This time last year, most of us hadn’t heard of generative AI, but it has dominated our industry discourse in 2023. The dramatic emergence of generative AI has illustrated how fast disruption is accelerating and has made us think deeply about the future of talent acquisition.
Back in July at RecFest, Tony de Graaf, Global Director of Hiring Success at SmartRecruiters, invited me to join him for a fireside chat about the potential impact of generative AI on TA. Even though three months is a long time in AI, this is still a very relevant discussion where we attempted to unpick what is happening and understand how AI is shaping the future of talent acquisition.
In the interview, we discuss:
• The AI hype cycle
• Does AI take away tasks or jobs?
• The pressure for change that is coming from the top of organizations
• Strategic workforce planning and hiring for future skills
• Moving from being operational to being strategic
• The transformation of marketing
• Democratized access to technology
• Is this the end of recruiting norms that we take for granted?
• Being relentlessly open-minded and questioning everything
• The future workforce talent and skills crisis
Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts.
Transcript:
Matt: Support for this podcast is provided by SmartRecruiters. SmartRecruiters enables hiring without boundaries by freeing talent acquisition teams from legacy applicant tracking software. SmartRecruiters next generation platform serves as a hiring operating system for over 4,000 customers, like, Bosch, LinkedIn, Sketches, and Visa. Companies with business-critical hiring needs turn to SmartRecruiters for best of breed functionality, world class support, and a robust ecosystem of third-party applications and service providers. To find out more, go to smartrecruiters.com.
[music]
Matt: Hi, there. This is Matt Alder. Welcome to Episode 563 of the Recruiting Future podcast. This time last year, most of us hadn’t heard of generative AI, but it has dominated our industry discourse in 2024. The dramatic emergence of generative AI has illustrated how fast disruption is accelerating and has made us think deeply about the future of talent acquisition.
Back in July at RecFest, Tony de Graaf, Global Director of Hiring Success at SmartRecruiters, invited me to join him for a fireside chat about the potential impact of generative AI on talent acquisition. Even though three months is a long time in AI, this is still a very relevant discussion where we attempted to unpick what is happening and understand how AI is shaping the future of talent acquisition.
Tony: So I’m Tony, Tony De Graaf, really Dutch last name. I work for SmartRecruiters. I live in Italy. I head up our global strategy consulting practice. I’m with them for four years, almost. Actually, it’s my first non-recruiting job in my life. I always was a classic recruiter career, right? “You go to school and what you want to be when you grow up is a recruiter,” said no one. So same for me. I ended up in agency jobs, did all types of agency recruitment jobs, then went in-house, headed up recruitment for multiple fashion brands in Europe, and for one of the largest eCommerce companies in the Netherlands, where I bought and implemented my third ATS can make a small educated guess which one that was. Rest is history, and now I’m here. So nice to see you all, and Matt.
Matt: Thank you. Well, thanks for coming to the last session. I know the bar is probably calling loudly outside. I’m Matt Alder. I’m the host and producer of the Recruiting Future podcast. I think I have the best job in the world because I get to talk to heads of TA, thought leaders, people who are doing really interesting things in the industry from all over the world to really find out what’s going on in the crazy world of TA at the moment. And as we know, it’s pretty crazy. So, I get to listen to all of the opinions and all the voices that are out there. I’ve been doing interviews all day asking people about the topics that we’re talking about. So great to be here, and yeah, great to be in this chat.
Tony: Yeah. And I think that is directly a good hook to start off a first question. You’ve been talking to a lot of the speakers here on stage, but also to others catching up to people you haven’t seen in a while. That’s the entire purpose of a festival/event. But is there something for you that really stood out, like, what is a big team that seems to not you can’t escape from?
Matt: So I think what we’ve learned today is if you put the word ChatGPT on anything, millions of people come flocking.
Tony: Yes, the tent was full.
