I recently hosted a webinar on the future of talent acquisition and asked the audience to consider this question. Will there ever be as many recruiters again as there were in August 2022?
The arrival of universally available generative AI and a harsh economic climate has caused the perfect storm in our industry. But how much long-term disruption of talent acquisition and potential elimination of recruiting roles could there be?
My guest this week is Allyn Bailey, a highly experienced talent acquisition leader who previously held a global role at Intel and is now Executive Director of Hiring Success at SmartRecruiters.
A couple of weeks ago, Allyn put out a challenge on LinkedIn that she was prepared to debate her belief that a major organisation would move to recruiterless recruiting within the next 18 months. Because I consider her one of the most innovative thinkers in the industry, I took the opportunity at the recent UNLEASH America event to learn more about her hypnosis. I also got her thoughts on the future structure of talent acquisition teams and her advice around reskilling and retraining for those at risk of being displaced.
In the interview, we discuss:
• Fungibility and flexibility of technology
• Can you build a future-proof tech stack?
• Is it possible to implement a relationship-based recruiting strategy in a world of management by transactional metrics?
• Can AI be more human than humans?
• Can technology now address every step in the TA process?
• Will we see recruiterless recruiting within 18 months?
• The nuances of the hypothesis
• The TA team of the future
• TA Ops, system and experience design
• Will candidates push back?
• Legislation and regulation
• Reskilling and retraining.
Listen to this podcast in Apple Podcasts.
Transcript:
Matt Alder (1m 7s):
Hi there. This is Matt Alder. Welcome to Episode 519 of the Recruiting Future Podcast. I recently hosted a webinar on the future of talent acquisition and I asked the audience to consider this question, “Will there ever be as many recruiters again as there were in August 2022?” The arrival of universally available, generative AI, and a harsh economic climate has caused the perfect storm in our industry, but how much long term disruption of talent acquisition and potential elimination of recruiting roles could there be? My guest this week is Allyn Bailey, a highly experienced talent acquisition leader who previously held a global role at Intel and is now executive director of hiring success at SmartRecruiters.
Matt Alder (1m 57s):
A couple of weeks ago, Allyn put out a challenge on LinkedIn that she was prepared to debate her belief that a major organization would move to recruiterless recruiting within the next 18 months. Because I consider her to be one of the most innovative thinkers in the industry, I took the opportunity at the recent UNLEASH America event to learn more about her hypothesis. I also got her thoughts on the future structure of talent acquisition teams and her advice around reskilling and retraining for those at risk of being displaced. Hi, Allyn. Welcome back to the podcast.
Allyn Bailey (2m 35s):
I am so excited to be here. You know you’re my favorite person to talk to.
Matt Alder (2m 38s):
Oh, thank you very much. It’s brilliant to be talking face to face as well.
Allyn Bailey (2m 42s):
Right? We never get to do this. This is great.
Matt Alder (2m 45s):
Yeah. Absolutely. No, it’s fantastic. Perhaps we should start with you just introducing yourself and telling everyone what you do.
Allyn Bailey (2m 50s):
Sure. Absolutely. My name is Allyn Bailey. I currently work for SmartRecruiters. I run all of our TA consulting services, implementation integration work. Previous to that, I worked for a large multinational technology company driving TA strategy and have been in the industry for the last 10 years in various different practitioner roles and now on the vendor side of the house looking at where we’re headed.
Matt Alder (3m 19s):
I suppose before we get into the conversation, let’s just talk about where we are and what we’re doing. We’re still on day one of the event. What have you seen that’s interesting? What have you heard that’s interesting? How’s your day gone? What’s really stood out for you?
Allyn Bailey (3m 34s):
It’s a great question. I also had some fabulous conversations as I’ve been hearing it, and they’re usually the one off conversation. Most people who come to these things know it’s gonna be those sidebar conversations that you’re having. Here’s what I’m hearing that’s intriguing me. I’m hearing people, and these are technologists by the way. This is our business and what we do who are still confused about the difference between what we were using for AI technology previously and Generative AI and how it operates. What’s interesting is, I’m not a specialist at all in those sorts of areas, but I found myself being educating in that space more than I thought I would, which was a shocker to me.
