It’s April 2021, and we really are standing at a crossroads in terms of the future of talent acquisition. Labour markets are changing, there is a rapid adoption of new technologies, and there is a reinvention in the way we work.
So how best to strategically navigate through these changing times. Well, who better to help point the way than my guest this week. As the preeminent analyst in talent technology, Josh Bersin doesn’t need much of an introduction.
In the interview, we discuss:
▪ How the pandemic is affecting talent markets
▪ Job automation
▪ The need for constant reskilling
▪ Talent mobility
▪ Internal talent marketplaces
▪ Gig work, deconstructing jobs and the evolution of employment
▪ Medium and long term trends to be prepared for
Listen to this podcast in Apple Podcasts.
Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Globally, 43% of candidates drop out of an interview process due to scheduling frustrations. Interview scheduling is one of the biggest pain points in recruiting, with all that back and forth creating the potential for a very poor candidate experience. This episode of the Recruiting Future podcast is sponsored by Chronofy, the scheduling platform for business, HR and recruiting professionals. The Chronofi Scheduler makes scheduling interviews easy. It saves you time, allowing you to stay in complete control of your schedule while offering personalized interview slots. Don’t let impersonal and lengthy interview scheduling stop you from acquiring top talent. Visit Chronofy.com to find out more and Chronofy is spelt C R O N O F Y.
Matt Alder [00:01:11]:
Before we start the show, I’ve got an exciting announcement. The Recruiting Future Podcast has teamed up with the excellent team at TA Tech to bring you a live podcast conference. The event’s called Peering into the Talent Acquisition Future and it takes place on April 21, 2021. Now I know there are lots of virtual events out there competing for your attention at the moment, so we’re running a super simple format that you can dip into and out of as you so desire and everything will be recorded and archived to watch or re watch at your convenience in the future. Over a half day, I’ll be hosting five different panel debates on the future of various aspects of Talent Acquis with some outstanding TA leaders from companies that include Intel, Siemens and SNC Lavalin. I promise that you will take away some great ideas and be challenged to think deeply about the future of what we do. The event is free to attend or watch at the time of your choosing. In the future, you can find out more and register at Bit Ly RecFuture Live. That’s Bit Ly RecFutureLive and that’s all in lowercase. Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 344 of the Recruiting Future podcast. So it’s April 2021 and we really are standing at a crossroads in terms of the future of talent acquisition. Labor markets are changing, new technologies are being rapidly adopted, and the way we work is being reinvented. So how best to strategically navigate through these changing times? Well, who better to help point the way than my guest this week? As the preeminent analyst in talent technology, Josh Bersin doesn’t need much in the way of introduction, so keep listening to hear how he sees the way ahead for talent acquisition.
Matt Alder [00:03:11]:
Hi, Josh, and welcome to the podcast.
Josh Bersin [00:03:13]:
Thank you, Matt. I’m happy to be here.
Matt Alder [00:03:16]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show.
Matt Alder [00:03:18]:
For the very few people who might.
Matt Alder [00:03:20]:
Be listening who’ve not come across and your work before, could you just introduce.
Matt Alder [00:03:24]:
Yourself and tell us what you do?
Josh Bersin [00:03:25]:
Sure. I’m a, I’m an industry analyst in the human resources domain and I’ve spent about 25 years studying this and working with companies and tools vendors and technology vendors and thousands and thousands of HR people to understand all the aspects of HR and talent management and technology for this ever changing world of work, as you know, is rapidly changing all the time.
Matt Alder [00:03:53]:
Absolutely. And the last 12 months have probably been like no other year in terms of that change. And that I suppose brings me to my first question, which is looking at everything that’s happened with the pandemic over the last year or so, what have you seen in terms of the way it’s affected talent markets in terms of supply and demand?
