We’re living in a time of unprecedented disruption in Talent Acquisition. Exponential advances in AI, shifting attitudes toward work, the ever-shrinking life span of skills, aging populations, and global workforce accessibility are all converging to create a revolutionary moment in our industry. Any one of these factors would be transformative on its own, but together, they demand a completely new approach to how we attract, hire, and retain talent.
TA Leaders know that getting their transformation strategies right is crucial. It’s not just about filling jobs; it’s about aligning with long-term business goals and staying ahead of the curve. But with change happening so rapidly, simply reacting isn’t enough. It is critical to anticipate what’s next and ensure strategies remain relevant and effective in this fast-evolving landscape. There is a unique opportunity here to actively shape the future of talent acquisition.
So, how can you get the strategic foresight you need to plan for such an uncertain future? Earlier in the summer I spoke about the tools and mindset required at RecFest UK. This episode is an audio recording of that presentation.
In the presentation, I cover:
• The macro and micro forces driving change in TA
• Autonomous AI Agent Swarms
• An amazing but disappearing opportunity
• Can we predict the future?
• Is AI a Co-pilot or a Frenemy
• The six elements of Futurecasting
• Common cognitive biases to be aware of when planning for the future
• The TA Team of the future
• Behavior science and automation
• Developing the right mindset.
In the recording, I refer to several podcast episodes that are excellent resources for future-focused TA thinking.
You can get links to these episodes and a copy of my slides by going to mattalder.me/future.
Follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts.
Matt: Hi there. Welcome to Episode 635 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. We’re living in a time of unprecedented disruption in talent acquisition. Exponential advances in AI, shifting attitudes to work, the ever-shrinking lifespan of skills, aging populations, and global workforce accessibility are all converging to create a revolutionary moment in our industry. Any one of these factors would be transformative on its own, but together they demand a completely new approach to how we attract, hire and retain talent. TA leaders know that getting their transformation strategies right is absolutely crucial. It’s not just about filling jobs. It’s about aligning with long-term business goals and staying ahead of the curve. But with change happening so rapidly, simply reacting to it isn’t enough. It’s critical to anticipate what’s next and ensure your strategies remain relevant and effective in this fast-evolving landscape.
There’s a unique opportunity here to actively shape the future of talent acquisition. So, how can you get the strategic foresight you need to plan for such an uncertain future? Earlier in the summer, I spoke about the tools and mindset required at RecFest UK. This episode is an audio recording of that presentation. In the recording, I refer to several podcast episodes that are excellent resources for future focused TA thinking. You can get links to these episodes and a copy of my presentation slides by going to mattalder.me/future, that’s mattalder.me/future.
Embrace the revolution. How is AI going to radically change TA team? So, I’m going to talk about this for the next half an hour, but let’s start with a little quiz. So, here’s a quote. It’s quite a famous quote. Does anyone know who said this? “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” Any ideas? Steve Jobs. We’ve got Steve Jobs over there. Any advance on Steve Jobs? Bill Gates. Okay, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates. Right. Give us a cheer if you think it was Steve Jobs. Oh. Give me a cheer if you think it was Bill Gates. You’re both wrong. [laughs] It was Alan Kay, who’s the most famous computer scientist that you’ve never heard of. And he invented object-orientated programming, the graphical user interface, personal computing, and the laptop.
So, when it comes to inventing the future, he obviously took his job very, very seriously. Got another one for you. Who said this? Gave it away. Pretend you didn’t see that, okay? “Mobile phones will absolutely never replace the wired telephone.” Did anyone see who it was? You didn’t see who it was. Anyone? Take a guess. Absolutely, Martin Cooper. So mobile phones will absolutely never replace the wired telephone, a famous quote from the man who invented the mobile phone. So, it just tells you that inventing the future is all very well, but you have to have a vision that goes with it. So, obviously, did a great job at building a mobile phone, but didn’t have the vision of where we are now, where mobiles have done much more than just replace the wired telephone. So, the point of this session it’s really about empowerment.