Allyn Bailey (4m 13s):
I guess I expected that to be a broader known thing. I think it’s something we need to all understand better. I’ve also heard really a lot about fungibility and flexibility within technology. How do we start to put together technology stacks or solutions that can solve the problems of today without binding us into constraints that won’t serve us tomorrow and what does that look like?
Matt Alder (4m 41s):
Interesting.
Allyn Bailey (4m 41s):
Yeah. Right, because that’s not how technology stacks have worked previously. They very much worked as we’re intending this to be rich and complex and putting all these tentacles into your data systems and et cetera, all for the purpose of being sticky. We don’t want you switching out technology left and right. Technologists are now starting to hear from practitioners that they need more fungibility and flexibility, so how do you do that? I think that’s the question I’m hearing a lot of.
Matt Alder (5m 6s):
Yeah, that’s really interesting actually. Maybe something we’ll talk about as we get into the conversation. To start off, so it was either yesterday or the day before, I can’t remember when it was, but you put out something on LinkedIn, a challenging statement on LinkedIn suggesting that people would debate you. It was all around the implication of what we’re seeing with technology at the moment and everything else that’s going on in the market. It was your belief that recruiting could effectively run with no people.
Allyn Bailey (5m 35s):
Yeah, absolutely.
Matt Alder (5m 35s):
Then that would happen very soon?
Allyn Bailey (5m 37s):
Absolutely.
Matt Alder (5m 37s):
Talk us talk us through that.
Allyn Bailey (5m 39s):
Let me give you what drove me to make that statement and feel comfortable doing it. Listen, I have been in the technology space for a while putting technologies into companies and corporations. I know that for a long time, we have had technological solutions for almost every part of the TA or Recruiting process, but we’ve always told this story, and I was one of them driving change inside a company, to the recruiters, sourcers, and teams that I worked with that said, “Don’t worry, technology is not here to replace you. It’s here to augment you. You will always need the human touch.” Why did we say that?
Allyn Bailey (6m 19s):
I think this is what I really started to ask myself the question, why did we say that? Because we believed it, because we understood that technology, particularly ones that were driven through algorithms and that were doing some of these fancy pieces of work for us, required us to insert the personalization, to be able to tell it what was good and what wasn’t, to be able to serve as, basically, the human filter to translate technology world to human world. There was always going to need to be humans to build relationships because this is a relationship driven business. When I worked at Intel for a long time, I was really enamored with this idea, and still am, that recruiting is a relationship based business, that we have been driving it like a transaction and it’s relational, but it’s always been hard to implement a fully relational function because Recruiters and sourcers, TA leaders, we still are being held to operational metrics, which are transactional – speed to fill, cost for higher, all of these things.
Allyn Bailey (7m 19s):
What does that mean? It means that even in our best efforts, when we know the smarter thing to do, take time to write personalized content, reach out at a regular cadence to keep people warm, all those things that allow us to build real pipeline versus rec based recruiting, really cool stuff, requires this depth of relationship. I wanted recruiters and sources to lean into that and to want to start to deliver at that level. I’m gonna be honest with you, we haven’t. I’m sorry, we haven’t, and for a variety of different reasons. It was hard. We weren’t skilled to do it or we didn’t have the enough or the right robust. Now enters Generative ai, right?
Allyn Bailey (8m 3s):
Listen, I was not the first on this ballpark. I saw it come out and I was like, “Okay, this chat GPT thing. I was in the early years of natural language processing chat bots before they were cool. I get how complex this stuff is to program. Everybody’s getting too excited. It’s not gonna be that big a deal. I had somebody who worked with me. His name is Tony DeGraff, and he said, “No, no, no. You need to just go play with it,” and then started sending me actual research articles on how this stuff is built and delivered. I went down a rabbit hole one weekend and sitting out in my pool in Arizona reading these weird technology research articles on how Generative AI is actually learning to train itself, and realized, “Oh my God, this is fundamentally different.”
