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.
Episodes mentioned in this Round Up:
Ep 597: Talent Acquisition Excellence
Ep 598: Building Exec Search In House
Ep 599: Data Sophistication
Ep 600: Did We Predict The Future?
Ep 601: Quiet Hiring
Ep 602: The Skills Mismatch In Hiring
Ep 603: Talent Lessons From Elite Sport
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Matt: Support for this podcast comes from Plum. Plum believes that when people flourish, business thrives with its unmatched scalability this powerful talent assessment tool uses science-backed insights to measure and match human potential to job needs, enhancing talent decisions across the employee journey from hire to retire. To learn more, visit their website at plum.io. That’s plum.io.
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Matt: Hi there, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to the March Round Up Episode of the Recruiting Future podcast. If you’ve not listened to Round Up 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. A huge thank you to plum.io for their ongoing support of Round Up. I think the approach they’re taking to skills-based thinking is both highly innovative and highly pragmatic. You should definitely check out their website to find out more. Well, March was quite a month. The Transform Conference in Vegas was fantastic and it was great to reconnect with so many great people and make some fantastic new friends. However, the highlight of March for me was publishing the 600th episode of Recruiting Future.
A huge thank you for all of your support in listening to the show. It really does mean the world to me. Thanks, as well to all my amazing March podcast guests who offered some genuine thought leadership on the most important topics of the moment. I was delighted to hear that two of my regular guests on Recruiting Future were writing a book together. Talent Acquisition Excellence by Kevin Wheeler and Bas van de Haterd is now available wherever you get your books. And it was brilliant to welcome both of them back to the podcast to talk about their book in Episode 597. Kevin is the founder of the Future of Talent Institute, and he’s highly respected for his skills in predicting how talent acquisition and HR will develop and evolve.
Bas is a consultant whose keen sense of curiosity has helped him map the evolution of assessment technology and deliver an annual state of the Nation Report on corporate career sites. In our conversations, they brought different perspectives to the concept of talent acquisition excellence, offering some actionable advice and giving us a sense of what the future might hold. Executive search is often considered to be so specialized that it should always be done by an executive search agency. However, an ever-increasing number of large employers are now choosing to build in-house executive search functions. So, what are the advantages of doing this? How do you do this? And what’s the ongoing impact from tighter talent markets and innovations in technology.
My guest on Episode 598 was Katie Howard, Global Talent Acquisition, Luxury and Lifestyle Lead at IHG. Katie has made the switch from search agency to in-house just over a year ago and has been helping set IHG up for success in a highly competitive market for senior talent. In the interview, we discussed the difference between agency in in-house approaching and engaging with global talent pools and how IHG is seeking to make their candidate experience match their luxury guest experience. We live in a world of work where understanding, interpreting and telling stories with data has never been more critical. Although talent acquisition has become more data centric in recent years, many TA functions rely on summary statistics that don’t provide a sophisticated enough platform to use data to inform and influence their organizations properly. So, what can TA leaders do to make their data strategies more effective?
On Episode 599, I spoke to Ben Porr, Chief Customer Officer at Harver. In our conversation, Ben offered some highly actionable advice that TA leaders can follow to level up and tell compelling stories with data. We talked about what organizations miss out on if they only use summary statistics, the most critical sources of data, and how AI will empower decision making based on much smaller sets of data. I launched Recruiting Future nine years ago to attempt to understand the future of talent acquisition. Back then, social media was the biggest driver of change, and we were starting to realize just how much new technology would change the world. Predicting the future is always risky. However, if you approach things correctly, you can spot the trends that will stick and get a sense of what’s likely to happen.
To celebrate this landmark of 600 episodes, I invited my longtime collaborator and co-author Mervyn Dinnen to a studio in London to explore just how accurate some of the predictions we made were in a white paper back in 2016 about the future of work and to also discuss what we think is going to happen over the next decade. Skill shortages, shortening skill 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 just a short-term trend. So how did TA teams respond and what role do they have in helping employers redefine their thinking about talent, skills, and hiring?
My guest on Episode 601 was 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 TA teams have to play in this critical transformation. Skills-based hiring is still a hot topic as many employers seek to better understand the skills they need in their business both now and in the future. With the shelf life of hard skills shortening by the day, companies need to bridge the gap between talent acquisition and talent management to ensure that they’re hiring for the skills that actually drive value for the business.
Jason Putnam, the CRO at Plum joined me for Episode 602. Jason has tremendous experience in our industry and is continually talking to senior corporate leaders about their skills strategies. He has some interesting and unique insights to share and this is a must listen for everyone trying to make sense of skills-based hiring. We discussed the ever-changing focus between talent acquisition and talent management, the mismatch between the skills employers hire, for and the skills they actually value in the organization, and how jobseekers use of AI will change talent acquisition forever. Employers can learn a massive amount from elite sports in terms of spotting and nurturing the talent required to build highly effective teams. Having an adaptable, flexible, and self-aware mindset is critical in these disruptive times, and professional sports have coaching models that can help leaders develop this mindset in their teams.
I was lucky enough to speak to former England Cricket Captain Sir Andrew Strauss at the recent Transform Conference in Las Vegas. After his playing career finished, Andrew ran elite cricket in the UK for four years. He’s now the co-founder of Mindflick, a high-performance coaching business that uses psychology and technology to make the lessons from elite sports accessible to companies. We had a fascinating conversation and we covered topics including the importance of adaptability and self-awareness, why it’s important to understand and accept your weaknesses, and driving team performance by getting emotional buy in to a shared vision.
A huge thank you to Plum, Harver and Willo for sponsoring the podcast during March so onwards into April and I can promise you some absolutely outstanding guests on the podcast, so make sure that you subscribe or follow the show wherever you get your podcasts. I’ve also just published a white paper which explores 10 ways that AI will transform talent acquisition. You can download your free copy by going to mattalder.me/transform. That’s mattalder.me/transform. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
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