It’s a very disruptive time for TA. AI is going to make it even more disruptive. And I just want to talk you through how we think about the future and how you can take control of what talent acquisition is going to look like in your business, taking into account everything that’s going on with AI, would that be a good thing to do? Yes. Good. I’m glad everyone’s so awake. It’s brilliant. Okay, cool. So, let’s start by just setting the scene. So, we’ll set the scene a little bit. As we know, there’s lots of change going on at the moment. A lot of the change is being driven by macro forces. So, political, social, economic, things going on, we had an election last week in case you didn’t notice. Lots of things that are setting the scene for change.
I just wanted to dive into some of the micro forces that are driving change that are particularly applicable to what we do. Now, you’ll find that there are your own micro forces within your own organization that are driving change. So, I picked on four, which I think are really, really important. The first one is technology, and obviously that’s what we’re going to be talking about as we move through the presentation. And the second one is productivity, and I’m going to talk about that in a bit more detail in a second. The third one is talent and skills, which I don’t really have time to go into, but you’ll all know that it’s still very difficult to get the right talent into your organizations. You’ll also know that skills are going out of date very, very quickly.
So, this is a real fundamental challenge in terms of what we do, recruiting the right people for our businesses, who are the right people, and how long are they going to be the right people? And that pace of change in terms of skills is just going to keep accelerating. The other one is jobseeker behavior, who’s had a massive increase in applications in the last 12 months. A lot of people are nodding. Could be down to economic factors. Who thinks that might be down to AI? We see lots of people. We’re seeing job seekers using AI and all these things. In a lot of ways, they’re setting the pace for this change. So, a real interesting thing, and we’ll come back and talk about that a little bit later.
Before we do, though, I want to talk about productivity, now please don’t try and read the words on this slide or even try and look at it. This is from a report that McKinsey’s did at the start of the year. Whatever you think about McKinsey’s, they do set the tone for what CEO’s and C-suites read. And one of the biggest things that they said that was important for organizations at the moment was productivity. And they were basing that on economic cycles and all these things. And productivity doesn’t necessarily mean what we think it means. So, the two things that I pulled out from it were they talk about upskilling talent and changing the way you work.
So, in terms of the top of the organization, looking at the talent, looking the rest of the organization, upskilling talent is a big thing, but changing how you work. And the big thing about this is about efficiency. And when it comes to efficiency, this is where AI slots right into our universe. So, one of the ways that you make things more efficient is you automate them. And right at the start of this presentation, I just want to say that I absolutely believe that more automation in talent acquisition is absolutely inevitable. There’s no way it’s not going to happen. You can quote me on that, and I’m sure we are on video. Automation has been creeping into our lives for many, many years now. If you go to McDonald’s, it’s automated. Everything is automated.
There’s no reason why talent acquisition is going to escape this. So, we really need to think about AI from that automation perspective. That’s a really important thing to do. And that obviously ties into this corporate message of productivity and efficiency. Now, when it comes to automation, I think the most-scary thing for me is we’re not necessarily in control of the automation that happens in what we do. What do I mean by that? So, this is an episode of my podcast at the end. A couple of months ago, I spoke to the chief people officer at UiPath. Now, if you’ve not come across UiPath before, it’s a robotic process automation organization. So, they build platforms that automate processes throughout organizations and the big revelation in this interview for me is they sell these in at a corporate enterprise level.
So, it may well be that your organization is buying automation at that corporate level in the same way that they bought SAP and all those other things that affect the software that we use. So, it may well be that the way that talent acquisition gets automated is not in our control. So that’s what I mean about inevitability, and that’s what I mean about empowering you to be able to have a vision about what all this might look like. So, let’s talk about technology, because that’s obviously why we’re here. So, this is the force that’s driving change. So, the first thing to say, and I’m sure this will be mentioned a number of times from the stage today, is just how quickly AI is changing and how AI is developing.
