I always knew that the pace of change would accelerate this year, but it’s only March, and we’ve seen thousands of tech layoffs, bank failures, and the launch of ChatGPT and now ChatGPT 4. Meanwhile, businesses worldwide are still struggling to get the talent they need.
The implications for Talent Acquisition of this pace of change and technological development are profound, and at the moment, it doesn’t even feel that there is time to take a step back and understand them. So what does this all mean, and how should TA leaders adapt and plan for such a dynamic future?
What better time to invite my favourite futurist back to show to attempt to get some answers. Kevin Wheeler is the founder of The Future Of Talent Institute and one of the great deep thinkers in our industry. In our conversation, Kevin looks back into the past to give us clues about the future and offers invaluable advice on what we should focus on.
In the interview, we discuss:
• Kevin’s take on the current market
• Talent hoarding and over-hiring
• The 1920s versus the 2020s
• Staying skilled and aware
• How will AI impact TA in the short and medium term
• Augmentation, automation and replacement
• A structural shift in how organisations see talent
• Internal upskilling and reskilling
• Thinking broadly, holistically and globally
• What should TA be focusing on
• The demographic and education time bomb
• What skills do the TA Leaders of the future need?
Listen to this podcast in Apple Podcasts.
Transcript:
SHL (52s):
Support for this podcast is provided by SHL. From talent acquisition through to talent management, SHL Solutions provide your organization with the power and scale to build your business with the skilled, motivated, and energized workforce you need. SHL takes the guesswork out of growing a talented team by helping you match the right people to the right moments with simplicity and speed. They equip recruiters and leaders with people insights at an organization, team, and individual level, accelerating growth, decision making, talent mobility, and inspiring an inclusive culture. To build a future where businesses thrive because their people thrive, visit shl.com to learn more.
Matt Alder (1m 10s):
Hi there. This is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 505 of the Recruiting Future Podcast. I always knew that the pace of change would accelerate this year, but it’s only March and we’ve seen thousands of tech layoffs, bank failures, the launch of chatGPT, and now chatGPT 4. Meanwhile, businesses worldwide are still struggling to get the talent they need. The implications for talent acquisition of this pace of change and technological development are profound. At the moment, it doesn’t even feel that there’s time to take a step back to understand them. What does this all mean and how should TA leaders adapt and plan for such a dynamic future?
Matt Alder (1m 51s):
What better time to invite my favorite futurist back to the show to attempt to get some answers. Kevin Wheeler is the founder of the Future of Talent Institute and one of the great deep thinkers in our industry. In our conversation, Kevin looks back into the past to give us clues about the future and offers invaluable advice on what we should be focusing on. Hi, Kevin, and welcome back to the podcast.
Kevin Wheeler (2m 25s):
Thanks, Matt. It’s always great to chat with you.
Matt Alder (2m 27s):
It’s always a pleasure to have you on the show. For people listening who may not have come across you in your work before, could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Kevin Wheeler (2m 38s):
Sure. Kevin Wheeler, I run the Future of Talent Institute and we try to look at the emerging trends in the talent space primarily for the next several years. We just comment on those and I write a weekly newsletter about these trends.
Matt Alder (2m 59s):
Absolutely. I can’t think of a more difficult job than in the last few years than doing that. I guess the logical first question would be, tell us what you’re seeing in the market at the moment there. There’s so many confusing things going on all over the world. What’s your take on what’s happening in 2023?
Kevin Wheeler (3m 19s):
I think clearly everything is in flux and changing, but the basics are that hiring is still robust. Companies, for the most part, everywhere in the world are still looking for talent. Despite all the gloomy news of thousands of layoffs here and there, I think that’s more of an indictment of leadership in these companies of abrogating their responsibilities for good planning and foresight in hiring so many people during the pandemic. It was a scramble for people. They over hired way beyond the revenue increases that they were seeing, and now, they’re obviously laying these people off, which is unfortunate.
Kevin Wheeler (4m 5s):
I think in the long, it’s perhaps good for small companies because they will now be able to pick up and are currently picking up some of these really great people that have been recently laid off from these big companies. I think there was a bit of hoarding going on pat, talent hoarding in effect, where companies were saying, “Let’s just just hire these people ’till we have them.” In effect, it denied them from other smaller companies that couldn’t afford them or couldn’t bring them on board. That’s unleashing a whole group of talent that was captured before. I think it could be very positive in the long run.
