our value it's not actually where we add any value in a process we're just owning it and holding on to it from a remit and from a headcount perspective but more and more i see organizations caring more about your value your impact than your headcount and your your army of people no absolutely absolutely and what does the what is the kind of that top level that sort of strategic approach what is that that looked like what kind of you mentioned that companies have struggled for years to define even define what quality of hire means let alone measure it what kind of sits in that strategic bit do you think yeah i think you probably end up with your exact search stuff just by relationship and the nature of it i don't think exec is always the hardest to identify but is that relationship based piece in the engagement piece i think that probably rolls through though you'd look at things where it's a high value low volume high touch high engagement piece yes you can absolutely use all the new sourcing tools and the automation tools we're seeing coming through at the moment but i think we're probably going to flood the market with outreach and you know we had a problem in sourcing 10 years ago where identification was a problem and it was really hard to find people and now it's really not hard to find people it's really hard to engage people and i think we're going to see a wave where we get a full-on wave of engagement tools and and big scaled sourcing tools but the problem is if you're you know we're seeing at the moment if you're a gen i researcher you're just going to get absolutely flooded with with the outreach and you're not going to talk to people anymore you're just going to switch off so i think it will go for me it will go back to the future of old school we're going to end up with a lot more recruiters or sources that are back to picking up the phone they're going back to going to conferences they're going back to networking they're going back to taking high value prospects out for a coffee and just finding out what they want from their career because it's going to be those meaningful value driven pieces rather than a volume of activity type active piece yeah i think it's really interesting because i think that when you when you automate you know so much of this it is that the that that human element that that's the thing that the way where humans are still needed and i think there's a lot of talk about recruiting going old school again and by old school that doesn't mean cold calling a hundred times a day it means you know building those relationships and and you know working out to find people and how to engage with them so it's really interesting i suppose part of that is one of the things that that i get asked about a lot is what does the TA team of the future look like what kind of skills what kind of people are going to be in TA in a few years time what are your what are your views on that so i've kind of got two fairly different it's where i think it'll ultimately go and i wrote a piece hook with the time nexus where i think it is where it will ultimately go but i don't think that's fees when they're the medium term i think it's stepping stones together i think we're probably going to see a state where TA will have to start pivoting further from from as i mentioned just filling jobs i think that there's got to be a rebuild where there's a bit more higher value service there that higher touch piece whether that's pure purely based around filling jobs still whether it's bringing in more workforce planning and understanding the demand signals a bit better i think we need to we need to address that because if we don't someone will and i see more and more jobs being created around workforce planning strategic workforce planning that aren't being created within TA and traditionally HR is very good at having silos and siloed data and siloed information that that means that TA doesn't really know what's going on with this strategic workforce plan doesn't even know what's going on with the operational workforce plan all they really get is the resource plan and suddenly they've got to fill these jobs they don't know anything about or the the jobs that come flood through aren't in any way shape or form aligned with the jobs that were highlighted in not what was planned or in a timeline or a location or a level etc so i think we probably need to get a bit more robust there and and say okay well actually do you know what we need to get a bit tough with the business if they're not giving us accurate demand data we need to own that space and really dial that up i think we're going to have a bit of a challenge in that companies don't want us i don't think to rebuild in the same way you know we saw a huge spike of recruiter activity market activity and recruiter salaries over the last five years or so it's a very expensive resource if we're providing what is considered a transactional activity if we can't articulate that value we become a very very expensive resource so then we've got to pivot we've got to get better at the advisory we've got to get better at the workforce planning and the planning overall and some of that starts with KPIs and metrics and some of that starts with capabilities and some of that starts with relationships you know one really simple metric to to change immediately get rid of time for hire time to hire is not utterly irrelevant metric if you do want to know what how good you are at doing this have a forecast of how long you think it's going to take to fill this job and then have a time and accuracy of that so if you say it's going to take 60 days and you're coming at 50 great you're minus 10 if you say it's 60 and you take 90 well you're plus 30 but businesses generally i find don't they don't need everything immediately they just need to know when they're going to get resource they need because if you're if you'll really get at forecasting and saying you know your software engineer is going to take six months well it's a hiring man joint then no all right i've got to get you that demand signal six months before i need this as long as i can trust you're going to deliver when you say you're going to deliver um so i think mailing that that sort of stuff down but it's just going to it's pretty operational to be honest it's not you know rocket science stuff but it will fundamentally change the relationship and the type of conversation you're having with with the business we'll get back to the show in just a moment but i wanted to take a minute or so to talk about something that i know is critical for you all right now tower acquisition is going through an unprecedented transformation and many of you are likely in the middle of planning your strategies as we move through 2024 towards 2025 we all know the operating models change management and aligning ta with corporate objectives are essential parts of any transformation strategy but with the market and AI technologies in particular evolving so rapidly there's a real risk that your strategy could quickly become outdated that's where strategic foresight comes in it's a proven