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

Ep 656: Strategic Transformation in TA

After many years of being seen as tactical, TA has the unique opportunity to reposition itself as a strategic function with insights to shape business strategy. However, this will only happen with a significant degree of transformation, and those TA teams that stick to doing what they have always done are at risk of further downsizing or being automated away altogether. So, what do TA Leaders need to do to harness the current forces of change and reinvent their function My guest this week is Lyndsey Taylor, head of Global Talent Attraction at Brooks Automation. Lyndsey has a wealth of experience in TA transformation, strategic workforce planning, and driving change. She shares her perspectives on the future of TA, the rise of strategic workforce planning, and breaking down traditional HR silos. In the Interview, we discuss: How the work of TA is changing and the forces driving that change How can TA influence business outcomes? Aligning metrics to business goals Internal mobility and reskilling What role can TA play in Strategic Workforce Planning How to be more strategic What does AI make possible Enhancing the candidate experience Reducing bias Breaking the silos in HR What should TA look like in 3 years time? Follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts. Follow this podcast on Spotify.

Duration:: 20m
Broadcast on:: 25 Nov 2024
Audio Format:: other

So, what do TA Leaders need to do to harness the current forces of change and reinvent their function

My guest this week is Lyndsey Taylor, head of Global Talent Attraction at Brooks Automation. Lyndsey has a wealth of experience in TA transformation, strategic workforce planning, and driving change. She shares her perspectives on the future of TA, the rise of strategic workforce planning, and breaking down traditional HR silos.

In the Interview, we discuss:

How the work of TA is changing and the forces driving that change

How can TA influence business outcomes?

Aligning metrics to business goals

Internal mobility and reskilling

What role can TA play in Strategic Workforce Planning

How to be more strategic

What does AI make possible

Enhancing the candidate experience

Reducing bias

Breaking the silos in HR

What should TA look like in 3 years time?

Follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts.

Follow this podcast on Spotify.