Matt Alder (4m 46s):
You mentioned just in your weekly newsletter, which is one of my favorite newsletters. I love getting your thoughts through and your observations through every week in terms of what’s going on. You sent one two or three weeks ago that really caught my eye, which was looking at parallels. You were looking back at the 1920s to look at parallels for the 2020s. Tell everyone a little bit about that and what you found.
Kevin Wheeler (5m 17s):
Yeah, they always say that history doesn’t repeat itself, but there clearly are are themes that seem to continuously emerge. I was looking at the 1920s and saying what was an incredible decade? Just as our decade is of growth and change, when we look at what was going on in technology, in science, in medicine, the twenties were amazing. 1920s, we discovered antibiotics. We found insulin to help control diabetes. Radio broadcasting became commercial. Frozen food appeared. Women got the vote in many countries around the world.
Kevin Wheeler (5m 57s):
HR became a profession in the twenties, really. It was an incredible decade of change, just like the one that we are in, but it led in 1929 to one of the largest depressions that the world has known. Hopefully, 2029 will not lead to that for us, but who knows? As far as changes in employment and work, there were tremendous changes. A whole bunch of jobs were created only briefly. For example, the telephone operator and the elevator operator are good examples of jobs that were very lucrative and well paying jobs in the twenties, thirties, and even the forties.
Kevin Wheeler (6m 39s):
Then they disappeared. They’re gone because of automation.
Matt Alder (6m 42s):
Yeah, I thought that was really interesting in terms of the technology creates these jobs and they become a thing that the people that people do for several years or many, many years but then become obviously and we’ve forgotten that they exist.
Kevin Wheeler (6m 57s):
Exactly. That’s gonna happen to us as well. Many jobs that today are considered to be very, very great jobs. They pay well. It’s great to get jobs doing them. I think things like just writing computer code is going to become heavily automated in the near future. All these people that are programmers and coders, I don’t know that they’re gonna disappear, but I think the numbers of them that are needed is gonna significantly decrease. We already saw a little bit of this back with HTML programming, which has pretty much disappeared as a profession. It’s very automated today. Network administrators, were super popular job 15 years or so ago. Now, gone.
Kevin Wheeler (7m 43s):
Taxi drivers are being slowly displaced by Uber and other services like that. We’re already seeing things like this happening. Yes, clerks in the grocery stores, the clerks are being replaced by automated scanners where you do your own scanning of your groceries. All of these things, jobs that have been great for quite a long time are already disappearing. There’ll be more jobs that continue to do that, but at the same time, new ones are created. There’s always new things coming along. The key is really, I think, in our era, as opposed to the 1920s, is this changes faster.
Kevin Wheeler (8m 23s):
The time spans are much shorter and it’s really necessary to stay skilled and aware so that you’re not caught in this by being a checkout clerk that suddenly doesn’t have a job. You need to be thinking about your next step.
Matt Alder (8m 40s):
I think that’s really interesting. I wanna drill into that in a little bit later in the conversation, but I suppose, to set the scene for that, what’s been really interesting for me in the last few weeks is with the open access to various AI systems that have come online. AI and automation is now very much at the center of everyone’s consciousness. Even though some of that technology’s been around for a while, how do you see AI and automation affecting recruiting and talent acquisition and HR in the short term, medium term?
Kevin Wheeler (9m 19s):
Well, I think it’s gonna have a pretty significant impact. I think clearly, for some of this mundane tasks that it’s probably gonna be able to do for us or help us do, are things like write a job description to create better marketing messaging for candidates, to communicate with candidates, and do the writing of the communication. I think you’re gonna see chatbots that are empowered by this AI technology already emerging. Recent discussions with Microsoft, with chatGPT, they’re already working on this.
