The future of work remains a common discussion topic. Whenever we cover it on this show, I always like to look at things through a talent lens. In recent months I’ve had a series of guests from outside of the industry giving their perspective on talent and the future of work. To provide us with an insider view my guest this week is a veteran of the talent acquisition industry.
Peter Weddle is CEO of the TA Tech trade association and author of a recent book on the future called “Circa 2118 – What humans will do when the machines take over.”
In the interview we discuss:
- Why there is such an unprecedented level of investment in talent acquisition technology
- The surprisingly short term impact of AI
- How we should be preparing for the future of work right now
- Eliminating tasks rather than eliminating jobs
- What should talent acquisition be focusing on
- The vital importance of building relationships
Peter also talks about the forthcoming TA Tech conference taking place in Lisbon in early May.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:01:08]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 182 of the Recruiting Future podcast. The Future of Work remains a very popular topic of discussion whenever we cover it on this show. I always like to look through the lens of talent acquisition. In recent months I’ve had a series of guests from outside the industry giving their views on talent and the future of work. This week my guest is a talent acquisition industry veteran. Peter Weddle is CEO of the TA Tech Trade association and author of a recent book on the future called circa 2118 what humans will do when the Machines Take Over. Enjoy the interview.
Matt Alder [00:02:02]:
Hi Peter, and welcome back to the podcast.
Peter Weddle [00:02:02]:
Well, it’s great to be back, Matt. Thanks for having me.
Matt Alder [00:02:04]:
My absolute pleasure. Now, for people who may not know you, could you just introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Peter Weddle [00:02:12]:
My name is Peter Weddle. I am the CEO of an organization called TA Tech, the Association for Talent Acquisition Solutions. And basically we are a trade association for industry. Industry for all of the companies that use technology to deliver a product or service for talent acquisition.
Matt Alder [00:02:33]:
Fantastic. Now you’ve just written and published a book that I’m sort of very keen to, very keen to talk about. It’s about the. Your kind of vision of the future. Before we do though, you’ve obviously been in and around this industry for a number of years. We talk a lot about how technology changes things and the pace of change and what’s happening in the sort of recruiting and HR arena. What would you say are the most interesting changes that you’ve seen in the time that you’ve been in the industry?
Peter Weddle [00:03:05]:
Well, just to set some context, way back in the early 90s, I sold a company which was arguably one of the largest in the US to use computers to match people to jobs. And I had A lucky break. I fell into a job writing a bi weekly column for the Wall Street Journal on this new thing called the Internet, and in particular the employment space. I’ve been watching talent acquisition technology for more years than I’d like to count. But I think there have been a number of changes that are not unusual for a maturing industry. In the beginning, we had a couple of dominant job boards like Monster and Career Builder in the States, Stepstone in Europe, total Jobs in Europe and so forth. And that era lasted for a number of years, probably until the dot com bubble burst. And then what we began to see and what I think is most interesting today is two things. First, the diversification of technology. In talent acquisition. We’re seeing more and more different kinds of technology that can be used not just for sourcing candidates at the top of the recruiting funnel, but for all of the activities throughout the recruiting funnel, for managing candidates, for communicating with candidates, for screening and assessing candidates and so forth. And at the same time, what we’ve seen happen is a growing interest on the part of investors, private equity investors, venture capitalists and so forth. So there’s actually money flowing into this industry at an unprecedented rate, which is further stimulating the growth of new technologies, new ideas, new approaches to talent acquisition. You know, it takes us 21 years to make a worker and right now we don’t have enough to go around. So the importance of recruiting, I think has finally begun to hit home at senior levels in the Enterprise. I mean, CEOs have always talked about the importance of talent, but I think for the first time ever, they’ve begun to see its bottom line impact. And that has really created much greater focus on, much greater interest in much greater innovation in the talent acquisition technology space.
Matt Alder [00:05:34]:
Now, as I said, you just published a book called circa 2118 what humans will do When Machines Take over, which I kind of, I suppose must lead on from the technology changes and the talent shortages that you sort of mentioned. Tell us a bit more about the book.
Peter Weddle [00:05:52]:
Well, I wrote the book because it’s no secret that there’s been a lot of hype around artificial intelligence and machine learning. So this is a very deeply researched book. I think there are something like 140 footnotes in the book, just a huge number of sources. But I also wrote it because I wanted to disabuse the, I think, conventional wisdom that the impact of artificial intelligence is something that’s largely going to happen down the road. It’s going to happen to people in the future. We don’t really need to worry about it. And what I found in the research is that that’s simply not true, that we are in the midst of a revolution in the world of work today, right now, as a result of these technologies, which are still in their infancy. And as they mature, the impact that they’re going to impose on the way we work, the way we live, our social, political and commercial institutions, is only going to get greater.