You know, I've recently heard some crazy success stories when it comes to hiring with AI. FedEx is sending offers to candidates within 10 minutes. General Motors saved two million dollars in recruiting costs in a year. Chipotle reduced time to higher by 75 percent, and Nestle's global recruiting team is saving 8,000 hours annually. The craziest thing, all of these companies did it by leveraging the same technology. Paradox. Paradox is the leader in conversational hiring. Powered by conversational AI, paradox can be your ATS, CRM, and career site, or can help automate parts of the hiring process on top of Workday, UKG, and SAP. Their product suite is driven by a 24/7 AI assistant who can handle up to 95 percent of the hiring process for restless hiring teams, or just automate specific, time-consuming tasks like screening, interview scheduling, and onboarding to allow recruiters to focus on recruiting. Paradox has helped hundreds of the world's top employers simplify hiring and save money while creating great candidate experiences in the process. Spend more time with people, not software, with paradox. You can find out more by going to paradox.ai. There's been more of scientific discovery, more of technical advancement and material progress in your lifetime than mine, and all the ages of this. Hi there! Welcome to Episode 656, a recruiting feature with me, Matt Alder. After many years of being seen as tactical, TA has a unique opportunity to reposition itself as a strategic function with insights to shape business strategy. However, this will only happen with a significant degree of transformation, and those TA teams that stick to doing what they've always done are at risk of further downsizing, or being automated away altogether. So, what do TA leaders need to do to harness the current forces of change and reinvent their function? My guest this week is Lindsay Taylor, head of Global Talent Attraction at Brooks Automation. Lindsay has a wealth of experience in TA transformation, strategic workforce planning, and driving change. In our conversation, she shares her perspectives on the future of TA, the rise of strategic workforce planning, and breaking down traditional HR silos. Hi Lindsay, and welcome to the podcast. Hi Matt, thank you for having me. It's an absolute pleasure to be here. And it's a pleasure to have you on the show and be talking to you. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do? Of course! So, my name is Lindsay Taylor, and I am head of Global Talent Attraction here at Brooks Automation. Now, we deliberately call it attraction and not acquisition. We believe it's more than just a quieting talent, but I'm responsible for global TA, global onboarding, global mobility, and HR transformation. Fantastic stuff. Now, before I press the call, we just had a very long conversation about TA transformation, which I wish I'd recorded. But let's start off by talking about that. So, I'm sure lots of the people listening are either going through a TA transformation, or will go through a TA transformation in the coming weeks and months. Does TA need to transform? And what does it need to transform itself into? What are your thoughts? I do believe that TA needs to transform. And I believe as a function, we're very good at adapting and being agile enough to transform. And we have been doing as a function for many, many years now. But the nature of the work is rapidly changing due to globalization, remote work, and we can't avoid the topic of any technological advancement, so AI, which does require a much more adaptive and responsive TA function. And again, forever trying to move away from that transactional role of putting bottoms into seats, which is not TA, I'm sorry, it really isn't, and moving into being more of that strategic business partner to really influence business outcomes and aligning those talent strategies with the organizational goals. But I do feel we have been doing that for a long time. It's just something that's the nature of the beast of TA that we're forever having to adapt to grow with the needs of the business. No, absolutely. And it's something that gets said a lot in terms of TA needs to align itself with the business objectives and those kind of things. How does that actually happen in practice? It takes time. That would be the first thing I would say. I know in TA we're very driven by metrics and governed by data and outcomes, but actually a lot of this is about not just seeing what we're going to do, but doing it. I know that it's a cliche when we talk about TA or HR should be at the table with business leaders, but it's true. And that's one of the important turning points for just HR and Genidol, where you're contributing to discussions about whether it's future workforce needs or the skills that we have to do versus the skills we need in the future and how are we going to bridge that gap and how are we going to help shape the business strategy through insights into whether it be talent trends or labor market dynamics. And then I would say turning it into reality is what I'm finding. This is my 24th year in TA and I'm finding that agility is most definitely essential so that TA teams can quickly pivot in response to those changing priorities where we are leveraging technology to scale efficiently, where we are focusing on measurable outcomes and look, you can never get away from your time to fail and your quality of hire, but rather than I would say those traditional satisfaction metrics. And then as we are implementing more and more AI and analytics, not only to streamline processes, but to provide more predictive insights about the future talent needs. And so you're moving beyond just external hiring and that's where and I'm very privileged in my role at BRICS where it does involve more than just TA. So it's including internal mobility, the reskilling, the workforce planning, it's all part of an integrated talent strategy. There's so much to unpack there. There's lots of things I want to ask you much more about, but let's start with that last bit, that bit about strategic workforce planning because I know it's something that you know you're having a current job and you've had in your previous role as well. Why is it that so many organisations don't do that or don't have that as a function? And what can TA do to fix this? Or what role can TA play where strategic workforce planning is a function? I think that the answer to your first question is fear because the moment you hear the phrase strategic anything, where workforce planning is concerned, I've seen a lot of companies over the last 15 years bringing out an ex-house spreadsheet. So TOES start to curl, organisations start to prioritise immediate needs over strategic foresight and a lot of organisations focus on filling positions quickly rather than thinking about the future workforce requirements. There's also the lack of tools, right? So a lot of companies will lack either advanced analytical tools or analytics tools, sorry Matt, needed to help project future talent needs or the talent internally to help interpret that data effectively. And I would say there's often a resistance to adopting strategic workforce planning because it does require a shift from the today, the next quarter, this year to much more proactive thinking which can be a significant cultural change. And then there's a disconnect between the functions. So it's, you tend to find people saying, well I own it, I'm finance, someone says well we own it, we are HR, it's all about the people and you have business operations saying well it's ours. And so this leads to quite fragmented ownership and execution. So your next question, what can TA do to fix this? As a TA leader it's about advocating for workforce planning, whether it's strategic or just critical workforce planning and helping to showcase its value and how that aligns with those business goals. So that is about TA leaders stepping up and demonstrating how workforce planning can prevent talent shortages and align those workforce capabilities with future business needs. And again, there's lots of tools out there, there's workforce analytics platforms that can really help make life a lot easier