Allyn Bailey (8m 51s):
I no longer need humans to make us more human. The AI actually knows how to be more human than the humans do. Oh, crap. Now I can finally put a full statement out there that says, “Idon’t know whether it makes sense to put humans in the mix of it.” We are biased. We are costly, right? We require retraining. We live in an ecosystem where we hire and fire recruiting teams based on the economic circumstances of the world as it is. It is a non-sustainable model. If I know that technology, and I would venture anybody to argue with me that there is a step in the TA process, from branding all the way through to assessment and selection, that we do not have some technology that can address today.
Allyn Bailey (9m 42s):
I know it’s there. My assertion was, listen, some smart, driven TA, HR, or CEO leader in some enterprise is gonna look at this and go, “Wait a minute, we just laid off a whole bunch of recruiters in this last downturn. Should I be investing in new recruiters as we start to up-level our hiring or should I be investing in technology and is there a new way to do this?” And who sits down and says, “My mandate is a recruiterless Recruiting process,” and gets really close to building an incident. It will take one enterprise to do it and everybody else will follow. I honestly think that’s 18 months at the longest away.
Allyn Bailey (10m 22s):
Somebody’s gonna do it.
Matt Alder (10m 23s):
I was gonna say, how long do you think that’s gonna take?
Allyn Bailey (10m 27s):
Fast, fast. This technology is switching so fast. Listen, the world we live in is changing so fast. The way in which people make decisions about how they hire, what their businesses look like. Look how fast we were able to learn. This is why we can make quicker business decisions. We learned how to pivot to a remote focused world in literally 48 hours around the world.
Matt Alder (10m 46s):
That’s very true, yeah.
Allyn Bailey (10m 47s):
You tell me a TA leader can’t figure out how to pivot to a recruiterless recruitment stack in 18 months? Easy peasy. Maybe they’ll listen to this, I tell you what. Somebody out there who wants to do it, if you’re the first one who’s interested in doing it, I wanna talk. Let’s talk about where you might be able to pack work that solution together. It won’t be elegant at first, right? The first one out the door will be like, you know, and it’ll need some people here and there. I’m not saying none will exist, but I think my message in there was actually to people I’ve worked with for over a decade now, recruiters, sourcers, and recruitment markers who deeply care about their work.
Allyn Bailey (11m 30s):
I’m deeply vested in them being successful, but I also think we have to stop lying to them now. It is now time for us to tell the truth and to say, “No, you really do need to re-skill. Start thinking about going into TA Ops. Start thinking about becoming somebody who is an expert at strategic systems design. If you are gonna hang your hat on being an exceptional bullion string constructor, yeah, your time’s over. There is no need.
Matt Alder (12m 2s):
I can hear the people listening.
Allyn Bailey (12m 3s):
Oh, they’re angry at me. Listen, people are either gonna hate me or they’re all sitting there quietly going, “Yeah.”
Matt Alder (12m 15s):
Absolutely. Just to summarize that, so effectively, we know the technology’s getting good. We know the technology can do lots of things. If we think about it, there is so much that is automated in our daily lives and very often, I’m quite happy to talk to something that’s automated if it’s doing it more efficiently and communicating, we’d be better than a human, but what you’re saying is we’ve always had this mission or this desire in recruiting that this is human based, we’re gonna have a great candidate experience. We are gonna do all these kind of things, but actually that’s not ever achievable because of lots of different factors. Let’s turn it over to the machine.
Matt Alder (12m 57s):
Is that a sub a good summary of what you’re saying?
Allyn Bailey (13m 4s):
That’s exactly what I’m saying. That’s exactly what I’m saying. I’m looking at it honestly saying, “Listen, as somebody who’s been trying to drive TA transformation for over a decade, if we were gonna do it, we would’ve done it.” We did not have the will or the desire to figure out how to do it, to equip, to fund, to realign ourselves, to think differently, to operate in that model. The time is over. The machines will now rule. They’ll take over because they can do it. Years ago, we started talking about my eviction of moving away from a sales funnel into an infinity loop framework, which really said managing, find the pipeline versus the rack. I always struggled with being able for that to live inside a TA organization effectively because we were always getting rid of non redundant resources and challenges with cost for killing, et cetera.
Allyn Bailey (13m 55s):
If I can now actually execute that, create personalized, robust, prioritized engagement interaction strategies that are valuable to candidates, useful to us in getting information and driving the data cycle that we need to drive and do it through technology, I can actually make it happen. I can do it now when I couldn’t do it with people. I tried.