Josh Bersin [00:04:15]:
Well, I mean, for the first probably nine months of the pandemic, you know, there was a lot of unemployment. So in the, in the hourly work and in retail and hospitality and transportation, there were a lot of layoffs. So there were a lot of people looking for work. And the unemployment rate is still pretty high in some parts of the United States and different parts of the world. But since then, most companies have transformed themselves into low touch hygiene oriented business models. And so now the job market is growing and, and the tech industry has been explosively growing, so there’s been no shortage of jobs in that area. Professional services companies have transformed themselves to doing a lot of things remotely. And now retailers are turning into distribution companies. So actually the job market’s picking up. So and the fact that everybody can now work remotely kind of, you know, democratizes the job market even more. So, you know, even though you may not be in a city of a company that you want to work for, it doesn’t matter as much anymore. So. So I think to some degree, if you’re a ambitious job seeker, you’re going to find probably a lot of opportunities out there right now.
Matt Alder [00:05:31]:
Absolutely.
Matt Alder [00:05:32]:
And you mentioned there about companies having to change their business model and change.
Matt Alder [00:05:36]:
The way that they, they work.
Matt Alder [00:05:37]:
And we’ve been talking about digital transformation for sort of a number of years now. But there’s obviously been a dramatic shift in the last 12 months. I mean, how significant is that in terms of skills and capabilities inside employers? And what do they need to be thinking about to make sure they’re sort of fit for purpose in this new world.
Josh Bersin [00:05:59]:
Sure. Well, you know, in the, in the early days of digital transformation, it was kind of black magic and companies were not sure what it meant. And we were thinking that every company was going to turn into a software company. But now we know that really what digital transformation means is delivering products and services in a digitally enhanced way. And that might mean selling apps, delivering things through mobile commerce, creating better websites, creating better scheduling systems, making retail more customized and personable. I mean, hundreds of little things using technology. So it’s really done two things. First, of course, there’s a lot of demand for software engineering inside virtually every company. But the bigger issue is that every job is to some degree a service job. And a lot of the routine work that used to be done manually has been automated by technology. And now, you know, the next wave is what’s called rpa, Robotic Process Automation. So even white collar workers are getting automated. And we’re not getting automated out of work, we’re getting automated into higher value work. So as more and more routine work is unneeded, there are more opportunities for the human part of it. And of course, if you’re not comfortable with technology, that’s a problem. So you have to be comfortable with the tools and kind of learn how to use them. And then on the HR side, digital transformation has really been big because we’ve been in a sense throwing away a lot of the old back office HR tools and putting easy to use front ends on top of them and creating what we call the employee experience as, you know, more of a digital single employee experience. So we’re now kind of well along in the, in the digital transformation of most companies and it’s fairly clear what needs to happen. You know, it’s no longer kind of a, kind of a mystical idea.
Matt Alder [00:07:58]:
And what does that mean for companies in terms of upskilling people and making sure they have the right skills within their business?
Josh Bersin [00:08:05]:
Well, you know, there’s, there’s been a lot of discussion about skilling and upskilling for the last decade. I think it was the Oxford University study that said that 55 or 60% of jobs were going to, quote, unquote, go away. They didn’t really go away. And my experience in, you know, my business career I’ve been working since 1978 is this has been going on for forever. You know, there used to be, there used to be a steno pool and the company I used to work for that went away with the PC and the word processor and those People became executive secretaries, and then they became customer service agents and other things. But I think big issue on skills is regardless of the role you’re in, you have to reskill yourself constantly. You need to keep up on the digital tools of your trade, whatever that may be, but more so the human collaborative, leadership communication skills. And when you look at job descriptions in recruiting systems and what are people looking for? Yes, there’s a lot of technology jobs, but that’s a small number compared to the need for people that can listen, be good managers, communicate, write, design things, you know, apply creative solutions to problems, understand data. Those are all the skills that people need to develop now, including the skill of self development. You know, being able to adapt and challenge yourself and teach yourself something new is a skill. So we often call it learning agility in the HR domain. But, you know, if there’s anybody listening to this podcast who’s kind of thinking, what do I need to learn? Just feel comfortable going out there and learning whatever you need to learn and asking for help. I think another big part of reskilling is getting to know people and feeling comfortable finding mentors and developing relationships with people who can point you in the right direction. And that’s really what makes careers successful for everybody, including, you know, people that are highly skilled in one domain.