Matt: [crosstalk] only, so write[?] it on the tent. And that actually resonates with the last few events that I’ve gone to. So I think there is so much interest in how AI is really changing our industry. I think also a lot of interest, a lot of excitement, but also a lot of trepidation in terms of where is this going, what does this look like for our careers, what does this look like for our teams, what’s it like moving forward really? I think the one thing we’ve also learned today is that no one really has the answers to any of those questions, which is why there’s such an interest. I think it’s why it’s also important to have these conversations to learn from people who are experimenting with these crazy technologies and really move forward from there. I think the thing about AI at the moment is we just have to think about where it’s going because everyone used ChatGPT. Everyone’s used it. [crosstalk]
Tony: Yes, roughly. Yeah.
Matt: Isn’t it really annoying? Isn’t it just like the most annoying interface and really difficult to use? I think that’s the bit where complacency can come in, because you listen to the hype and then you look at it and think– Actually, this does some amazing things, but it’s very, very difficult to use. I think what we got to think about is, well, actually, what does the interface for this kind of technology look like in 3 years’ time, in 5 years’, time, in 10 years’ time? How are all the vendors all around the field and you yourselves, all the other vendors are out there, how are they embedding large language models and things like that into their technology and what impact does that have on my team and what I do? So I think that’s the interesting thing. It’s this curiosity for the future and no one necessarily has all the answers yet.
Tony: Yeah. It feels like exciting times. It’s almost like the internet really became larger and bigger and the impact on the recruitment. A lot of the work was operational, shifting manually through resumes, walking downstairs every day, getting the post and looking at the resumes. There’s literally a big part of the job. It’s not also that we thought we’re going to be out of a job because all that manual work is going to go away, which was more than half of the job. I think we’re literally in at least the same level of exciting times. We think it’s really hard to judge because you’re in the middle of it. Is this bigger than the internet coming on and in terms of impact on a job or not? But I think it will have tremendous impact and I already saw that in the discussion that we just had. I don’t know where people were here.
The tent was so full because people really wanted to understand what it actually means for us. What I noticed is that when the discussion really goes to one end of the spectrum or the other end of the spectrum, I think it doesn’t matter what’s left or right. I feel that it is really connected to how you see yourself and what you think the value is you bring to an organization. Literally, why do they pay me if you have some not unsecurities[?], I don’t know if that’s the right word or doubts about what you do versus what ChatGPT can do. The conversation gets really fierce, really fast, right?
Matt: Yeah, absolutely. Because I think whenever you talk about taking people’s jobs away and changing their careers and all that kind of thing, it’s always a very emotive subject. I suppose there’s a couple of things to say about that. The first of all, I heard a really good quote about this the other day and it was like, “AI doesn’t take jobs away. it takes tasks away.” I think what you have to think about is what are the tasks that are involved in my job and could AI take all of those tasks and therefore, I don’t have a job? So, I think that’s one way to think about it.
I think the other really important thing, and I’ve not really heard this spoken about today, and that’s because we’re in a big field full of TA people talking about TA, but I think we just need to look sort of in the wider organization as well. You have to look at finance, sales, marketing, and just how technology has brought those functions on and how AI is being adopted in other places in the enterprise. Because I think understanding that then that helps you understand the pressure that there will be on HR and TA in the future from the top of the organization to say, “We have this technology. These functions are adopting it. They’re doing all these kind of things, what are you doing?” I think that this isn’t a voluntary thing that we can sit and ignore and say, “Do you know what? We’ll just carry on the way that we carry on” because pressure will come from other places-
Tony: Yeah.
Matt: -not even to mention the impact it has on the way that people look for and apply for jobs as well.
Tony: Yeah. I think that it will change tremendously. But if we already feel the pressure– I think you’re right. I think if we already feel the pressure on what it will do for our jobs and what will we do on a daily basis, the answer towards all the departments that we actually recruit for is the same. So even everything that we know about hiring great marketing people and what makes great marketing people or what makes great finance people, that will fundamentally look different in a couple of years. We need to be able to help our hiring community navigate that.
Matt: Yeah, absolutely. The turnover and the transfer of digital skills is phenomenal. One of the interviews that I had to do on the podcast because I just felt compelled to do it– It’s not been published, that be out in August, is I have to have people come and talk about strategic workforce planning, because to be 100% honest with you, it’s not a topic that I’ve delved into very greatly in the past. But it just time and time again with all the people that I’ve interviewed, we’ve talked about almost this transparency between talent acquisition and talent management and understanding skills in the business and things like strategic workforce planning and all those kind of things just to really understand the skills that businesses will need in the future. Particularly when you’ve got this ever-evolving technology which we don’t really know what it’s going to look like tomorrow, quite frankly. So I think it’s interesting.
