Skills shortages, shortening skills lifespans, digital transformation, the AI revolution, hiring freezes and layoffs. These are just some of the factors currently reshaping how companies think about talent. It’s clear that this level of disruption is now the new normal rather than a short-term trend.
So, how do TA teams respond, and what role do they have in helping employers redefine their thinking about talent, skills, and hiring?
My guest this week is Rich Wilson, CEO and Co-Founder of Gigged.Ai. Before he became a founder, Rich had a successful career as a recruiter and spent time as a Gartner analyst specialising in digital transformation and the future of work. In our conversation, we discuss skills-focused strategies to reinvent hiring and the part TA teams have to play in this critical transformation.
In the interview, we discuss:
• Skill shortages and layoffs
• The shortening lifespan of skills
• Switching from cap-ex to op-ex
• Future of work trends
• How AI is creating new workforce opportunities
• Internal mobility, upskilling, reskilling and contingent hiring
• New ways of getting skills into the business
• Talent sharing and open innovation
• How does TA need to think differently about talent?
• What will the talent space look like in five years?
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Matt: Hi, there. Welcome to Episode 601 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder Skills shortages, shortening skills lifespans, digital transformation, the AI revolution, hiring freezes and layoffs. These are just some of the factors currently reshaping how companies think about talent. It’s clear that this level of disruption is now the new normal rather than a short-term trend.
So, how do TA teams respond, and what role do they have in helping employers redefine their thinking about talent, skills and hiring?
My guest this week is Rich Wilson, CEO and Co-Founder of Gigged.Ai. Before he became a founder, Rich had a successful career as a recruiter and spent time as a Gartner analyst specializing in digital transformation and the future of work. In our conversation, we discuss skills-focused strategies to reinvent hiring and the part that TA teams have to play in this critical transformation.
Matt: Hi, Rich. And welcome to the podcast.
Rich: Hi, Matt. How are you?
Matt: I’m very well. Thank you. And it’s an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please can you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Rich: Yeah. Last time I seen you it was in a pub in Las Vegas.
Matt: [laughs] Absolutely. So, that’s why it’s great to have you on the podcast.
Rich: I appreciate you you using that. I think I had one point and then you can run with the microphone. So, I appreciate it. Be clearer this time. Yeah, I’m Rich Wilson. I’m the Co-Founder and CEO of Gigged.Ai, a talent acquisition and talent management platform. As the name suggests, we break work into short-term gigs, and then match to both internal and external talent pools. Before that, I was a recruiter for 12 years with a leader’s group. And after that, I spent three years as an advisor, mainly in the future of work at Gartner to CIOs and CEOs of Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 companies. So, always been involved in recruiting and talent management in some way.
Matt: Fantastic stuff. That’s a really unique set of experiences. And I think, obviously very relevant for the crazy times that we’re going through at the moment. Now I know that you do a lot of thinking, and a lot of research and publish a lot of interesting reports as part of everything that you do. Gigged.Ai have recently published a new report. One of the big focuses of it is around skill shortages. Now for people who aren’t necessarily involved in technology, hiring, a lot of the narrative around tech jobs is all around layoffs and the layoffs that big organizations are making. Talk us through what’s actually going on in the industry, particularly around skill shortages.
Rich: Yes. So, it’s an interesting time. If you think about your skill shortages and layoffs are everywhere those– There’s also a lot of reports that went around even last week around, a lot of these jobs have been lost because of generative AI. Not true, right? Hey, Microsoft are letting all these people go, because they’ve been replaced generative AI. I think a lot of things going on from job title perspective. If you think about it, if you break it down, if you’re a hiring manager in the UK, and we’ve been very specific, the skill shortages, obviously, everywhere, but very specifically in the UK, you’ve got a lot going on. Macroeconomic being one of them. So, obviously, Brexit took a lot of skilled jobs. That’s continued to happen. So, that’s a big one. The skills being hired continue to change.