I think there’s a real temptation to look at what AI can do right now, let’s face it, is pretty impressive. Although it’s becoming the norm now. I think we’re getting used to it, looking at what it can do right now and judging the future by what it can do right now. So, I’ve seen people saying AI is never going to take over my job in talent acquisition because it’s very limited. All it does is allows people to write really spammy LinkedIn posts that use language that they don’t normally use. If you see a post with the words let’s dive in, it probably AI. So, it’s easy to look at that and say, “Do you know how is this going to affect what we do?” But things are changing very quickly.
We’re shortly moving from AI as a copilot to the world of AI agents. Now, I’m not massively technical, and I’ll show you a podcast in a second that will explain this much better than I can. But really, the idea with AI agents is they go and talk to other AI to do things and actually do tasks for us and make things happen. And this is where the real interesting bit comes around, automation and what goes on. So, I’m not making this up. AI agents working together are called swarms. I don’t know who comes up with this terminology, but they certainly didn’t do it to make it sound user friendly. So autonomous AI swarms are coming to an office near you. And basically, that’s lots of AI agents working together, asking each other questions and doing tasks. So, there’s two use cases here.
There’s ask use cases where you ask the AI something and it goes and finds the information. So, it might go and talk to lots of different systems to find the information that you need. But then there are do use cases where the AI is actually doing tasks. So, it’s semi-automated, semi-intelligent, it’s going around, it’s looking at things, it’s talking to other systems, it’s actually doing the doing. It’s a bit difficult to understand, perhaps at a contextual level, but this is already here. So, over the last six weeks or so, I’ve done a huge amount of demos with startups who are trying to come into the TA space from an AI perspective. And there was just so many interesting ideas and so many interesting things that are happening.
So, I picked this company. I don’t recommend this company. I don’t know anything about them or whether their technology works, but the way they describe what they do and some of the demo that I’ve seen is absolutely fascinating. So, this is a voice driven agent. What it basically does is it auto dials up people and interviews them. So, it will take things out of an ATS and it will make a phone call and it will phone that person for a phone screening and it will say, “Hi, I’m an AI” up front. So, it’s not trying to pretend. They can match its accent to where that person’s from. They can also digitally clone another person’s voice so it sounds really effective. They were going to digitally clone my voice for a demo, but we didn’t have time to do it.
But basically, it can decide the accent he uses based on where that person’s based, if you want it to, then does a phone screening fairly standard. Obviously, lots of companies in the field who are doing automated screenings in one way or the other, but then it decides whether that person’s past that screening or not. And if they have it then goes into the next level straight away or it asks them, “Have you got time to ask more questions or can we book a time to do a second part of this interview?” or would you like to switch over to WhatsApp so we can just type these things.
So, it’s making those decisions and then it’s coming back to the recruitment team with a short list of candidates who’ve already been through two levels of screening, and it’s using AI agents to do that. It’s automated decision making. Now, for many of you, that might sound like absolute recruiting dystopia. [laughs] The robots are phoning up and doing these things, but it’s already happening. This particular company, they’re using it for nurses for lots of other things. And I think if anything that you hear today about AI makes you really cross and makes you think TA is never going to be the same. If that happens, the onus is on us to craft the way that we want TA to be in this AI driven world, rather than sitting back and just letting it happen to us.
And I think there is a tremendous window of opportunity to do that right now, and that opportunity might not be here this time next year. So, really, that’s my core message for today. It’s all about empowering yourself to really shape the future of TA within your business before a robot comes along and does it for you. I think that’s the key thing. Okay. So, if you want to know more about AI agents from someone who really understands them, rather than my garbled morning explanation, I would recommend this podcast. This guy’s called Jack Houghton. He’s the founder of Mindset AI, which is AI company that works predominantly in the HR space, not the TA space, in the HR space. And this is a great chat all about the future of AI, swarms of robots and all these things.