Tony: Yes. Oh, my God, that gets me thinking about how do we actually do this, because this is the entire journey from being that operational recruiter to becoming more that strategic partner to the business. I think what I just realized literally just now is that we all know that we need to do that, but the thing that we always comes to mind is we don’t have time for that. We don’t have time to implement proper structured interview. We don’t have time to really be that business partner because we need to fill those roles. But the reason why we say we don’t have time is to a large chunk actually connected to a lot of operational stuff which ChatGPT could potentially do, so those reasons start to fade away that we don’t have time for that.
Matt: Yeah, absolutely. I said I’d [unintelligible [00:10:51] on stage but I was talking to Nick outside, [laughs] “It’s his shirt. He just stands out.” You have to point at him and say, “Look at that man with his that shirt.”
Tony: That shirt. [laughs]
Matt: We were talking just about how AI can do huge amounts of stuff for you very, very quickly, produce hundred pieces of content or whatever it was were discussing in next to no time. I think that it’s really how can you leverage that to create that kind of space in your job. I think the best quote I heard about generative AI in the last couple of months came from– I’ve forgotten his name. He’s a guy who founded Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly, who described generative AI as it exists currently, “As a universal personal intern,” basically. So it can do all this stuff for you, and everyone’s got access to it, which is the other thing as well.
If you’re not using it, someone else is, but you still have to check its work.
I think that’s where it’s difficult to make that shift because we kind of look at that and say, “Well, do you know what? This is pretty good. It’s pretty impressive. It’s done that. It’s not as good as a human can do.” But we’re still very, very early stages of this. There’s a great podcast interview with Mark Zuckerberg that I can’t remember where I heard it. I’ll try and remember. A couple of weeks ago, it’s him talking for two hours about AI and the metaverse and all that kind of stuff. But he talks about the large language model that Facebook have built, which I think is called Llama, as you do. But he was talking about how they’re planning to embed that in the whole Facebook marketing ecosystem.
So if you’re running a dog walking business in Dundee, it’ll pick your audience for you, it’ll pick your creative for you, it’ll optimize it for you. It’ll run all of those processes that traditionally you’d have to use an agency for or something like that. So it democratizes access to lots of things. I think that in the aspect of our professional careers, we really need to think about that, and how we can harness that and become more strategic because it opens the playing field up in so many different ways.
Tony: What I just remembered is that LinkedIn actually changed their algorithm two weeks or three weeks ago, but that’s actually what you’re talking about as well. So now, any social type of post that you do because that was very booming during COVID, working from home and all these kind of more– Facebook/LinkedIn started to merge a little bit, all those posts don’t work anymore. The AI or the algorithm or whatever need to officially call that technology behind the judging of the post literally looks like, “Okay, what industry are you in? You are in recruiting? Are you talking about recruiting? Are you challenging a certain thing? And do you actually have an opinion about that?” If you have that in the post, then it will go and explode. But if you just post something, it doesn’t flow as it used to be, literally like a month– I think it’s two weeks ago, maybe even less. So you already see this happening that we need to adopt our ways and strategies.
Obviously, I posted on LinkedIn this morning that I was going to RecFest like, ‘Oh, yeah, it’s here.” We’re coming at just like these standard texts, not super exciting, not a strong opinion. A few pictures, and I’m in a taxi on the way here with the picture of the weather. I got a whooping 16 likes. Last week, I posted something about a wouldn’t it be great if we have this app store Buff for recruiting, and you say, “I need help to build a DNI strategy in Australia.” You click enter and bam, you see every type of organization that can actually help you do that. That thing exploded and had over 200,000 impressions, 400 likes, and everything. So the difference is incredible. At the same LinkedIn profile, five days difference. So we already need to start adapt ourselves to these AIs and language models how they actually judge what we put out there.