Matt Alder [00:07:00]:
I mean, that’s really interesting. And, you know, I’ve actually had a sort of, a, sort of two or three people on the podcast in the past who’ve researched and created a vision of what AI might do to jobs in the future. What I’ve. What I found is that, you know, they. They seem to sort of fall into two. Two camps. There’s the. There is a. It’s either a kind of a very, very optimistic view or quite a dystopian view where, you know, we’re sort of ruled by robot overlords and there are no jobs. Where do you stand on that scale? What’s your. What, what do you think? How do you think this is going to. How do you think this is going to play out and develop?
Peter Weddle [00:07:40]:
I stand right smack in the middle. You know, I think it’s pretty clear that the impact of these technologies on the work that we do is accelerating. For example, in 2016, the World Economic Forum published a report in which they estimated that there would be a net of 5 million jobs lost in just the 15 leading global economies by 2021. That was in 2016, two years later, the McKinsey Global Institute. So we’re talking about, not Silicon Valley, over caffeinated salespeople. These are legitimate research institutions. The McKinsey Global Institute in 2018 looked at 2,000 work activities across 800 occupations. And they determined that 30% of that work in 60% of those occupations could be automated by currently available AI technology. And we’re talking about jobs from CEOs to welders. And they estimate that 15% of the global workforce, 400 million workers, are not going to be able to find work because it will be done by machines by 2030. So, you know, barely a blink in time, 11 years from now. And the whole thrust of my book is not that there’s some sort of dystopian future, but rather, to avoid that future, we need to be thinking about the implications of that kind of change right now. You can’t unionize your way out of this. You can’t, government, by government decree, change the pace of technological development. This stuff is going to happen. So what are we in the world of work going to do not only to protect our own jobs, but equally as important, to protect the jobs of our kids and grandkids.
Matt Alder [00:09:43]:
That’s a really interesting perspective. What do you think people should be thinking about right now in terms of enabling that? I mean, in terms of sort of protecting their future careers and the relevance that they’ll have in the future?
Peter Weddle [00:09:58]:
Well, I think the first thing that we as individuals need to do is to develop situational awareness. In other words, we can not afford to stick our heads in the sand like a bunch of ostriches and pretend that this stuff isn’t here or is going to go away. We need to make sure, regardless of what profession, craft or trade we’re in, that we are aware of where technology, where artificial intelligence and machine learning is encroaching into our jobs. Most of the research today is not necessarily about how these technologies eliminate jobs, but rather how they eliminate the tasks within those jobs that are currently performed by humans. Think about it this way. Right now we have chatbots, which are these cute little technologies driven by machine learning that can help engage candidates as they come into a company’s talent acquisition process. That’s kind of where we are state of the art. The next generation will be to have really recruiting assistance. These are more capable technologies with deeper learning, with better neural networks, better algorithms that can do more of the work, more of the tasks that recruiters do. But recruiters won’t feel threatened because they will still be the main partner, the major partner in the partnership. So they’ll still be controlling the technology. But inevitably, as each generation of AI becomes more sophisticated and more capable, they’re going to take over more and more of those tasks. So humans will go from being the senior partner in the partnership with technology to being the junior partner, sort of the fail safe system, if you will, like we have in driverless cars today. And eventually, because we humans are not infallible, eventually those machines will learn even to be able to do those tasks. It’s important for all of us to gain some awareness of how fast that progression is occurring in our particular field. But at the same time, we need to collectively begin to exert influence on our governmental and political institutions to pay attention to this crisis. It’s interesting, the UN report on climate, global climate change predicted that 2040 was the year where we may well reach the point of no return, where we will have so impacted our global climate that no matter what we do, we can’t get it back to what we Remember, as kids, and ironically, 2040 is also the very same year that most experts predict that machines, this development of AI and artificial intelligence, these machines will finally have reached a point where they will become smarter than humans, that they will be more able to do the things that we humans do. And what that means is that at that point, we will remove the human friction in the development of AI. AI will no longer be developed by humans. It will be developed by the machines themselves. And that will accelerate the progress at a dramatic rate. So, you know, we have some time here, which is why I said I was sort of in the middle. This isn’t going to happen day after tomorrow. But we have decades, but only decades to really think about what’s going to happen to people when all of a sudden, the whole notion of paid employment, which began way back in the Middle ages in Europe, what happens when paid employment is no longer available because machines are doing all the work?