Matt Alder (14m 23s):
Also, I think there’s nuance about this as well because what you’re saying is like someone will try this in an imperfect way within 18 months. Because this will be how some people will interpret it, what you’re not saying is there will be no recruiters at all this time next year and everyone will be doing all this kind of stuff.
Allyn Bailey (14m 46s):
No, yeah.
Matt Alder (14m 46s):
Even if the technology moves quickly, companies, humans, stakeholders, and managers don’t.
Allyn Bailey (14m 48s):
Oh yeah. I’m still having conversations with people about how to do job scraping. Okay, so listen, we are not fast adopters in our world. Not everything’s gonna turn over the dial tomorrow. I guess what I’m saying is it’s going to happen. We now have a route to see how it’s going to happen. We’re past the question mark of asking, “Oh, is that real? How fast will that? Is that really relevant? Should I care?” It’s now time to wake up to care, to get smart about the technology, understand how it operates, and understand if you are in one of these roles, how do you start thinking about what your future is?
Allyn Bailey (15m 31s):
I’m not saying that we don’t need people who know to. Listen, I love this business. We need really smart TA. We need smart people who understand recruitment process and what best practices to help us understand how technology should be executing. These roles will exist, but they will be different. 18 months, we’ll start to see the first players out there. Again, they may fail, fall flat on their face and be horrid. I can talk to you about TA tech accident failed humongously over time. We can all look at them, but those failures always lead to us learning very quickly. This technology is advancing faster than we have ever seen.
Matt Alder (16m 9s):
Do you think that there is the potential for almost external pushback on this? Are candidates, potential talent, is that something that they might not like? Also, I’m thinking in terms of legislation and the various things that are happening to maybe limit some of the things that AI can do. Do you think their factors in this?
Allyn Bailey (16m 39s):
Yeah. I mean I do, but here’s what I’ll say. I think the blockers or the hurdles will be mostly in legislation and in our understanding of how AI and data gets regulated and how we understand to adapt to it. Don’t think they’ll keep us from it, but they’ll have to learn to adapt to it in all the right ways. Do I think the candidates will be unhappy with this? Nope. I think they think we’re horrid now and I think they will be happy for anything that gets us an inkling of a step better to treating them like actual relevant, interesting, capable human beings who are seen and not just pass through like transactional pieces of paper. AI and the ability to leverage it in a conversational way to help connect them, it will increase their experience exponentially.
Allyn Bailey (17m 24s):
We know they understand and expect this experience because they’re starting to have it on the consumer side. This is the other story I tell people every day with candidates. Candidates didn’t wake up one day and become a candidate. They live a whole life outside of the recruiting and hiring process, which delivers a whole set of expectations for how they interact with technology, what their expectations is for responsiveness and execution of technology. In 18 months, they will have experience in they are today. Listen, whatever number we have out there of individuals who are playing around with chatGPT today, you know what that’s doing? That’s training them in mental models to think about how they should be expecting.
Matt Alder (18m 8s):
Yes, agreed.
Allyn Bailey (18m 9s):
Engagement and interaction to happen By the time 18 months rolls around, this isn’t a convince them this is something to do. This is an expectation of the world they now live in.
Matt Alder (18m 21s):
We’re an industry where some employers still ask people to fill in their details three times.
Allyn Bailey (18m 25s):
Oh dear Lord. That’s what I’m saying. That’s what I’m saying. Imagine actually using a responsive Generative AI based conversation that allows me to gather information about a candidate from a variety of different places, including themselves, and then go fill out all these stupid forms that we need. Oh my God. That solves the problem we have all been facing all this time, getting all of our data to connect together, getting it to talk, to put all of it together so that we can analyze it appropriately. We now have technologies, not just technologies that technologists can go and play around with. You can go onto your laptop today and start playing around with the basics of the stuff anybody can.
Matt Alder (19m 4s):
To finish and pick up on a couple of things that you talked about, get your crystal ball out and think about this. What might The TA team of the future look like?