Matt: Yeah. I think that’s quite an interesting point about how quickly change happens and how we can’t rely on lots of things that we consider norms. It’s interesting because I’ve asked lots of people around the field, “Will a recruiter exist in 10 years’ time?” I think this is probably the most biased group of people I could ask [laughs] because everyone said, “Yes–”
Tony: Yes, of course, I will have a job.
Matt: Yes, of course. I think that the answer is that we can’t– I know Elon’s got some very strong views on this, but we can’t predict what’s going to happen. It’s difficult enough to predict what’s going to happen tomorrow, let alone in 10 years’ time. But what I think we can do is we can be– It’s about questioning everything. I think that there are so many embedded things about recruiting that people don’t question. So this is why we’ve still got CVs, this is in many respects, recruiting runs the way it’s run for hundreds of years. I think that what’s going to happen over the next few years is we’re going to have to start challenging things that we’ve just taken for granted.
Tony: Yeah.
Matt: I think it’s being aware of what those things are that’s really important. Now, some of them might stay, but I think there’s no sacred cows about this. It’s like everything–
Tony: Everything.
Matt: Everything might change.
Tony: Yeah.
Matt: I think having that mindset that appreciates that is really the best way forward.
Tony: Yes. Yes, yes. So without knowing the answer being comfortable with the change. This actually leads back to the conversation and the statement about– I made about Mad Men yesterday when we were talking [Matt laughs] that I do believe. I think I said it in my talk before as well. If you look at professions like sales, marketing, finance, etc., these professions are very old. If you have your master marketing, maybe some of you do, most of the models you’ve learned are from the 1980s and 1990s because then is the time when the books were written and everything was discovered and figured out. We actually live in that exact time for recruiting.
So, I think we live in the like 1950s and 1960s of marketing for recruiting. In 20 years, 30 years, we have figured this stuff out how it really needs to go different and then people will learn based on our experience and failures. So I think, yeah.
Matt: I think that there are these three forces at play that are really changing everything at the moment. One of them is obviously the economy. We can’t really ignore that. Technology is obviously what we’ve principally been talking about. But also talent. How we think differently about talent? I’m watching some of the speakers on the stage today talking about moving from filling wrecks to being talent advisors, understanding the skills the business needs, predicting the skills that the business needs. The way we think about talent is changing as well. When you put those three things together, you get to where we are right now.
Tony: Yeah. This is why I think if I need to answer this question straight out, I think, yes, recruiters will exist in 10 years. It depends on the definition of a recruiter. If you look at the exact job profile of most recruiters today, no, I don’t think that will exist. We are being forced to be propelled forward. We wanted to do it. We already know. For 10 years, we’re talking about we need to be more data driven, we need to do something with scorecards and competency, skill-based interviewing, we need to become a little bit more talent advisors. We’ve been talking about that, but it’s very hard to actually make that change. I think the upcoming big language models and ChatGPT’s might be that push in the back that we actually need to make that change, if you will. So in 10 years, I think that role exists, because at the end of the day, there is an organization.
An organization, there are humans in some capacity that work in there. We can also have an entire discussion what that actually means with the upcoming ChatGPT. But let’s assume there are groups of humans that clunk together under a brand name. There need to be people that understand what humans do we have now and to what degree are we actually able to achieve our goals, and people have careers, and move on, and leave. There will always be this piece of attrition. So you need to be able to start to control and understand how this attrition works, and improve that or work on that as well, and then combine that with whatever the organizational goals are and understand what the skills and competency gaps are that we have today that we’re going to have in two years or three years. And then that’s all on the inside.
Then I turn around in the triangle and I look to the outside world, where and how am I going to get those skills and competencies in? Is that specifically hiring and recruiting people? Maybe not. Maybe we move way more to a gig economy type of form. But still, then you are responsible to get those skills and competencies in, so a company can achieve a certain goal. What the format will be in terms of what your role description is or classic recruiting or is it perm interim, I don’t care about that. But solving that problem for groups of people that work together and name it an organization, I think that still exists. But I think that is where our profession is heading.
Matt: Yeah. No, I would agree with you. I think it’s like that balance of how does a company get the skills that it needs to do what it needs to do. Some of those skills are AI driven. I think that’s the other interesting thing. I think the other thing about this is, it feels like we’ve been here before because I’m sadly old enough to remember standing up on stages.