and get away from this, here's an Excel spreadsheet, everyone's going to fill it out and come back because you lose about 90% of your audience there. And then it's about developing the ability across the TA function to get everyone thinking more strategically and understand the business needs more deeply which does include more training on data interpretation and strategic thinking. And that leads nicely into working closely with finance, working with Ops and whether colleagues across the HR function to make sure that workforce is a much more collaborative integrated effort. And the way I've seen it work really well is when you have a team of experts in the room who all put their hand up and say I'm kind of out my depth here and we work on it together. No that's interesting and I think there's a wider, something much wider there which I think is probably worth talking about which is getting that kind of buy-in and influence across the whole organization for TA function, you know, workforce planning, whatever it might be. What would your advice be to people in terms of how they can do that, how they can achieve that and really kind of set themselves up to operate in a much more strategic way? I would say I've learned my lessons the hard way so hopefully this will help others and prioritize by always building those relationships. So foster strong relationships with those internal customers, those internal stakeholders and aligning what you're thinking and around those TA goals with their priorities and then you're ensuring there's much more of a mutual understanding and support. So rather than just going to your stakeholders or your internal customers and pitching the idea, understand their world, understand their problems and what's going to be in it for them which then helps you start to show how those strategic initiatives in TA can lead to much more measurable business outcomes. So for example using the data to demonstrate the correlation between efficient hiring processes and overall business performance and I would say it's not the kind of thing I would ever recommend you switch on like a big bang globally so it's about a proof of concept with a smaller group or a function or even a particular line manager, people manager then you can start to share those early wins and it could be whatever, you know you feel is going to work well to influence internally whether it's reducing time to fail or it's improving the quality of the higher that's going to then build that credibility and support for larger initiatives and I would say one thing I've learned is to make sure that you maintain clear and open communication about the goals, the processes and the expected outcomes of these initiatives but that it's not okay TA might be stepping up now and leading but we don't just own it we all have a part to play in this. I want to dig a bit deeper into AI and technology which sort of you touched upon right back at the kind of the beginning of the conversation. What impact is AI having and what do you think it makes possible you know moving forward kind of based on what we're talking about? The impacts AI is having I think right now everyone feels like they're an expert as long as they've got chat GPT in front of them. That's one thing I'm learning and look hey I'm a massive advocate for using tools like chat GPT I use it every day but you have to be able to know what you're using and be very careful with how you interpret that information and fact check it. I would say thinking about the TA space you cannot move away from the fact that AI is going to and has been helping to automate a lot of routine tasks so screening resumes CVs or scheduling interviews for recruiters or or hiring managers so that TA can focus on much more high value activities. AI is providing insights again into the future of talent needs. It's helping companies stay ahead of that curve. From my past experience and what I aim to do here at Brooks is have an enhanced candidate experience so whether you're active talent or passive talent it's having a much more personalized communication and streamlined process that enhances the candidate journey and I know bias is always up there so I know we still have a lot of work to do here but properly design AI well help us reduce unconscious bias so again looking to promote much more diverse workforce. And in terms of how it kind of really evolves the way that HR works do you think that it's going to kind of bring the silos in HR closer together was that what do the future look like from that perspective? Yeah I wholeheartedly agree that it will bring HR closer together. I think we in the HR function have a shared goal right which is to enable the growth of our business and so by utilizing AI and aiming to eliminate more of those non-value added activities we can start to empower our existing team members to focus on those higher value activities where they do work together so it really is a core part of business planning and providing insights that shape the company strategy. What would your advice be to someone who is right in the beginning of a TA transformation process? How should they be thinking about it? What should they be doing first? I would say we start with aiming to drive cooperation between functions so I talked earlier about some of those shared goals and feeding into the enterprise wide strategic objectives and initiatives so defining and communicating those shared goals across the function will be an important part to play whether we're looking at increasing internal mobility or what even is our external and internal global mobility strategy it's about making sure we're establishing teams that include members from various functions to work together on specific projects or initiatives and then you're ensuring that we have different perspectives and expertise incorporated and that then helps lead on to the encouragement of continuous interaction through regular meetings, shared dashboards, collaborative tools and then securing alignment from leadership across those functions again highlighting the strategic importance of collaboration and achieving business goals. I don't know if I completely answered your question there I may have been open a tangent getting far too passionate about bringing some of these silos together. That makes perfect sense and it sounds like a very logical thing to do. As a final question give us your vision for talent acquisition what do you think it should look like in two or three years time? That's a big question for a Friday afternoon or Friday morning for me right now I would say that TA should be a core part of business planning it should be providing insights that shape company strategy. We should be and we will be continuing to use technology to enhance those efficiencies that we've talked about Matt whilst maintaining strong human connections with not just candidates or talent but people so driving a positive experience for all who engage with the recruitment experience and I would say in the future we have a much more agile function Matt then that can quickly pivot in response to market changes and then looking at how we leverage AI to foster more unbiased hiding processes and builds that diverse workforce but for me the TA of the future I am excited to work here at Brooks on moving us from more traditional satisfaction driven design TA models to something more productivity driven design so for me that's how the future of TA looks less of the generic post-and-free high volume recruitment where you have general recruiters and we are looking to streamline and focus on particular talent segments and focus on how bringing those talent segments in how that then feeds needs of the business Matt. Lindsay thank you very much for talking to me. Thank you so much it's been a pleasure. My thanks to Lindsay. You can follow this podcast in Apple podcasts on Spotify or via your podcasting app of Joyce. You can search through all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com also on that site you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter Recruiting Future Feast and get the inside track on 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. [Music]