Kevin Wheeler (9m 60s):
Google, I think, today just announced its version of basically chatGPT. I think you’re gonna see many other companies announcing their versions of this. We’re in a competitive race for how can we use these tools in everything, but clearly, recruiting will be a beneficiary of this. It will do many things, maybe not as well yet as people do them, but certainly can do them in an adequate way to meet a lot of needs and can give recruiters a foundation to improve. For example, let’s say it writes a marketing message that you may not think is great, but with a little bit of tweaking, it could become great so a recruiter wouldn’t have to come up with it from scratch.
Kevin Wheeler (10m 45s):
I think this is gonna be a real augmentation to what we do in recruiting really help us. I think over the next decade or less, it will slowly become more powerful and probably replace many of the tasks that recruiters do today. It doesn’t necessarily mean that all recruiters are gonna just disappear. It just means that skills will shift and you’ll be able to do things or be required to do things that maybe you don’t have time to do today while the technology does the things that waste your time today.
Matt Alder (11m 22s):
Do you think with everything that’s going on, albeit the economic circumstances, the talent markets, the rise in adoption of technology, are we starting to see a structural shift in the way that organizations view talent? For example, number of conversations on the podcast in recent weeks about talent acquisition playing a role in internal mobility and, in some cases, talent management and talent acquisition almost merging or becoming more transparent. Do you think that we are seeing these structural changes in the way that employers think about talent?
Kevin Wheeler (12m 3s):
I hope so. I think it’s gonna be necessary given demographic trends, given what’s going on out there in terms of the skill mix that is available. I think you’re gonna see that employers are gonna have to think about their workforce in bigger terms than just a full-time permanent employees. They’re gonna have to do what I call tap into what I call the larger workforce ecosystem. That ecosystem includes part-time people, sometimes people, contractors, consultants, vendors, strategic partnerships, RPOs.
Kevin Wheeler (12m 44s):
When a position or a need arises in a firm, rather than just with a knee-jerk response almost saying, “Okay, let’s open a rack and go hire somebody,” I think it’s gonna be a much more thoughtful process of saying, “What’s the right kind of person for this job? Do we need it all the time? It’s a job that a consultant could do. Is it more of a project? Is it something that we only need occasionally? Maybe, an occasional worker would be great for this job.” We’re gonna have to have a lot more thought about what type of person and what skillsets are best suited for doing whatever it is that we want done. I think for the 20th century and even right up till today, we’ve just always hired a full-time person to do it.
Kevin Wheeler (13m 31s):
Whether that full-time person really had a full-time job or not, or whether it was challenging or whatever, didn’t matter. We just hired somebody full-time. I think companies and recruiters are gonna be asked to look outside to a larger ecosystem, probably a larger geography because of what’s going on with education and with the demographics and internally with their own internal current employees and how they can be re-skilled, up-skilled, relocated removed within the company so that they can meet some of these needs that they would’ve gone outside for before.
Kevin Wheeler (14m 12s):
A much more thoughtful, holistic approach, I think to recruiting the smart companies will do this and doing this will help to avoid these massive layoffs and this be increasingly unacceptable employment behavior that firms have been engaging in.
Eric Brotman (14m 32s):
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Matt Alder (15m 4s):
This is another current TA leaders who are listening, who are trying to plot a course through the next few months and years in terms of all this change, all these factors, and all these pressures that they’re under. What would your advice be to them in terms of what they should be focusing on?
Kevin Wheeler (15m 24s):
I think you should really clearly focus on this larger workforce beyond the permanent 40-hour week employee. I think work is changing. We all know that more and more people don’t wanna work as a full-time regular employee. Many people are opting to choose a more flexible work style and lifestyle. I think recruiters have to influence hiring managers as best they can to think differently about these jobs. Just as I talked about a few minutes ago, talk to a hiring manager, do we really need a full-time permanent person in this job? What if we hired a contractor? What if we hired a part-time person?
Kevin Wheeler (16m 6s):
What if we hired a consultant to help us redesign this job? How do we look at this differently so that we don’t constantly increase our workforce and not necessarily use it as effectively as we could? I think that’s one of the responsibilities that recruiters have is to be more aware of the market and help to educate hiring managers on that. I fully realize that this is a difficult job and that hiring managers may still insist on hiring a full-time person, but it doesn’t mean you can’t bring this up and talk to them about it. Everyone that you convert is a win, in my opinion, for you, for the company, and for the person ultimately gets hired and for the hiring manager as well.