Tony: Do I remember you think? [laughs]
Matt: I don’t know.
[laughter]
Matt: Maybe not. Standing up in stages in, I don’t know. 1999, and people would stand up then and say, “The internet is going to kill recruiting as we know it. By 2003, there’ll be no recruitment agencies left,” and all this kind of stuff. And then social media came along and everyone stood up or even the same people actually stood up and said the same thing, “This is going to change everything,” and all this sort of stuff. It has, to a certain extent, there’s been a a slow evolution. I think that’s what we’re still facing. We’re facing an evolution.
I think if you remember back to about February, when ChatGPT was all anyone talked about, apparently, we’d all be out of a job by March. So that’s been and gone. So hopefully, we’re getting through the hysteria and the hype that always comes with new technology, particularly in the world of social media, where everyone wants to do stuff. If I see another social media post that says, “If you’re not using AI, you’re falling behind. Please buy my eBook. It’ll just do [00:21:18]
Tony: Yeah.
Matt: But what I think we’re going to get is I think we’re going to get evolution faster. So I think all of the things that we’ve talked about mean that, yeah, there will be recruiters in 10 years’ time, but what they do and how they work will probably be more different than it was 10 years ago. That’s the only prediction I’m nailing up and actually making. [crosstalk] Because I think if you went 10 years before that, it hadn’t actually changed that much.
Tony: No, we just digitalized the way that we did paper recruitment.
Matt: Yeah.
Tony: That’s, I think, basically the only big change. Again, I think we’re living in the most exciting times right now because now we have to. We have to. Because if we don’t innovate and find new ways to actually attract talent and get them for our jobs, other companies will. There are way more different tools that are upcoming, and there are organizations that are ridiculously successful filling retail kind of jobs, focus on the use using TikTok, and all these things. They’re running circles around classic big retailers with big names that are already around for decades.
Matt: I think the other force that we need to think about, which you’ve touched on a little bit, is the talent and the candidates themselves in terms of how they apply jobs, how they use AI, and how that disrupts everything. I think there’s a thing where if you say, “Right, we’ve got all these candidates. They’re using AI. It’s writing their CVs. It’s auto applying for them.” Oh, my God, the world’s collapsing. It’s terrible. It’s like, who’s to blame for that? Is it the candidate? Probably not, because they’re just being resourceful. Is it AI? Well, it is, but we can’t change that. Or, is it our recruitment process? It’s always going to come down to– It’s the process, because you can’t change the other two things. They’re just forces that are going to continue.
I think in the short-term, it’s interesting that people are putting in technology to detect AI and all this kind of stuff, but to me, that just feels like short-term fixes. I think that ultimately the pace of the technology is going to run ahead of that, and that means we need to think differently about how we hire. In the context of everything we said about skills, it makes perfect sense that this should be when we’re rethinking it.
Tony: Yeah. I think that’s put my mind at ease a little bit, I think, is that all the pressing issues or the things that now start to move. In my eyes, it become a little bit insecure. We don’t know what to do. For me, they are always the same topics that we all, if we’re very honest to ourselves, already know that we needed to change over the last decade. Why are we still using resumes to hire white collar people, or why are we–? In operations and retail, it’s already proven. If you hire a bus driver, what does it matter what that person did for the last 10 years?
So I think the first wave that is going to come and I don’t think we’re going to need to look or can actually look a lot further is that all those challenges that we intrinsically already know that we need to change now actually, slowly have to change or change faster. So that put my mind at ease like, “Okay, at least we got enough to do for the next year, two years, [Matt laughs] three years.” Don’t worry about it.
Matt: I think the other thing as well is, so I do two podcast episodes a week. This is not an advert for podcast. I do two podcast episodes a week, which means I speak to lots of people. What becomes really clear and it’s become clear today as well, no one has the answers to this-
Tony: No.
Matt: -and no one is doing it in a a perfect way. I think that lots of people are looking for those perfect examples and they just do not exist. Even companies who are adopting some of these things, they’re still experimenting. They’re still innovating. We’ve also got a massive thing coming over the horizon in terms of ethics, compliance, legislation, all of these kind of things. I’ve got a podcast into coming out next week with a chief people officer, and we were talking about how can you keep that momentum of innovation going when you’ve got all this kind of compliance, and legislation, and all this kind of stuff coming down the line, particularly if you work in HR which is traditionally would run a mile from anything that did that. I think that’s a challenge. That’s a challenge moving forward as well.