Digital transformation, even though it’s quite an old term is right phrase, you obviously talk a lot about it in your book. Every single FTSE 100 company and 250 and even SMBs are doing some form of digital transformation just now, that requires a certain skill set. You need certain skills, especially now. If you’re doing a generative AI pilot, you might go out to market and say, “Hey, I need some GenAI skills.” Essentially, they have said, “They’re going to hire 35,000 GenAI experts in the next two years.” Well, where are you going to find these people?
There’s less people coming through university, especially in Scotland, computer science and data science degrees, there’s less local people coming into them than ever before. So, if you think about it, yes, there’s a lot of layoffs, but those layoffs are very much CapEx or OpEx. spreadsheets. These people are still needed. There’s still a demand for someone to do it, but they’re just going to look to hire that person in a different way. They’re going to outsource it to a TCS or whoever. They’re going to look maybe for a consultant from Deloitte. They’re going to hire some contractors. They’re going to hire different models. At the end of the day, the demand is still there for people on digital transformations more than ever. Like, it’s not slowing down. But the talent pool in terms of where you would normally go to has shrunk considerably. And again, there’s just not enough supply to deal with the demand.
There’s some legislation going on there as well. There’s a lot going on around taxation, especially in Scotland and England. There’s obviously ISA5 which is causing a lot of uncertainty as well. There’s obviously general election, Scottish election, there’s a lot of elections going on in the next 12 months to 18 months. So, all of that is creating a perfect storm. And if you’re a hiring manager right now going out to look to bring in a new skill, you have got a headache. And it’s not the case that all these layoffs are just making more people to go and do your jobs. It’s just not correlating that way. I don’t think we’ve ever seen it like this.
Matt: Now, and I think we scale things are so interesting as well, because I saw number of conversations in the last few weeks with people for the podcast about skills, and really the lifespan of skills. I was talking to a chief people officer. He was saying that in some cases, the lifespan of some of the skills they need is six months. So, massive effect on how people think about hiring, a lot earlier when you when you said about hiring 30,000 GenAI specialists, because sadly, I’m old enough to remember the e-commerce revolution around the year 2000. And it was full of people wanting to hire 50,000 e-commerce specialists when e-commerce had only just been invented. So, it’s interesting that that’s come around again, but obviously, at a time where the lifespan of skills is so much shorter.
Rich: Yeah. Well, I think we’ve seen it with the blockchain bubble two or three years ago, Web3 everywhere. There was lots of solidity developers, lots of demand for all these skills, and those skills have pretty much disappeared. Mainly because the success or use cases for blockchain was quite minimal. There are success and use cases for it to work makes a lot of sense. But for the widespread organizations, it doesn’t. So, I think we’re going through that similar experiment at the moment. How many actual successful use cases are we going to see for GenAI? There are some obvious ones and there are some great ones already. We’ve integrated it pretty early. Our most used feature is our GenAI feature, most used one by a country mail. So, that has worked. But you’re seeing more and more of that.
So, yeah, like you said, that is changing in terms of the levels of demand, the type of skill. Prompt engineering is one of the biggest ones. Are you going to need a prompt engineer in 12 months when most people have got a digital dexterity to do it? Probably not. But you’re going to need more cybersecurity experts, data privacy experts, probably. That’s going to be the next can of worms, which is going to happen. You always imagine in three years’ time, one of the biggest, most in demand skills are going to be cybersecurity and going to be data engineering. We talked about it in the report how VT have been working to reskill a lot of the people in their shops. Sales managers in an EE shop are being retrained as cybersecurity consultants. We’re going to see much more of this upskilling and reskilling as big companies try and close the gap.
Matt: I want to come back to upskilling, rescaling and also how this affects the way companies think about recruiting just a little bit later. But before we do though, but one of the really interesting part of the report for me is where you talk about some of the future of work trends that you’re seeing and their impact. Talk us through some of those.
Rich: Yeah. So, every year, Gartner releases its future work trends. And to be honest, they’re the ones that people look to the most for inspiration. And this year, I think they’ve been really interesting. I’m not sure if I totally agree, but some I totally agree with. So, the nine trends have really focused on different areas. But the number one of it is the cost of work, surprisingly. So, that was the number one future work trend for 2024 is around the cost of work. And that is all around the mental, the physical and obviously the monetary side of actually people doing the work. That is why we’re starting to see companies shrink their workforce, because the sheer cost and that people are starting to want to work different ways around for their own mental health. This is what we’re starting to see around these directives to come back to work. Some of them are going down like a lead balloon.