methodology that helps you build credible future scenarios create agile strategies and most importantly have a proactive influence on what the future of tower acquisition looks like both within your organization and across the industry i know you're busy so i've created a concise online course that breaks down strategic foresight into easy to learn tools specifically designed for ta transformation it's quick to implement and will keep you ahead of the curve you can learn more by visiting mattalder.me/course that's mattalder.me/course there's really never been a better time to shape the future of tower acquisition so don't miss this opportunity to make a lasting impact i want to talk about your your vision for the future in a minute because it's fascinating and you know quite out there but it makes perfect sense to me what other advice they would you give to ta leaders who are kind of looking at the the function that they have now they want to kind of make that move to be more strategic there's a huge amount of disruption and change in in the air you know what are the first moves here what should people be doing and thinking about i think a very common Amazonian thing is you work backwards from a customer so really understand your business what do they care about because realistically if they do just want it really really really cheap and they don't really care about quality of hire they don't really care about time to hire they just want a really cheap service delivery model great you can build against that you can absolutely build against that and you can understand what those key strategic deliveries need to be for the business but equally they might want something that's really high quality or they might want something that's really fast and agile and nimble reactive they might have really big strategic goals that are going to be pivoting fast like you need to be really clued into what are the business leaders trying to deliver what are they trying to achieve and then work backwards from there work backwards to say okay well what's going to stop you from delivering xy and z it's going to be the people how do we tie in and make sure we're delivering what you need for when you need it i think we can have a habit of tinkering with ta and changing things that frankly the business don't care about they just don't hr might care about some of it ta cares about it but i don't think the business really cares so i think we've probably got to get a bit tougher with ourselves around having that line of sight between what we're doing why we're doing it and if we are saying that things are valuable enough for us to do highlight that to the business that that push back on cons and that cons strategy of this is how we highlight all of the good value and all of the good work and all of the impact we're doing back to you on a monthly weekly quarterly whatever it is basis have a have a defined cons strategy know what you're trying to say know who you're trying to impact know the keep the goals organizationally that you're impacting and how and why it fits in it's all for me it's all around line of sight and then constant constant communication over communication not about but since it's recruiting it's not about with filling xy and z unless that is absolutely core to what you're delivering it's it's around what are you trying to achieve as a strategic goal and how does this tie into that absolutely and i think the the challenge here is that lots of people will find what you've been talking about as a revolution is a really big change in what ta does what ta stands for and you know obviously you know there are there are challenges in in moving that forward however the overall context of everything is for even more fundamental change i think if we look at all the things that are driving change at the moment so you know whether that's economics or demographics or technology the way that work is changing the way that businesses are changing there's a seismic shift coming in the next few years about how we think about everything and i was really delighted to read the piece that you wrote about this because it kind of really resonated with you know some of the things that i've been sort of researching and thinking give us your vision for the future where is all of this going what could we expect in i don't know five years time yeah so um i think with that that initial change piece i mentioned i think you know the underpinning thing there is around ramping up our consulting and consultative abilities and breaking down those silos and obviously to do a lot of that as i say you've got to have a really strong consultative environment really strong data analytics you've got to know your stuff the external context of how that's changing at the same time is you're obviously seeing a big ramp up in skills intelligence and skills-based hiring and skills-based organizations they are only being that if you're a good recruiter you you can do skills-based hiring your entire career like that's what the only of all of this is that's exactly what time acquisition should have already been doing we should have been looking at those parallel skills developments parallel career paths etc so getting much better at this pan silo piece is going to be cool where i see it going to eventually and this is going to be largely driven by computing power is in the article i call it a talent nexus but it's a really holistic business intelligence structure and foundation that happens to look at human capital data it's much broader than TA it's beyond talent management it's beyond deep analytics it's a pan organizational piece where the systems would look organizationally wide at the skills you have within the organization at the gig workforce you've got and how it's going to fit in and how it's going to tie together so a business leader for example might go to it and say i want to open up a new software center in which to develop this new business we're trying to stand up delivering xyz in the next five years and the system would be able to deliver that you're going to need xhead count or y skill set it comes into the workforce planning piece of you know buy borrow build bot and all the other 15 b's you could have within there to really say well actually we can develop these highly intuitive and agile workforce plans rapidly and suddenly it takes a lot of the ownership away from individuals into the organizational piece and challenges everything around what the value is and what we're doing it will mean that you can really have workforce management and resource management organizationally wide rather than having hiring managers hoarding talent and not letting great people go you can suddenly have the system identifying high performers and pushing them onto stretch projects much more aggressively and proactively rather than having t8 teams pulling their hair out saying can we do internal head hunting and the people saying no can't touch our own people you can head on anyone externally anyone external can head on our people but we can't head on our own people the system will own that the system