Allyn Bailey (19m 19s):
That’s a great question. Here’s what I think. I think the TA team of the future is going to include one or two individuals who are focused on looking at candidate experience and hiring manager experience data and using that to translate into designing experience models. I then think it’s going to include people who are technologists who can understand how technology can be leveraged in the use cases that can be built. Then you’re gonna need people who understand data and data management and privacy. Guess what? Recruiting’s gonna be really rich in compliance and legal people.
Allyn Bailey (20m 1s):
I think that’s okay. I’d rather have them inside helping us think about how to do this rather than always when we’re being questioned about our practices.
Matt Alder (20m 13s):
I ran a webinar last week about the road ahead in terms of the future of TA. One of the questions I asked the people listening to consider was the statement that we’ll never have as many recruiters again as we had in August 2022. Now, I can tell you’re nodding at me. That’s something that you massively agree with because obviously that is in the context of what we’ve just been talking about. You mentioned this already, but just to dig in a little bit deeper, what would your advice be to the recruiters of now in terms of what they need to learn, what skills they need to have for the future?
Allyn Bailey (20m 54s):
If I have a friend who comes to me who’s a recruiter or a sourcer, and let’s say, they’re one of the many who become redundant or have become redundant in this recent blood bath for recruiters. By the way, we go through these cycles like we talk about. We all know, usually, those individuals will start freelancing, they’ll go find something else, and then they’ll wait for the app to come back up again and start going to hiring. I would look at them and I would say, “Use this time wisely. Use this time to get super smart on what is possible in the technology landscape. You need to understand how it operates. You need to be the person that does the geeky things like I did.”
Allyn Bailey (21m 36s):
I’m not listening, I don’t know what I’m doing half the time, but sits down and says, “I’m gonna read this research report on how this thing works,” and then think about what it means for the future. Why do I want them to do that? Because when I say a TA leader is gonna have this concept and wanna put this in place, they’re going to need people around them who know how to do it. They’re gonna trust their recruiters and their sources so they have strong reputations with who they believe, understand the process and the design and they’re gonna lean on them. If you are one of those people who can lean into that experience and be part of building this future, you’re gonna have this.
Allyn Bailey (22m 17s):
I don’t even know what the jobs of the future are going to be. Nobody does. I have this conversation with my 16 year old frequently and I’m like, “I don’t know if you should be study out or not. Just do it.” I think now what we’re trained to people is you can now see what you need to know. Go learn it, get good at it, and be the trusted advisors to get people there and then see where that takes you next. What I would not do is stick our head in a hole, and start saying, “Ah, nah, that’s never gonna happen. People will always need me.” Everybody always says this, “This is never what happens.” This is not the time to be afraid. It’s the time to be bold and get out there and do something cool. Don’t be afraid.
Allyn Bailey (22m 57s):
Afraid is going to get you lost and disappeared very quickly.
Matt Alder (23m 1s):
This is not the technology of 20 years again.
Allyn Bailey (23m 4s):
Oh God, no. It’s not the technology of three years ago. I am telling you, the rapid pace at which this stuff is coming at us. As somebody who now sits on this side of the house and looks at technology, I look every day, I’m here at Unleashed talking to new startup businesses every day about what they’re doing. It used to be, I’d come into these and 70% of the people I talk to be like, “Why are you designing this? Are you something that does that? Okay, fine. Then there’d be like a 10% where you go, “That’s interesting. I don’t know how that works yet,” or then there’s a good portion of like, “They don’t understand the business.
Allyn Bailey (23m 44s):
That’s ridiculous.” I’m sitting now talking to people at the Unleashed Conference, people who are having one-off ideas, interesting, intriguing new concepts for things, and I’m thinking, “Crap, nobody’s done that before, and that solves the problem we’ve been waiting for. We now have the capability to solve problems we couldn’t solve before.” If we have people who are not, and a lot of people in this industry are not TA experts, who are coming up with answers to problems we’ve been dealing with for 10 years. You can pretend and act like it’s not happening or you can get in the game and start saying, “Hey, I knew that was a problem. Now let’s talk about how we can solve it.”
Matt Alder (24m 22s):
Allyn, thank you very much for talking to me.
Allyn Bailey (24m 23s):
I know. Thank you Matt. This was lovely. I appreciate it. Anytime.
Matt Alder (24m 25s):
My thanks to Allyn. 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.