So, definitely check that out if you want to know more. So, let’s talk about the future. What’s the future going to look like? Can we predict the future? Can we control the future? All big questions. When people talk about AI and talent acquisition, there-s a small minority in each group, but there’s two really polarized views. So, over here you’ve got. I’m sure there’ll be people that you’ll hear from today saying this, “There’s going to be no more talent acquisition. This time next year, this field will be empty. Talent acquisition is over. We’re being replaced by semi-automated swarming robots.” I’m sure we all know someone like that.
And at the other end, you’ve got people going, “Do you know what? It’s not going to change. It’s not going to change. It might help me with my job descriptions, but fundamentally, nothing’s going to change.” It’s all nonsense. TA cannot be automated in any way. Now, there maybe people in the room who subscribe to these T schools of thoughts, and that’s absolutely fine, but I think that most of you will probably take your position in the middle. So, this is what I hear the most often people say, “Well, no, actually AI is going to be this copilot. It’s going to help us with repetitive tasks. It’s going to take all the boring bits out of my job. It’s going to leave the interesting bits. Recruitment is a very human driven activity. The robots can’t come and take it.” So, this AI as copilot is a real narrative that people talk about all the time.
And what’s that going to look like. Now, my challenge to you is what happens if the future looks a bit more like this? So, what if we land closer to the no more TA bit? Are we prepared? Are we thinking about it? Are we shaping what that might look like? Because I think that is very, very possible that that’s what’s going to happen. You can quote me on that if you want. So just a challenge in terms of your thinking. It’s really easy to get a go from the middle ground between those two polar positions. But actually, what if we’re more towards the no more TA than we think we are? What do we need to do right now to make sure that that’s a great future for everyone?
We’ll get back to the show in just a moment, but I wanted to take a minute or so to talk about something that I know is critical for you all right now. Talent acquisition is going through an unprecedented transformation and many of you are likely in the middle of planning your strategies as we move through 2024 towards 2025. We all know that operating models, change management, and aligning TA with corporate objectives are essential parts of any transformation strategy. But with the market and AI technologies in particular evolving so rapidly, there’s a real risk that your strategy could quickly become outdated. That’s where strategic foresight comes in. It’s a proven methodology that helps you build credible future scenarios, create agile strategies, and most importantly, have a proactive influence on what the future of talent acquisition looks like, both within your organization and across the industry.
I know you’re busy, so I’ve created a concise online course that breaks down strategic foresight into easy to learn tools specifically designed for TA transformation. It’s quick to implement and will keep you ahead of the curve. You can learn more by visiting mattalder.me/course, that’s mattalder.me/course. There’s really never been a better time to shape the future of talent acquisition, so don’t miss this opportunity to make a lasting impact.
So, the question is our copilot or is it our enemy? I like to position this in terms of Top Gun so I don’t think AI is Goose. I think it’s more of our Iceman. Now, I love the fact they made a sequel to this film because I can make a Top Gun reference to a room full of people who probably weren’t even born when it came out. So that’s fair play. So, yes. So, AI, it could be our friend, but it could be in competition with us, and it could take our job before we know it. So, I would think about it as a frenemy. I hate that word, but it’s the best word that describes it. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, says some of the most quotable things I’ve ever heard anyone say.
So, you see Sam Altman quotes cropping up all the time. And obviously any quote that he makes comes with a caveat that he would say that because his whole business is predicated on whatever he’s saying coming true. But this is a quote that I took from a podcast interview he did with Bill Gates, which I think is really interesting and should really help shape our thinking about talent acquisition. So, I totally believe if you give people way more powerful tools, it’s not just that they can work a little faster, they can do qualitatively different things. So, I think AI and TA isn’t about automating repetitive tasks and allowing us to do what we already do faster. It’s about empowering us to do something completely different and something that addresses those issues around talent and skills and productivity and all those kind of things.