The third biggest trend that Gartner cited was the four-day working week and how that’s going to become normal. This year, again, not sure if I really buy into that. Based on that, I think we’re still in this whole remote versus hybrid versus back in the office mandate. And I think until that is blown over, I don’t think the four-day worker really crack on. But then it’s talking around how AI creates a new workforce opportunity, that’s number two. And I think that is a really interesting one about how it’s around it’s creating opportunity. And it’s not just about job replacement. I very much write about it in the report. I definitely see GenAI as an augmentation. It’s a way to make people more productive. I really don’t think it’s going to have the mass layoffs or anything to do with that and I don’t think we’re going to see lots of jobs replaced because of what’s going on with generative AI.
And that puts me to the next point, number five on the trends was that GenAI will have painful costs. And I think those costs, like, I don’t know if you’ve seen some of them out there. I think somebody bought a car for $1, but places using chatbots without training them. I think unless you do pilot in GenAI in a safe space makes a lot of sense. So, we’re going to see tons of GenAI pilots. One of the biggest things we get asked for is skills of our own GenAI pilots. I think piloting our own use cases is really sensible, but we will see some data privacy issues this year. We will see some cybersecurity problems, and we need to be really mindful of the– If you think back in the day, I forget what one– I don’t know if you remember. Was it a chancellor that read the left one of his briefcases on tube underground in London?
Matt: Yeah, it happened quite a few times actually people leaving things on the on the tube.
Rich: GenAI, if you’re a CEO using some GenAI tools, it’s similar. And that’s the painful cost. If you put some really highly confidential information in and is asking it to rewrite it or review this for me, you really need to be careful around your data privacy. And it’s the same thing. So, I think we will see that briefcase moment used by a generative AI tool, and I think that is where we need to be really careful.
Matt: You saying GenAI is not going to take jobs away. Do you think it might fill some of these skill shortages though?
Rich: There’s two answers to that. I think first one, what we’ve seen in a report from the research that we’ve done, 51% of hiring managers are considering using GenAI to help with the skill shortage. I think there’s definitely use cases when GenAI can help, you fill a gap in the short term. For example, we’ve definitely seen customers using generative AI. Maybe it’s around digital marketing, maybe it’s around creating particular designs definitely seen it to help. Maybe the copywriting as well. We’ve seen copyright tools get used. If you’re trying to build a new product and you need to get the tagline in the website, you can use a generative AI tool to create that.
I think what we’re seeing largely is though that this work still needs to be reviewed by an expert. These tools are there. So, I think there are definitely examples where it can actually help in the moment. But if you have a glaring gap, “Hey, I am about to put out this new piece of software, and I don’t have a copywriter,” then GenAI I could help you at least prolong that need, maybe for a month or two. But when you go live and you’ve got a CEO saying, “Right, you’re about to go live in that product. You’re going to want a human to review that copy.” And an expert to review that copy. And I think same thing goes with code. If you’re putting out your code or you’re using a data analysis tool, before that goes to the board or before that goes out to the world, you’re going to want a human to expert to review that.
I think we’ll see a lot of rules become more of a review and augmentation of generative AI, but not as a full replacement for it. That’s definitely the way we see it. But yeah, as I said, over half of managers are going out, and using generative AI tools to help with the here and now. And I think most people, if they were telling the truth, would say, “Yeah, they’re probably doing the same.”
Matt: So, you mentioned that this is a perfect storm. There’s so much going on in terms of skill shortages, skills going out of date very quickly, lots of unknowns about GenAI and what’s it doing and what’s it not doing? What do talent acquisition professionals need to do? What do they need to think about when it comes to recruiting? In this kind of environment, how do they need to think about talent differently?
Rich: Well, I think going back to the current trends that Gartner put, I think two that are really worth looking at right in the hidden and they are number six is skills over degrees. You’re really starting to look at skill-based hiring over just hiring based on the fact that went to university for four years and they’ve done something for three years. We’re really looking at different skills to fill skill gaps, instead of thinking really long-term. So, I think that is something that we’re going to see more and more of.