Matt Alder [00:10:15]:
One of the things that we were talking about at the start of the pandemic was talent mobility and how that would be a massive focus for employers as they sort of navigated their way through the situation as it was happening. The reality seems to be quite different. And many employers, certainly the ones that I spoke to, were struggling with a lack of systems and technology to properly sort of deploy talent around their business. Who’s getting this right and what is it that they’re doing? What type of technologies that are out there that are kind of really helping people with this?
Josh Bersin [00:10:49]:
Sure. Well, this is kind of a big topic, so let me start at the beginning. Mobility inside of a company is a big topic. It’s not a new one, but it has not been widely adopted until recently. There are a lot of companies that have moved people around for years. Cisco, a lot of the consumer, packaged good companies. Even when I worked at IBM in the 1980s, people moved around all over the place. GE was big on this, but it was always a very structured, facilitated move where, you know, kind of, you kind of waited your turn and your manager, you know, decided when you were ready for the next job. And, you know, it was in the. In the context of some sort of a linear career. Now and what we found in the research that I’ve done over the years is that about 2/3 of people would say that it was easier to find a job outside the company than than to find a new job inside the company, which is kind of a nutty thing. Well, because of the pandemic, because of the skills shortage, because of the low unemployment rate, before the pandemic, companies realized, wow, you know, it’s sometimes much cheaper and more effective to reskill somebody inside the company to take a job than to bring in an expert from the outside. Because in Most roles, within 12 to 18 months, if you get the right candidate inside the company, people can become very, very good at a new. And then you develop a culture of mobility and that person understands other people in the company and knows how to work in the company. So this has been a massive shift. And the technology vendors have started to adapt. So there are now tools which are often called talent marketplace tools that facilitate and enable this internal mobility. Now there’s different flavors of talent marketplace systems because they come from different sources. Some of them are coming from recruiting vendors, some of them are coming from learning vendors, and some of them are coming from companies that just focused on career management. But typically the technology you need for great internal mobility is a way to search for open opportunities and apply. So sort of an internal marketplace for jobs like an applicant tracking system, you need some technology that can find the right jobs for you. So if you’re inside the company, it can recommend opportunities that might be appropriate for you using AI and matching. You need some sort of career oriented pathing. So if I’ve been in this job for two years and I’d like a promotion, I don’t want to just search around for every job in the company. I’d like to know what would be the right job for me next. Is there some intelligence behind that? And then there are all sorts of other tools for breaking jobs into small pieces and decomposing them into parts. Because in most companies, and this is a massive trend, more and more work is really project work and not just a job. So even though you may want a new job, there might be a project in the company that will teach you something that may not require you to change jobs directly. And so these tools are starting to become gig market workplaces so that people can decompose jobs into pieces. In fact, one of the companies that does this is SAP in Germany. And SAP, they have a talent marketplace technology and they do job sharing. So you can go into the system and say, you know, I don’t want to work Thursdays and Fridays. I’ve got kids at home. Would anybody like to share my job and take the Thursdays and Fridays of it and let me, you know, let’s talk about who might be available for that. So there’s, you know, there’s all sorts of new things that are coming from the talent marketplace, technologies that are to me really the, the core of the next generation of talent management, really. And how we’re going to, or how we’re going to really work together inside companies on different responsibilities.
Matt Alder [00:14:41]:
That’s really interesting.
Matt Alder [00:14:42]:
And how, how does that kind of dovetail into the, the sort of the management of gig workers and the, the different way that companies are, you know.
Matt Alder [00:14:52]:
Think about employment now?