Kevin Wheeler (16m 58s):
I really urge recruiters to think more broadly, more holistically, and more globally. We could get into that, the why I think you need to think globally if you want to.
Matt Alder (17m 11s):
Yeah, absolutely. Give us your perspective on that.
Kevin Wheeler (17m 14s):
Well, it really boils down to demographics and education. All of the western world is getting older very quickly and we’re not able to replace our populations. The only country in Europe that’s currently replacing its population through birth is France and it’s barely doing that. Countries like Germany, the UK, Italy, they all have less than replacement birth rights. The same for America, the same for Canada, the same for Japan, the same for China. We’ve got all these countries that are getting older, and older workforces are not as productive. They’re not as energetic as younger workforces.
Kevin Wheeler (17m 59s):
Where are these younger workforces? These younger workforces are in the places you don’t really expect. Southeast Asia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, even Burma. Countries like India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan, these countries all have growing birth rates and fairly educated people that are choosing to study the subject that’s gonna make the most difference for the future, which is science, technology, engineering, and math, which we sometimes refer to as STEM. STEM jobs are really the future lots of projections project there.
Kevin Wheeler (18m 40s):
The primary gonna be the primary growth job of the next 20 years. Those countries are putting more people through STEM education. We’re not the only country in Europe that’s putting a significant number of people through STEM jobs in Germany. The US is not, but countries like Vietnam, Cambodia, believe it or not, are leading the way in STEM education. When you combine the age of the workforce with education, it seems to me obvious that your best engineers, your best next hire is not gonna be in America, the UK, or Europe.
Kevin Wheeler (19m 23s):
Your next best hire is gonna be in one of these other countries. We’re gonna have to figure out how do we hire these people in place to work remotely probably, or perhaps set up small satellite offices in these areas. We’ve been doing this for decades in India. We’re gonna have to continue to do this at a greater level, but we’re just not gonna have the people with the right education to fill the needs of the workforce unless we expand our thinking into a more global marketplace.
Matt Alder (19m 52s):
I suppose thinking about expanding thinking skills of the future, in the workplace of the future, there’ll be people listening who are the aspiring recruiting and TA leaders of the of the future, and also, people who are already in leadership positions who want to move their career on. What skills do you think people should be developing to make them the brilliant recruiting leaders of the future?
Kevin Wheeler (20m 20s):
Well, clearly they are going to be the skills that AI cannot, and if we believe, which I do, that AI will take over many of the ordinary routine functions we do every day. Even things like assessing candidates, screening candidates, even finding candidates. Those things are gonna be done by AI and they’re gonna get done increasingly better and better. Like I said a few minutes ago, it may not be as good today as a person, but it’s gonna get better and better. The skills that you need to stay in the talent space in the future are gonna be those human skills of marketing influencing, those are gonna be incredibly important skills, skills that understand the global marketplace, that really understand the trends that are going on out there that can discuss those intelligently with leadership, can do the analytics and bring in the facts and the data to support your positions.
Kevin Wheeler (21m 25s):
Those are gonna be the key skills and AI can help you do those things. The artificial intelligence can help you gather the facts and help you put together the influential discussion or presentation that you need to have. Being able to do that is going to be the fundamental success skill. I think the skill of being I’m a best interviewer or I’m the best sourcer, those are increasingly gonna become less important skills because AI is gonna be able to do those things. Our job is gonna be to use whatever they produce, judge it, interpret it, put it, communicate it, influence people with the data. Those are gonna be the primary jobs of those of those people in the talent space.
Matt Alder (22m 8s):
Final question, where can people find you and where can they subscribe to your newsletter?
Kevin Wheeler (22m 13s):
Sure, they can subscribe to my newsletter at FOTnews.Futureoftalent.org, or you can just go to the futureoftalent.org website and there’s a link there you can click to subscribe to my weekly newsletter, and that’s how you can reach me as well.
Matt Alder (22m 32s):
Kevin, thank you very much for talking to me.
Kevin Wheeler (22m 35s):
You’re welcome, Matt. Thanks again for the opportunity.
Matt Alder (22m 38s):
My thanks to Kevin. 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 all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com. On that site, you can also subscribe to the mailing list, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks so much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