And then the other one was that careers, stereotypes are collapsing. That’s something that we’re seeing a lot with Gen Z. So, 57% of Gen Zs now take a freelancer contingent role before they take a permanent job. So, I think those two alone, skill base hiring and looking at different ways you can onboard different types of talent, is really, really important. I think the days of just having a grad scheme or early talent scheme and then having a PERM scheme, Gartner predicts those days are gone. And I do too. I think going back to your question around, “Hey, you’re in TA, and what are you going to do this year?” Because I said, “I don’t think we’ve ever seen a more difficult time to be ahead of TA than we currently have.”
If you think about the massive over hiring that happened over the last few years, again, that’s not TA’s fault. TA people had to jump in and deal with that hiring. And then now if you think about the amount of TA people being made redundant, that are open for work, that are struggling to pick up. I know lots of amazingly talented TA people who are struggling to pick up a job. It’s a really, really difficult time. I think this is where you can really looking at different ways to stay valuable, stay relevant and add value to the C-suite.
So, ironically, I know I said I was kind of lukewarm in Gartner’s trends for 2024. I think a lot of the answers are in Gartner’s trends in 2023. So, the number one trend in 2023 was quiet hiring. And I really, really believe that quiet hiring is something that TA teams really need to embrace this year. TA has three key components. So, quiet hiring got left behind. Already killed a little bit, because it came right after quiet. Quiet, remember, that term came and left us. Well, quiet hiring came, and I think it was written off because it was a bit of a clickbait title. But quiet hiring is really, really simple. There’s three key components to it. It’s about internal mobility, upskilling and reskilling. I don’t know, they should probably make that four, but they say it’s three. And then the third one being contingent hiring.
If I was ahead of TA right now, I would really be looking at those three things and going, “Eight, what ones do we have to be able to get the right skills in place without necessarily having more permanent headcount?” Go back to your first question about the layoffs, we are seeing hiring freezes. 58% of the companies that we talked to, and these were leaders in the UK, 58% say they currently have a hiring freeze right now. So, if you have a hiring freeze right now and you’re in TA, you’re obviously feeling worried about that. But as I said, I think by embracing those three parts of quiet hiring, you can really add a lot of value.
Matt: Talk us through them a little bit in terms of what you think TA people should be doing, what you’re seeing with the employers that you work with.
Rich: Yeah. So, the first one is obviously internal mobility, something you obviously talk about in the book. It was something that, when I was at Gartner, I didn’t know anything about internal mobility before I was at Gartner. Gartner talked a lot about internal talent marketplaces and gave a lot of advice to CHROs and CEOs and COOs about why they should create internal talent marketplaces. It’s something that we’ve obviously built a SaaS product, which allows companies to create one very quickly. But that is a really quick way, whether you do it yourself or whether you use a piece of software like ours, being able to find a really good way to look internally before you go externally. I think in the book you said, “Only 5% of companies actually look internally before they go externally.”
If you can have a good process to know what skills do you actually have in play, and it goes back to Gartner trends this year skills over degrees, what skills do I have in my current organization. We’re going out and saying, “We need a cybersecurity. We need a Python developer. We need someone that can do GenAI prompts.”
If you’re in enterprise, you’ve got over probably 500 employees. There’s a good chance of somebody in your organization with that. But right now, most leaders either track the skills in an Excel spreadsheet or– And no disrespect to them, but on workday, the day that they signed up, the day they got the job, sorry, their CV went into workday, it pulled the skills and that’s the skills. But people’s skills update. I think being able to pilot.
And again, I talked about GenAI pilots, being able to pilot internal mobility in a small scale is a really good way to show value, because you can actually show an ROI really quickly, because you can say, “Hey, look, we were actually about to put a requisition out for someone paying 80,000 pounds doing this skill. We actually found that we actually had two people internally who could actually do it on a side basis or a secondment,” or whatever. But being able to do that is really interesting. I think if you’re a TA leader, that would be my number one advice to this year. Pilot internal mobility. Don’t think it’s really difficult to do. It’s really not. I said there’s software that can help you do it quite cheaply and quite easily. There’s definitely different ways to do it, but it’s something that we are seeing more and more.