Josh Bersin [00:14:54]:
Well, you know, gig work, the word gig work sort of started about five or six years ago when we kind of figured out what Uber was doing. But it’s always been around. It was called contingent work or outsourcing. And there’s lots of different words for it. But what typically happening is happening is that is oftentimes not managed by hr. It’s a, you know, you’re in the vendor system. So if I’m a line manager and I need some help, I just go into procurement and I essentially buy a project from a person and somebody goes off and does the work. Now that’s a human being. So to some degree it should be an HR process, but it isn’t. In most companies it’s not. And so what’s been happening for the last year or two from the pandemic, this has exploded because there’s been so much need for part time and contract work for different activities that we didn’t necessarily do before, that this is becoming big enough that it’s becoming more of a corporate policy. And so now more and more HR departments are saying, you know, we need to get our arms wrapped around where all this contract work is, who’s doing it, put some criteria around it. We need some standards for policy, for culture, for background checking for security, maybe pay standards, safety standards, training. And it’s becoming slowly a more mainstream part of talent management. We’re not there yet. I think, you know, if you looked at most companies, you’d probably find 70% of them don’t even know where all the gig work is. And they know it’s in the vendor procurement system somewhere. Some of it’s tagged as, you know, gig work, some of it’s tagged as a project. And nobody really knows, you know, that there’s a, you know, how many people are working on it, so, but it’s, it’s moving that direction. And the reason it’s moving in that direction is because of what I mentioned earlier, the general nature of work is more, you know, project oriented. And if we allow people to work from home, I mean, why wouldn’t we have a contractor work on something? If we don’t have a skilled person in our team that needs to do something, why don’t we have a contractor do it? It’s really not that big of a deal if it’s a well vetted, validated person. And so if HR creates a pool of, you know, ready, contingent work, then we can make financial decisions on when to hire versus when to bring in a contractor or an outsource. And of course, more and more companies are making this their business model. Obviously Uber and Airbnb and Doordash and companies like that, they don’t really even need to employ a lot of people. Well, I suppose Uber does now, but you know, in some of these models like Airbnb, they don’t really have a lot of employees. All the work is done by the hosts. And that business model is actually interesting in more dimensions than you might realize. So it’s becoming a much more strategic part of the financial business model of companies. And HR is becoming much more intelligent about how to manage this new type of workforce that’s, that’s really happening in every single company.
Matt Alder [00:18:04]:
One of the other things that we’ve seen over the last 12 months, it seems to have been a massive leap forward in terms of the adoption of AI and automation in talent acquisition. Obviously it’s been something that we’ve been talking about in theoretical terms for, for quite a long time. But, but certainly, and I’ve sort of had a number of practitioners come on the show and talk about it. You know, lots of people are really sort of using these tools very proactively now to solve their recruiting. Chall are you seeing in this particular area?
Josh Bersin [00:18:36]:
Well, there’s a lot of AI that’s working and there’s a lot of AI that’s being oversold. It’s a little bit like snake oil at this point, but we’re past the early adopter stage. The applications of AI first of all, AI is basically software that learns from data as opposed to programming every possible path. An AI based system learns from the data itself. So as the data, its database grows, the AI gets smarter. That’s the big difference. And it has capabilities like natural language processing or it understands images and it has video intelligence and other things in it. So the Two areas that I know it’s extremely popular and very successful. One is in screening and chatbots where candidates are looking for jobs and they’d like to know when is this shift available, where’s the location, what jobs are open? And there’s tools like Maya and Eva and others that are very, very sophisticated at handling the recruiter. You know, oftentimes it’s the screening or the pre hire process and getting somebody to the right position on the website. The second area that AI is, you know, very successful and it’s going to get much better is in candidate matching. Instead of browsing A list of 100 open positions in the local hospital, you can upload your resume and the system says, oh, here’s a job that’s probably a good one for you to apply to. And that saves everybody a huge amount of time. The recruiter, the candidate, the hiring manager. And that technology that matches an individual in their background to a potential position is useful in many, many ways. It’s useful for job searching and recruiting, but it’s also useful for internal mobility, for professional development. Oh, here’s job that you might be qualified for. You should consider this next in your career. So that’s the second area of AI that’s very useful. You know, the area that’s a little problematic is video interviewing. Video interviewing was originally a non AI based technology that was used to scale the interviewer. So what it, what it was was a candidate could video record their answers to questions on their phone or on their computer when they had time and then the recruiter could scan through the videos and listen to them when they had time and figure out who they wanted to call for the next interview. Face to face interview. Of course the vendor started to apply AI to that and said, oh, let’s see if we can figure out if people are lying. Let’s see if people, we can figure out people’s personality traits based on the video. And sure enough, they ran into all sorts of problems with African Americans not represented correctly, not understanding language correctly and so forth. So that’s actually been kind of pulled back, but the vendors are still working on it. And there will be other applications of AI in recruiting, but those are the ones that are the most popular. Sort of.