Matt Alder [00:14:00]:
So, very, very specific question. You know, we talked about, you know, we’ve, we’ve talked about the way the future is going to pan out and what people should be thinking about. Specifically for people who are working in talent acquisition right now, what should they be thinking? What should they be doing to prepare themselves for the future?
Peter Weddle [00:14:21]:
There’s been some research done lately which suggests that we may have missed or misplaced the focus for people to best insulate themselves from the impact of this ongoing change. Historically, what we’ve said is that people need to be more technologically literate. They need more skills in STEM science, technology, engineering and mathematics in order to be able to work with and four machines. And that’s still true. But the work that will be left for humans is most likely to involve soft skills. The skills of leadership, the skills of interpersonal relationships, the skills that a lot of recruiters instinctively bring to bear. So I think for recruiters for talent acquisition professionals, it is to hone their soft skills and to increasingly make sure that those in the enterprise who are deciding their budgets and deciding their staffing sizes and so forth, that they understand that even as these machines become more capable in doing specific hard tasks, there are certain soft tasks that, at least for the foreseeable future, only humans can do. And to the extent that each recruiter has honed those skills, they will have, relatively speaking, insulated themselves from seeing their jobs terminated.
Matt Alder [00:15:55]:
Now you run TA Tech, run a number of events around the world looking at sort of technology and talent acquisition and talking about the future and bringing together sort of great people to network and learn. I’m delighted that I’m going to be speaking at the TA Tech in Europe in May about my book, which I’m. Which I’m currently writing. So we’re going to be talking about some of the early findings there. Tell us a bit about the events you’ve got coming up, what people can expect and how people can find out more about them.
Peter Weddle [00:16:26]:
Well, thank you for asking. TA Tech Europe is an event that we’ve created that’s specifically designed to nurture thought leadership and collaboration among the companies which design, develop and deliver technology based products and services for talent acquisition. So this is an industry event. It’s not that employers aren’t invited to attend, certainly they are. But the real focus here is to do two things. It is to allow very senior industry executives. The conference is designed for enterprise CEOs and their direct reports. So it’s an intimate gathering, maybe 160, 175 executives. And it’s designed to really challenge their views of where technology is today, where it’s going tomorrow, and how best to get from point A to point B. We try to bring in really provocative, really innovative speakers like yourself. But also both Google and Facebook, for example, chose this kind of event, the TA Tech event, as their coming out presentations when they decided to get into the talent acquisition business. We work very hard to bring speakers to bear that people haven’t heard elsewhere or which are offering creative new ideas for people to consider. And at Tiatech Europe, which is coming up in Lisbon in May, May 8, 9, 10, we’re going to do that two ways. In the beginning we’ll have a program called Recx, which is a program of Ted Talk like sessions, so only 15 minutes long, very engaging. It’s in a theater environment, it’s going to filmed with lots of audience interaction and we’ve got 10 of the really most thoughtful people in the talent acquisition business in both Europe and the States on the program to really think outside the box and be thought provoking. And then we’ll move from that into the main conference itself on May 9 and 10. So we’ve got a great lineup of speakers. But the other thing that the conference is all about is B2B collaboration. The conference is built around a unique format called the Deal Center. And the way that works is that 10 days prior to the event we release online a scheduler so that people coming to the event can see who else is coming and they can reach out to them and pre schedule meetings so that you’re not missing those really important contacts that you want to have you connect with people you may not have ever connected with before and so forth. And During a typical two day conference, we’ll have over 1,000 meetings scheduled in the Deal Center. Amongst the conference participants, they’ll be exploring potential partnerships, they’ll be looking at strategic alliances, they’ll be talking about doing business with one another. All of those conversations will be going on as the thought leadership sessions are proceeding at the same time. So it’s a very busy two and a half day event and it will have some of the very best companies in the talent acquisition technology industry from the EMEA market. So a very substantial and important market globally for talent acquisition technology as well as about 30% of the participants will be from North American companies as well.
Matt Alder [00:20:19]:
Peter, thank you very much for talking to me.
Peter Weddle [00:20:21]:
Matt, thank you for having me. It’s been great to be back.
Matt Alder [00:20:24]:
My thanks to Peter Weddle. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. The show also has its own dedicated app which you can find by searching for Recruiting Future in your App Store. If you’re a Spotify user, you can also find the show there. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com. on that site, you can subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about Working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