Matt: What about contingent hiring? That’s obviously something that’s very, very core to what you do. How is that changing? How do people need to think about that differently?
Rich: Yeah, I think there’s a big paradigm shift needed here. Now obviously, I was a contract recruiter during the deep recession in 2008 and what came out of that. So, it’s a space that I know particularly well and I’m really passionate about. I think in terms of traditionally, we’ve always thought about contingent hiring really being one way and one way only and being contract hiring. And that contract hiring being through an MSP, obviously a VMS to manage. We’ve always thought about these large contingent work programs.
A lot of the time, contingent hiring won’t hit ahead of TA. There will often be a team that will focus on the contingent work program. But I think that’s another paradigm that I think is going to change a– you’re going to expect more ownership under the one person. There’s going to be less contingent work programs. But I think there are so many other ways to hire talent that is not just through a contractor, but is short-term.
I talk a lot about statement of work. The statement of work market in the UK alone is £16 billion right now. That was the SIA research. That’s a huge market. It’s nearly 300 million of talent is hired through a statement of work. There’s two types of statement of work. Timing material, which is staffing agencies do most consultancies work that way. But then you get the one, and this is the one I’m most passionate about through our platform is outcome-based statement of work. You’re seeing more and more companies offer outcome based, whereas you pay based on milestone and you tap into different talent pools.
The other one being is interim hiring. We’re seeing more fractional CTOs, fractional CFOs. We’re seeing more leadership teams being hired fractional. One of the other ones I love just now is talent sharing. There’s a UK based company called ditto that I really like. They do secondments. So, let’s say I have a finance assistant and that finance assistant, I don’t have demand for that person right now.
They’ve actually got a marketplace for other companies can hire them on secondment. They just pick up the permanent salary. And they actually [unintelligible [00:26:58] it to that company, so that company actually can generate revenue. There’s companies like Vodafone, who use that, who actually generate revenue from the current people. On our open talent platform, I won’t name names, but we’ve got some large, global consultancies that have bench resource on our platform that picking up work, and that company is actually generating the revenue stream through that.
So, talent sharing is one that we’re seeing more and more here. And that’s not a contractor. But still contingent. Freelance and gig work, obviously, Upwork and Fiverr shares have doubled this year. We’re seeing more and more demand through these freelance gig platforms. Again, I wouldn’t say that we’re one of them, we’re in that space, but we’re actually more of an outcome-based platform and an internal talent marketplace. We’re actually not trying to be an Upwork or a Fiverr, as people often think. But as I said, Upwork share price doubled this year. So far this year, it has doubled, because more and more companies are hiring that way.
And then the one that I really like, which– I think we should see more in the UK. NASA have been doing this for years, is open innovation challenges, putting out challenges, about the things that you need done. NASA built the data mapping for the asteroids via open innovation challenges. It’s an amazing way. You can use gig platforms to do it, but it’s a way to tap in. For example, on our open talent marketplace, the people that we have on that, contractors, sure, traditional freelancers, but then there are the boutique consultancies I mentioned. But the most interesting one, and actually we’re 70% of the skills that we place are side hustles. So, you can have people who are permanent, but actually have their own consultancy on the side. So, for example, we had a huge shipping company and they needed their cybersecurity strategy reviewed.
Now, they went out to the [unintelligible [00:29:07], but it was too expensive. They didn’t have the budget. So, they put it onto our platform and they got a CISO from a bank. So, there’s no competition between a shipping company and a bank. And that CISO has his own site company. And all he does is review cybersecurity, strategies for large companies. I think they were able to do it for $3,000 instead of $30,000 that they were quoted. Again, it’s just a different way. And especially, if you’re trying to tap into some of the GenAI skills that I mentioned earlier in the podcast, there are different ways to tap into that the days that, hey, a contingent is just a contractor through an MSP are gone. There’s just so many different ways to tap into global workforce.