will put all together when it when it does its resource plan if it's looking at it going well actually we do need to buy in some of this talent great let's trigger ta let's look at the internal systems to say well actually we've already identified all these silver silver medalists i can automatically message them to see if they're even available let's look at and say well actually we don't want to buy this in we want to um co-create it with an rpl we want to co-create it with one of our vendors let's automatically trigger an rfi or an rfp to get this information in and get things moving immediately so rather than a that same vp that wants to do this the strategic priority having to sit there and have 56 meetings with 17 different silos about everything else and slowly trying to like pull a hair out as you get with us together the system will take a lot of that burden and will give us that holistic view and we've mentioned it a few times it's that the silo thinking going away to holistic thinking and how do we tile this together to make it a commercial intelligence and commercial commercial impactful function you know every vp's when they're asked what's your biggest asset it's your people what's the biggest risk your future it's your people and yet we have better supply chain management procurement management tools to understand you know and not unbolt with its QR code scanning through our systems then we do about any of our people and any of the human capital landscape that we're trying to plan yeah no it's a really strange it's a really strange thing but in this kind of vision i mean i think the two things that strike me about it first of all it's real time so this is happening this is happening incredibly happening at a speed that we just couldn't even imagine sort of making some of these decisions and doing some of these things at the moment and then the other side is that that like an automation that that scenario building that intelligence that data driven stuff where effective the system is making a huge amount of decisions that are normally made by and normally made by humans but actually the objective is to really effectively get the right people with the right skills or the right skills into the right place at the right time which has got to be better for everyone oh yeah the hundred percent agree like the the biggest thing holding this is the raw compute power so to do this in the article i talk about quantum computing and to really do it you'll need to run all of these scenarios all of these analyses in parallel to everything else so it's got to be running incredibly fast data sets all at the same time all running in real time which will be an insane amount of compute power and we're definitely in my mind we're knowing here that at the moment like if you compare this sort of model to like a traditional ATS system or an LMS system or you know your skills based talent cards or whatever it is we're just a world away i think we're going to see baby steps towards it i think you see more and more of these talent management systems coming in where you can combine you know your skills profile with your learning management system or your mentoring system etc and we're going to see baby steps towards what people do try and understand the skills people have and what they're trying to achieve with their career and where they want to go and how they could flex and develop but to really push it to the degree i'm suggesting in the article it takes a whole different type of computing power that i don't think HR has the sources for it i'm absolutely but i think with all of these things the thing i chose with learning the last few years is that these changes can happen a lot quicker than than we anticipate they will yeah i did you know it's funny mentioned that i i often look at the gen ii staff and i think it's i'm both amazed with how far we've come in the space of what 18 months i'm really shocked at how slow and how little has changed in 18 months because fundamentally a lot of the outputs were same you know you've you've got more more mature models you've got more access but the vast majority of the the tooling the majority of the use cases hasn't really changed i don't think it's been as revolutionary as a lot of people thought it would be and that's because the underlying architecture to build this stuff is the same kind of rpa right so robotic process automation stuff but we've had for a decade already and the reason we weren't already automated was it's really hard to do that stuff and so now you've all you've really got is all the automation stuff we've built in gen ii capabilities and and it's it's still really really hard to build all of that so i'm excited about where the next five years will go and i think we're going to get a lot of efficiency gains but uh yeah it makes me chuckle how little has really changed in the last year of it and perhaps that buys ta some time to go through the type of transformation that we've been talking about yeah 100% so i i think you know when when you really think about ta and i i asked this both on a poll uh probably about a year ago and also at the er a exact research association conference year before last not been year before that um but i was asking about where the the really unique value of recruiters comes from and i was slightly concerned honestly with some of the results some of the answers were yeah it was stuff that we mentioned the earlier around you know we put butts in seats or you know i i can find unique things in a cv to show that somebody's got a skill set that isn't explicit in the cv or i can find a diamond and rough cv that suggests a career path that wasn't there etc and i just started terrified because i thought this is exactly the stuff that systems will do far better than you far faster than you are on a scale that's unimaginable i i that this isn't our value i think since then more people are realizing actually recruiters true value and ta's real value is that people's side it's the the connecting the dots between different organizations it's understanding the human element of recruiting so for me i think the i'm hoping this period will be okay period of let's use tech where it's valuable and where it's it's better than us let's use it to to automate let's use it so that people don't have to you know get a job description from one field and copy and paste it into another field and pretend that that's an advert like let's use it for what it's good for large language models it's using for languages using to to help create better copy let's use them for create chatbots so can that's kind of a better experience whatever it may be let's use them for what they're good for but let's use our people for what they're good for use our people to really drive that value drive that high touch drive that relationship have that human connection because if we don't have that i think we're we're at risk we really are at risk Toby thank you very much for talking to me thank you so much my thanks to Toby 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 this is my show you [BLANK_AUDIO]