Matt Alder [00:21:41]:
As a final question, obviously it’s very difficult to predict the future and the last 12 months has certainly taught us that.
Matt Alder [00:21:49]:
And a number of the things that.
Matt Alder [00:21:51]:
We sort of talked about in this discussion are, are ongoing trends. But what, what should we be keeping an eye out for over the next sort of 12 to 24 months. What do you think the important trends are? What’s, what’s going to happen? What should talent acquisition professionals and HR professionals be, you know, be looking out for and ready to kind of act on?
Josh Bersin [00:22:15]:
Well, I mean, I think there’s two or three things. First of all, the job market is going to get very, very competitive. We have massive amounts of money going to the economy, people are coming back to work, people want to go on vacation, they want to buy things. So consumer demand is going to go up, hiring is going to go up, and the unemployment rate is going to go way down. And it’s going to be hard to hire people. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the unemployment rate goes below what it was before the pandemic. That means you’re going to have to become very good at employment brand marketing your opportunities to the right candidates, what’s called consumer candidate relationship management and creating a fantastic candidate experience. People don’t want to spend an hour filling out a job description, a job application to come work for your company. They’d like to click on something and have the data go directly in and then they’d like to hear from you after they apply. Because not only are they potentially a job candidate and maybe they don’t get the job, but they might want it, you might want to hire them later. But they could be a customer. You know, companies like Southwest Airline and other companies basically have a policy that every job applicant is a customer. So we need to treat them very, very well, give them great information and a great candidate experience. And then the third area is really, you know, using AI to reduce the number of steps and make it as seamless as possible. Now, some of that’s AI and some of that’s internal organization. You know, if you let every hiring manager hire however they want and onboard however they want, you’re going to have a very complicated process because hiring managers don’t hire all the time. So they’re not going to be experts at, you know, interviewing people and onboarding them and bringing on board. So now is a really important time to look at your end to end recruiting process and create channels of recruiting for different roles, roles and maybe dedicated recruiters in different areas and make sure they are doing it in the most efficient way and they’re using the technology that you have effectively. There’s a lot of talent acquisition technology. Talent acquisition departments tend to have many tools, scheduling tools, the applicant tracking system, some form of assessment, the job searching stuff, background checking and so forth. That wastes a lot of time for recruiters to go through that if it’s not integrated. So that’s another big thing. So I think there’s going to be a lot of energy and money put into recruiting technology and integrating it. And you kind of have to scan what’s out there because this is a very dynamic marketplace and there are constantly creative new vendors coming up with new ways to recruit people in different roles, different geographies, different industries.
Matt Alder [00:25:05]:
Josh, thank you very much for talking to me.
Josh Bersin [00:25:08]:
Thank you, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:25:09]:
My thanks to Josh Burson. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow the show on Instagram. You can find us by searching for Recruiting Future. You can search through all the past episodes@recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list to 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.
