Round up is the monthly show on The Recruiting Future Podcast channel that highlights episodes you may have missed and gives you my take on some of the key learnings from the guests.
Episode mentioned in this Round Up:
Ep 547: Generative AI – A Deep Dive
Ep 548: Rethinking Background Checks
Ep 549: Rethinking Work, Jobs and Recruiting
Ep 550: Promotion, Motivation, Commitment and Retention
Ep 551: Interviewerless Interviewing
Ep 552: Hiring Innovation in LATAM and Asia
Ep 553: The Strategic Value of Talent Acquisition
Ep 554: Perfect Business Storytelling
Ep 555: Using Skills To Predict Job Performance
Ep 556: How AI Is Transforming Recruiting
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Transcript:
Matt Alder: Hi, there. This is Matt Alder. Welcome to the September Roundup Episode of the Recruiting Future Podcast. If you’ve not listened to Roundup before, it’s a short review of the episodes that I’ve published in the last month to make sure that you don’t miss out on the valuable insights my guests are sharing. It was another month of big, fundamental topics on the podcast, and we discussed some of the huge trends that are driving change in talent acquisition, including generative AI, skills-based hiring, and the innovation in recruiting automation that we’re seeing in frontline hiring. On top of this, I got the chance to do a deep dive into some fascinating research around retention, background checks, and business storytelling. A big thank you to all of my guests for sharing their expertise so willingly.
It’s been an extraordinary year for technology. We can all broadly agree that the effect of generative AI will be transformational for talent acquisition. But how can we separate the hype from the reality to know where to focus in the short-term and how to plan for a much-changed future? With so much noise and minimal signal in the discussion about AI, I thought the best way to get a grip on everything was to talk to a genuine AI thought leader. My guest on Episode 547 was the brilliant Jon Krohn, host of the Super Data Science Podcast, bestselling author and Chief Data Scientist at TA startup, Nebula.
Jon was on the show back in 2019 and gave us a primer on AI that was so good, people are still listening to it now. This time, he did a deep dive into generative AI giving us some history, explaining the current reality, and outlining the radical potential for the future. Jon is brilliant at communicating complex technology concepts in an accessible way, and I got a huge amount of positive feedback about this episode. The conversation was eye-opening for me, and it’s a compulsory listen for everyone working in talent acquisition.
We featured several employers on the show with recruiting strategies focusing on hiring people with criminal histories. All of these employers have spoken about the benefits for the people they hire, the benefits they get from reaching new talent pools, and the benefit for society as a whole. Despite this growing list of case studies, several misconceptions about hiring people who’ve been involved with the criminal justice system are holding many employers back.
On Episode 548, I spoke to Shawn Bushway, a professor at the University at Albany and a researcher at RAND Corporation. Shawn has built a body of research on the impact of criminal background checks on employment, and his work informed the current standards of the EEOC. He now helps employers revise their background check policies to better reflect the science about re-offending and become compliant with EEOC guidance. We talk through some of the common misconceptions about hiring offenders and how many employers overestimate the level of risk by not making factually informed decisions. The way we describe work and jobs is mostly based on long standing assumptions that have been in place since the industrial revolution. The world is now a very different place, and the employers breaking free of our ingrained mindsets around jobs and recruiting are giving themselves considerable talent market advantage.
Dart Lindsley is Strategic Advisor for People Experience at Google. Dart believes that rather than being seen as resources or units of production, employees are actually customers of a product that we call work. There are some vast implications for talent acquisition here in terms of bringing genuine marketing thinking to HR and completely rethinking the role of recruitment marketing and employer branding. I absolutely loved having this conversation, and it’s a must listen for anyone developing a strategic plan for the future. As we’ve seen, attitudes to work are more complex and varied than ever, making identifying trends and patterns harder. There are currently critical questions about retention and productivity that employers need to understand. So, how can we make sense of our ever more complex motivational drivers and attitudes to work? ADP have access to massive Human Capital Management datasets. By combining this data with qualitative research, the ADP Research Institute is helping to shine a light on complex questions about work. They recently launched a new quarterly workforce report called Today at Work.
My guest on Episode 550 was Ben Hanowell, their Director of People Analytics Research. As well as looking at patterns in worker sentiment, the report has revealed a surprisingly inverse relationship between promotion and retention. If you’ve been listening to recent episodes of the show, you’ll have noticed the considerable amount of innovation currently happening in high volume hiring. Driven by skill shortages and automation technology, high volume hiring is an area that has given us an insight into what the future of talent acquisition might look like.