So, it’s quite a big revolution potentially. Okay, so how do we know this? How can we predict the future? And I think this is a difficult thing, and I think it’s a difficult thing about doing a presentation like this. I would love to be here talking about the TA team of the future, giving you all charts and career paths [chuckles] in terms of how it might look. But the future’s uncertain. We don’t really know what’s going to happen in AI in the next five years. So that puts us in a really difficult position in terms of planning for the future, planning for the future of our careers, planning for the future of our teams. So, this is a methodology.
A lot of these slides are from a course that I’ve built that go into this in a lot more detail, but just to give you a scope of it at the moment. So, future casting, how can we predict what’s going to happen? How can we empower ourselves to shape the future? So, there’s six elements to doing this in terms of helping you shape that future. So, the first one is analyzing the forces that are driving change, which you talked a little bit about at the beginning. What is it that’s driving this? What’s really driving this change? It’s not just technology, it’s demographics. It’s all kinds of different things. So, what’s driving the change or what’s driving the change in my organization? Where’s my organization wanting to be in five years’ time, and how do I help do that?
Focusing on things that are very likely to happen. So, although the future is unpredictable, there are things that we know are going to be possible. Hopefully, the sun will come up tomorrow. [laughs] It’s a very low bar, but there are things that are very likely that they’re going to happen. It’s important to distinguish those. Identifying the trends that matter, this is the really difficult one. Out of everything that everyone’s talking about today, what’s a fad? What’s a trend? What’s really going to make the difference in terms of what we do? So, that’s a challenging one. One of the ways to do that is to learn from adjacent areas. So, if you look within the enterprise, you’ll see that finance, marketing, all these other areas are probably further along the AI journey than we are in terms of what we do.
So, even within your own organization, you can see what’s happening and learn those lessons. And also, if you look at other industries outside, that’s also the case. So, learning from adjacent areas is a really important thing to do. Study historical patterns. History is difficult because it doesn’t always repeat itself. So, sometimes you can look at what’s happened in the past and think that it might be a good indication of what’s going to happen in the future. And that’s not the case. So, classic example, England always get knocked out in the quarterfinal on penalties, and suddenly they’ve turned to this penalty taking psychological machine. So, history, not the thing there. The thing about history is a lot of things do repeat themselves because the human brain doesn’t change.
So, the human brain has evolved over millions and millions of years. And if you take a look at anthropology, it’s a really interesting discipline to understand that. So, there are things that humans do which they will always do. And I think that’s a key part of understanding what we can learn from history. So, think of the fundamentals of human behavior that are wired into a brain that takes millions of years to evolve. And one of the problems we have with modern life is our brains are not evolved for the fast, crazy pace of everything that happens at the moment. So, from that perspective, those things stay the same. However, a lot of other things do change. So, always a caveat when looking at history. And then the last one is to consider uncertainties and complications.
So, as a vaguely famous American once said, the unknown unknowns. So, what is it that might happen that could throw us off course? So, we had this thing called the pandemic. That was certainly something that weren’t expecting. So, these things happen all the time. So, these uncertainties, these unknowns, and being agile and planning for that is a key part of it. Now, the other thing I think this is really interesting is our cognitive bias towards how we look to the future and how we judge things. And I see these happening all the time when people are talking about AI. So, be very, very aware of the bias that your brain is automatically bringing to things. So just to run through these really quickly, confirmation bias, only considering information that confirms your beliefs. Are you doing that?
Hindsight bias, seeing past events as being more predictable than they actually were. That’s the whole patterns in history thing again. Anchoring bias, being over influenced by first impressions. And I think that copilot thing is a classic case of anchoring bias. It’s like the first people came out talking about AI, they started talking about AI being a copilot, and then we all picked up on that because that was the first thing that we heard. And it sounds good. It confirms everything I believe. So that’s another one. Optimism bias, I hate this one because I love being optimistic, but overestimating the positive while underestimating the negative. And unfortunately, all humans do that. And then perhaps the big one for our sector, status quo bias, not the band, reflecting the desire to keep things as they are.