And again, this is why I think we’re grown so much. This year is that especially in the UK companies are going, “How do I tap into these talent?” I have skills that I need right now. I don’t have perm headcount. I can’t hire a contractor. And let’s not forget the issues that ISA5 has created right since it came in. Obviously, ISA5 is not new. But what happened in 2021 through the reform, that created a lot of gray areas where a lot of companies just put a blanket ban on outside. Actually, by finding a way to compliantly hire outside ISA5, again, you need to do it through a statement of work is a way to do it. And through an outcome SOW is actually the way to do it compliantly.
If you can do that again, the talent pool then broadens massively. And I think that’s the massive opportunity that we have in TA that traditionally it’s been right. We have 1,000 roles to fill. How do we get all these roles filled permanently? Then we have the contractor MSP to bring in contractors quickly when we can’t get someone in or we don’t need them permanently. But the huge opportunity we have now is that through internal mobility, contingent upskilling, rescaling and all the different technology platforms out there. You can actually build amazing skills without having to have thousands and thousands of [unintelligible [00:31:18].
Sam Altman, the OpenAI CEO, has said– I don’t know if I totally agree with this, but he said, that, “We are not long away from seeing the first billion-dollar company with one person.” And what he means by that is that through access to on demand talent and GenAI, you could build a really valuable business. I think this is a different way of looking at it now, right?
Matt: Yeah, absolutely. Just to kind of in a way, summarize for us, where is this all going to go? If we were having this conversation in five years’ time, what do you think the talent space will look like by then?
Rich: That’s a great question. I think we will see much more technology being adopted, I think over COVID, we obviously seen a massive explosion in HR tech. And HR tech has had its ups and downs with VC funding. It’s backing it up again. Even this year alone, we’ve seen more HR tech deals than we did pretty much all last year. So, I think we’re going to see much more HR tech solutions. We’ll see much more consolidation between the large companies. Obviously, workday being on a massive acquisition spree, but I think we’ll see a consolidation. But we will see HR technology being at the core of how we work.
GenAI will not go away, but the use cases that are successful will then be amplified. So, there will be elements of roles that will be largely staffed by AI agents. Your SDRs has potentially been one of them. There’s a company in London called the 11xXbuilding your SDR and sales experts who are AI agents. They’re not real people. They look like real people, they talk like real people, but they’re not real people. So, I think we will see more of that augmentation of AI tools in real. And I think we will see a shrinkage of the amount of people that you actually need on a full-time basis. Like I said, I don’t think we will see a reduction in the amount of people we actually need to do digital transformations or to run companies, but how those people are engaged will change massively.
I was on an open assembly call last week, which is a collective of TA leaders, open talent CEOs, just a real collection of people. They shared Harvard Business School. We’re on sharing an example of UST for a huge outsourcing company. They created a center of excellence for open talent, and they now hire 20% of all roles now that they hire through this open talent center excellence. So, instead of it being a permanent requisition, now they go through open talent first, then permanent. And if you think traditional contract hiring always was, “I’ll hire perm. If I can’t hire perm, I’ll hire a contractor until I find one.” I think that whole [unintelligible [00:34:09] is just going to be blown up over the next five years. We will actually see open talent center of excellencies. We’ll actually see generative AI center of excellencies or generative AI leaders for certain areas are augmented with GenAI bots, with a small team overseeing what that happens.
But I do think this is when over the next five years, we will see more change than we have. And over the last three years, we’ve seen probably more than we’ve seen in 10 years because of COVID, but I think that genie is now out the bottle. Generative AI is now out of the bottle. I said blockchains definitely diminished. But that’s not a way. Quantum computing is obviously the next big trend, which means that we’re going to be able to deal and process much more data much faster. That’s the next big trend coming.
So, these technology trends are not going anywhere. But I do think over the next five years, we will see a real change in how we build knowledge workers and how we build companies. I do think you’ve seen these behemoths that have got like 55,000 permanent employees. We will see a reduction in that, for sure. There’s no doubt about that.
Matt: Rich, thanks very much for talking to me.
Rich: No problem. Pleasure, Matt.
Matt: My thanks to Rich. You can follow 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 @recruitingfuture. You can search 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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