In Episodes 551 and 552, I did a deep dive into automation and AI in high volume hiring by speaking to technology CEOs with products that are helping to shape the future. Stephane Rivard, CEO of Hiring Branch, shared his thoughts on the future or rather lack of future for the job interview, while Max Armbruster, CEO at Talkpush, gave some important context around high volume hiring in Latin America and Asia.
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The talent acquisition landscape, as we know, is changing rapidly. 2023 has been difficult for many people in this profession, with lots of layoffs and an incredibly tough job market for recruiters. At the same time, advances in AI and automation technologies are driving types of change that we couldn’t have imagined a few years ago. And post-pandemic labor shortages are still a reality in many talent markets. All this disruption is forcing employers to think differently about jobs, work skills, and recruiting creating an incredible opportunity for talent acquisition to illustrate its long-term value to the business. So, what role does TA play in the future and how can TA leaders prove its strategic value when many of their teams are being downsized?
My guest on Episode 553 was Jessica Zwaan, COO at Whereby. Jessica is a cutting-edge HR thinker and has written a book, detailing how People Ops should be run using product management principles. She has a very similar angle on work to Dart Lindsley. So, it was great to talk to both of them in the same month. In our conversation, we talk about the future role of talent acquisition, and Jessica offers some practical advice from her perspective as a COO on how TA leaders can prove their strategic value. Regular listeners will know just how essential I believe it is for talent acquisition to learn the art and science of storytelling. Being able to craft stories that resonate isn’t just part of an effective recruitment marketing strategy. It’s vital to building internal stakeholder engagement and developing more influence to move TA up the corporate strategic value chain. So, why is effective storytelling so powerful and how can we all build our skills in this area?
On Episode 554, I spoke to is Karen Eber, CEO of the Eber Leadership Group and author of a new book called The Perfect Story: How to Tell Stories That Inform, Influence and Inspire. The book deals with the science and structure of good storytelling in business, and is full of advice that can help everyone tell more powerful and engaging stories. When talking about the future of talent acquisition, generative AI has been taking all of the limelight this year. However, arguably, although it grabs fewer headlines, the steady evolution of skills-based hiring is potentially even more disruptive to traditional recruiting norms. There’s an enormous amount of data, science, and research going into understanding the relationship between skills and job performance, and the results are smashing some of the longest held assumptions about hiring.
My guest on Episode 555 was Andy Nelesen, Global Head of Talent Acquisition Solutions at SHL. SHL have done an enormous amount of work to establish the link between skills and performance. And their research has revealed 12 skills that universally predict success. There is also a significant discrepancy between the skills employers ask for in job ads and the skills the science shows they actually need. We discuss the adoption rate of skills-based hiring, how it can drive diversity, and the real meaning of recruiting for potential.
Finally, to finish off the month, Episode 556 took a look at the implications of generative AI from a slightly different perspective. A lot of our industry conversation has been about creating with large language models to generate recruitment, marketing content, and automate interactions with candidates. However, the impact of AI goes much deeper than this, and its effect on the speed of vendor innovation is highly significant. AI is already changing the way candidates are found and matches are made, and has the potential to make Boolean searching and keyword matching obsolete in a very short space of time. So, what is the art of the possible here and how can TA leaders ask the right questions of vendors to ensure they’re dealing with genuine products that are ethically and legally compliant?
My guest on this episode was Mark Chaffey, CEO of Hackajob. Hackajob has integrated generative AI into its technology to vastly improve matching between candidates and roles. At the same time, they have a strong focus on using AI to improve diversity in tech hiring and are already getting some significant results.
So, onwards into October, and I’m very excited about going to the HR Technology Conference next week. I’m going to be presenting a mega session with Mervyn Dinnen on the Friday morning and hosting a live podcast recording in a Scottish brewpub, on Tuesday night in conjunction with Hackajob. Please come and say hello if you see me. If you’re not going, then listen out for the recording of the live podcast which will be available wherever you normally listen to Recruiting Future. So, don’t miss out. If you haven’t already, then make sure you’re subscribed to the show in Apple podcasts, on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
A huge thank you to SHL and Hackajob for sponsoring the podcast during September.
Finally, make sure you go to recruitingfuture.com to subscribe to my monthly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