And I think all of us perhaps suffer a little bit from that. So, when you’re thinking about the future of your team, when you’re looking at AI, when you’re assessing the software that people are trying to sell you, just think about what biases your brain is bringing to it. So, taking all that into account, I went through that whole process and I built a couple of scenarios that describe where we might get to. Now the first one is recruiting nirvana. Again, not the band. And in recruiting nirvana, I think, and I’m being optimistic here, I think that we have the ability to make recruiting absolutely amazing, fix all the problems, get people the jobs they deserve at the time they need them, furnish them with the skills that they need.
I really think that is a positive vision for what we do, and I think that everything’s happening at the moment in terms of technology makes that really achievable. So, this to me is the vision in terms of where we’re going. So, just a few points from recruiting nirvana. Employers can accurately forecast the skills they need and have them available just at the right time in their business. The candidate experience is super personalized even if it’s driven by robots. Technology streamlines the process. And we still have that critical human in the loop, that critical human touch to persuade people to join our business. So, this is a vision that I can absolutely buy into. If we’re not careful, though, we could end up in scenario two, which is recruiting dystopia.
So, AI with unchallenged biases, selecting people, automation actually means things become incredibly unpersonal, robotic candidate experiences that are dreadful because AI is available to create marketing content. Everyone’s recruitment marketing just looks the same, and it’s impossible to stand out as an employer. And recruiting is seen as a transactional activity that’s best left to the robots. So, this could happen. This could happen. And unless you buy into this, some of you might. Unless you buy into this, then we need to put our positive vision forward to get TA to where we want it to be. Because I think this is a strong possibility or elements of it are a strong possibility.
So, what happens to talent acquisition? This is the key question. Is TA expired or is TA hired? What do we know? What do we know? What do we know from everything that we’ve done in terms of looking at the future, this exercise that I’ve been through, things with a high degree of certainty, we know that TA is going to be disruptive and change. And we know that because it’s happening already, the rate of change will be quicker than it’s been in the past, and we’re already seeing that in terms of just how quickly AI is evolving, that’s another certainty. Companies will struggle to get the talent that they need. This is baked in demographically. We live in a country with an aging population. If you live in Scotland like I do, the population is even more aging. Parts of southern Europe, it’s worse. The US is an aging population. So, getting talent is always going to be tricky. And also, when we do have talent, skills change so quickly now how do we have the right people?
So, companies are always going to struggle to get the talent that they need. I think that’s an uncertainty. AI will revolutionize productivity and efficiency. Again, I think we can be pretty certain about that. I use AI for bits of my job and it certainly makes me more efficient, apart from when I’m going down rabbit holes of things that don’t. And I think the other thing as well, which is a really interesting point, is about silos in a talent function need to disappear. So, I’m seeing this already from quite a few organizations that I’m talking to where talent acquisition and talent management are working closer together. I was talking to Matt just before he came on stage about a company where they parachuted a general manager in to run the whole of talent. And he looked at it very holistically in terms of what skills do we need when.
So, I think that we’ll see that breaking down of silos in HR, in talent, and companies will have a much more holistic approach. I certainly hope so. But I’m seeing that happening already. So, what don’t we know? Well, we don’t know the exact speed of change. Anyone who can remember back 18 months or so when these large language models first came on the market, my social media timelines were full of people telling me that there will be no jobs for anyone in the entire world by last summer. That obviously didn’t happen. So, sometimes, how quickly are things really going to change when this great technology hits reality? How quickly does it shift forward? So, I think that’s an uncertain.
The exact rate of adoption, how quickly are companies going to want to adopt this? How quickly before they have empirical proof that if they don’t, they’re losing out to their competition. How quickly does that happen? We don’t know. The other one is the impact of legislation. So, the EU AI act is due to come on stream shortly and recruiting an HR sees high-risk activities in terms of that. The UK’s approach to legislation around AI has been quite interesting to date in terms of waiting to see what Europe do, then doing the opposite. However, that might change now that we have a different government. So, impact legislation is a big thing, the level of TA influence on corporate strategy.