Tony: Yeah, definitely. ChatGPT and GDPR. GDPR or how do you say it, ChatGPT is not GDPR proof. Simply put, because the moment you realize you can put a resume of a person in there, but you have to clean it up, all personal identifiable information, like, name, email address, phone number. You have to take it out because the moment you click enter it’s in the ChatGPT algorithm forever and you can’t take it out anymore. So it is very clear. It is attractive to use it. I’ve used it myself as well to see how well can it match. Obviously, I use public data of LinkedIn profiles, so only data that already existed out there. But there are so many things that we want to try, but we can’t. We just have to wait for the legislation and then yeah, experiment carefully, –
Matt: Yeah, exactly.
Tony: -I would say, but I wouldn’t wait for the legislation because then you’re already three nil behind. But there is so much we can do. If you have a candidate, you have an application, just that data that has no personal information, plus maybe a motivational letter, plus feedback from an interview, plus the job description that you have, say, give me a scorecard for the next interview to determine if this candidate is well good or not. Bam. You get very good information from ChatGPT that you can already use. So there is so much we can do. I think that’s what we need to focus on as the world around us evolves and finds a place with ChatGPT.
Matt: I’d be really interested in views from everyone sitting here. Does anyone have any strong thoughts or views or questions or complaints? [laughs]
Tony: Yeah. Are we talking gibberish is also possible?
Matt: Or, anything like that.
Tony: [laughs] We got a question.
Matt: We got a mic coming. We got a mic coming.
Speaker 2: If we jump 10 years ahead, what do you think it will look like? 10 years is a long time, but I think it’s fair enough. We’re saying in 10 years. So let’s talk about 10 years’ time. What do you think it will look like?
Tony: Yeah. I think, in my mind, that is pretty close to the description that I gave. So the classic role, if we take all our position descriptions, I don’t think they will exist exactly like that. I think what I think recruitment, TA, talent acquisition, whatever, our profession is moving towards is more like a head of talent and how does an organization manage the talent that they have, make sure that they’re satisfied, and how do you work on filling the gaps that exist. Literally, I tried to explain it that vague. So then that’s way more ahead of talent role. Not a recruitment or talent acquisition role, just acquiring it, so more head of talent because it’s more around managing all the human experiences in and around your organization.
I think it moves more in that direction. So you get more that split between more HR operations, and then running the HR calendar, and that it could very well be that the function house, the salary house, the L&D, and all these kind of things. Maybe in a matrix organization, maybe direct start to report to a head of talent that starts to solve the wider people challenges of the organization, if you will. That is what my gut feeling lies. What do you say?
Matt: Yeah. I’m going to take a real helicopter view on this because I think 10 years’ time,, 2033, trying to do my math’s there, [laughs] I think what it looks like is a skills cris, because if you think about the people who are going to be entering the workforce in 10 years’ time, so they’re currently at primary school. I have a son at primary school, and the education that he is receiving and the skills that he’s learning, from the 1950s. They’re not anywhere like [Tony laughs] where we’re going to need to be in 10 years’ time.
I think there’s a really interesting report that the Scottish Government commissioned a few weeks ago which looked at Scotland in 10 years’ time in terms of skills. So it said, “As a country, it’s moving towards renewable energy, and life sciences,” and things like that. If you look at the skills ecosystem through university, training within companies, training within schools, it’s so off kilter to where it needs to be. So I think that there is a massive role for anyone working in talent in 10 years’ time to solve that problem, because just– Not every country in the world, but it’s certainly in this country, I think it’s a huge issue.
Tony: Good. Thank you for that. I think we’re at time. Thank you so much for being with us for the last session. Applause for Matt.
Matt: Thank you.
[applause]
Matt: My thanks to Tony and all of the team at SmartRecruiters. You can subscribe to this podcast on 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 find all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com. On that site, you can also subscribe to our monthly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and 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.
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