I’m hoping that some of the things I’m going to talk about, some of the things I can talk about in a minute are really going to help empower you to have that influence within that organization but that’s sometimes uncertain and also the precise scope of AI’s capabilities, more than six months to one year out. So, I think we can see what’s coming down the pipe in six months, unless there’s some interesting surprises. But what’s this technology going to be able to do in a year’s time? I really don’t know. So, they’re the uncertainties that we’re dealing with. So, what about future roles for TA? So, as you’ve seen, it’s just a very uncertain picture in terms of how it evolves.
And I would love to give you job titles and all charts and career plans and all those kind of things, but it’s very difficult. And I think we just need to look at what are themes that run through all of the things that we’ve been talking about. So, the way that talent’s changing, the way the skills are changing, the way that AI is driving things forward. So, I just picked out a few areas that I think could be interesting. The first one is experience design, if you’re automating things, we want to give people a great experience. And to do that, you need to design that experience. You need to understand behavioral science, you need to understand how you can use automation in a way that makes things better.
And that’s the skill that I don’t think we currently have in our industry, and it’s one that we desperately need. So, rather than trying to fight back the swarm of robots, why don’t we spend our time working out how we can use them to make what we do better? So, I think that’s a big thing. Technology and operations, obviously, technology is a huge part of this. I think we’re already seeing huge confusion in the vendor market about tech stacks and what’s an ATS and what isn’t an ATS, and who’s launching an ATS and what goes on. So very confusing in terms of technology. So, skills are needed there. Marketing, how do you differentiate yourself when everyone has access to the same tools? I think that’s a really interesting part to it. Data and analytics, obviously, and then talent strategy.
I think that whole thing about looking holistically within a business. I wrote a book a couple of years ago with my good friend Mervyn Dinnen, who’s not here today for a change. We talked about total talent thinking, which is about a company just looking at talent completely across their business in terms of the skills they need and being agnostic about where those skills come from. So, I think that’s a really interesting area. If you want a bit more around this TA team in the future. I’ve got a great interview with Andrea here, who’s done a lot of work and a lot of brainstorming with TA leaders about what some of the roles might be. So, it reflects what I’ve just said, but there might be a little bit more detail in there.
So, my big message, though is act now, act now. There’s no time to wait and see what’s going to happen with all of these other technologies that have come into recruitment, starting with a fax machine going all the way up to mobile and Twitter’s in there as well. We had time to course correct. We had time to be cynical. We had time to sit there and go, “That’s never going to work.” You need to prove to me that it’s going to work. I want to see case studies. I want to see all these things. There’s no time to do that now. There’s no time to sit back and let AI happen to us, because if we do, we’re all going to be replaced by robot auto dialers. So, that’s a key thing.
And the reason there’s no time is that pressure from the top of the organization because of that productivity thing that I talked about and efficiency and also the candidates coming up and breaking recruitment processes by using AI to apply. There is some fundamental things that we need to think about right now. We can’t just wait and see on this one. And finally, you just need the right mind. Having the right mindset is really important. So, thinking strategically, that’s absolutely critical. We need to behave in a very strategic way to get the vision that we want. Being open minded about things, so just questioning everything. We’ve always done it this way. Why have we always done it this way? We always use CVs. Why do we use CVs at all?
Just asking all of these questions, questioning the unquestionable, I think, is a key part to this. Being flexible, everything I’m saying today could be irrelevant tomorrow because something else might happen. So, having that flexibility of thought and being able to change your opinion on something very quickly is essential. And then the last piece is that awareness of the cognitive biases that are in your head that may be shaping the way you make decisions or the way that you think about things. And I think despite my introduction, I’m actually going to finish on time. If you want the slides, if you want links to the podcast, you want to know about my course, just scan that code and I will send you everything you need. But other than that, thank you very much.
My thanks to the team at RecFest for hosting me as a speaker. Remember, you can download the slides and the links to the podcast episodes mentioned by going to mattalder.me/future. That’s mattalder.me/future.
Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
