The unprecedented volatility in the Talent Acquisition jobs market in the last three years illustrates that many organizations still see TA as a transactional function turned on or off according to hiring demand.
This is a big problem. While the development of ever more sophisticated AI promises much for TA, it also represents an existential threat to the survival of any business function seen as transactional and easy to automate.
So, how can talent acquisition prove its value to the business and live up to its enormous strategic potential? Perhaps the first step would be to understand that value properly.
My guest this week is Toby Culshaw, Global Head Of Pipeline Strategy & Intelligence at Amazon Worldwide stores. Toby publishes a lot of thought-provoking content about the future of TA and has strong views on how TA should position its value within the enterprise.
In the interview, we discuss:
• Talent Acquisition’s significant challenges
• What is holding change back and why TA is at risk
• What TA does versus its actual value to the business
• Evolution or revolution?
• Taking a tiered approach to TA operations
• Breaking down silos in HR
• Taking a consultative and advisory role
• Adopting new, more meaningful metrics and KPIs
• Advice for TA leaders on where to get standard
• “Talent Nexus” and a future outlook of even more significant change and disruption
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from smart Recruiters. Smart Recruiters is your all in one platform for faster, smarter hiring, making recruiting easy and effortless. Smart recruiters are making some big changes, revamping their user experience, adding AI features and refreshing the ui. I know from experience that they truly are a company that really values the recruiter and the practitioner. They understand the intricacies of the recruiting business and this has always been reflected in their functionality and customer support. So it’s exciting to hear that they’re making a bunch of updates. If you’re ready to be part of the future of Talent Acquisition, head over to smartrecruiters.com and find out what they’re up to. Trust me, your team and your future hires will thank you. There’s been more of scientific discovery, more of technical advancement and material progress in.
Matt Alder [00:01:04]:
Hi there. Welcome to episode 640 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. The unprecedented volatility that we’ve seen in the talent acquisitions jobs market over the last three years illustrates that many organizations still see TA as a transactional function, a function that gets turned on or off in line with hiring demand level. This is a big problem. While the development of ever more sophisticated AI promises much for ta, it also represents an existential threat to the survival of any business function seen as transactional and easy to automate. So how can TALA acquisition prove its value to the business and live up to its enormous strategic potential? Perhaps the first step would be to understand that value properly. My guest this week is Toby Kolshaw, Global Head of Pipeline Strategy and Intelligence at Amazon Worldwide Stores. Toby publishes a lot of thought provoking content about the future of TA and has strong views on how TA should position its value within the enterprise. Hi Toby and welcome back to the podcast.
Toby Culshaw [00:02:24]:
Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.
Matt Alder [00:02:26]:
Always a pleasure to have you on the show. Please could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Toby Culshaw [00:02:32]:
So Toby Kolshaw I do talent intelligence stuff at Amazon. I’m a bit obsessed with talent intelligence, labor market dynamics, all that sort of stuff. So I run groups on it and do podcasts on it, webinars and seminars and all this sort of stuff. So I’m a bit obsessed with anything related to talent intelligence, workforce planning, that sort of stuff.
Matt Alder [00:02:53]:
You are indeed very prolific with your output in terms of the things that you do and everything that’s out there. And you kind of been writing a lot in recent weeks about the future for talent intelligence. The future for talent acquisition. And I thought it’d be great to have you on the show and sort of talk through all of that. Before we do though, let’s talk about the actual current state, the current situation. So what do you see as the biggest challenges for TA at the moment and what’s kind of holding what is sort of very necessary change back.
Toby Culshaw [00:03:26]:
Yeah. So I think TA is feeling the squeeze, frankly, at the moment. You know, we’re seen as a resource that’s a cost center that you turn on and off when companies are recruiting. We’re seen as a transactional resource. If you’re not recruiting, we don’t need TA turn it off. The problem generally with that mindset is a lot of the change and transformation and we need to do. We can’t do when we’re on full run mode and we’re under the pump then to deliver. So in busy markets, it’s really hard to do a lot of this change transformation. Then in a quiet market you’ve had a team cut. So it’s very hard to do this change of transformation. And we’re really feeling the squeeze. I think there’s some elements where we’ve set ourselves up for a difficult ride, the way we set our KPIs and what we see as success which we can get into. Beyond that, though, there are some circumstantial stuff. You know, it is a tough market. You’re getting a lot of pressure externally, so companies are cutting their cost base aggressively. And we’re seen as a resource that if we’re not owning, say, internal mobility and we’re not owning that internal piece, what is the value of a function that bases itself around putting butts in seats, if you’re not putting butts in seats? And I think that’s where we’ve kind of found ourselves squeezed in the last 18 months or so.
Matt Alder [00:04:42]:
Let’s dig into the KPI part of this because a lot of this is about TA proving its value, which within the organization. And a key part of that is data and proving that value. What’s going wrong at the moment? What are metrics that people are looking at? What should they be looking at instead? What’s the sort of situation with that kind of analytics side of things?
Toby Culshaw [00:05:07]:
Yeah, so I think there’s. And I’ve been writing about this piece for far too many years now. Most TA teams, in my humble opinion, were created initially to get rid of agency spend. So our initial KPIs were around doing things cheaper and getting rid of that spend and cutting that spend down. And then once we’d got rid of the agency spend, it was an increased efficiency play. So it was continued focus on that cost per hire and keeping that cost per hire down. And it’s the classic time quality cost piece. It’s, you know, once you’ve got that nailed, you’re looking at, okay, well how do we do this faster? Because we’ve addressed the cost piece, so let’s try and do it faster than we were before. So we’re bringing that time to hire down. And then once you’ve got that kind of as tight as you feel like you can measure, you start looking at that quality piece. And quality of high has been banned around for many, many years now. And I think most companies are still struggling to know what it is, how it works, what to do, etc. But the problem is for me, it’s all basing itself on the wrong premise of what our value is. I think for me there’s two different pieces. There’s one, what do we do and what is our unique value and unique selling point. And they’re two, for me, very, very, very different things. What we do is fill jobs. You know, you hear the mantra, right people, right place, right time, right cost, you know, absolutely, that’s what we do. We fill jobs, we’re there to fill. But that’s, you know, recruitment. For years we’ve been talking about that with talent acquisition. And in the same way buying transformed into procurement and it was that much more holistic view of their supply chain, supply chain management, procurement, management, TA is kind of trying to broaden that perspective and broaden that mindset. But all of our metrics and kind of key, key mechanisms are still based around that recruiter mindset of filling the job. And ironically not even the recruitment consultant. But I think we often miss that consultant bit, which is one of the key value pieces externally is that consultative advantage advisory piece. And I think that’s the bit we really need to double down back into is to really say, well, where’s our value in this chain? If we look at the overall life cycle management of talent, what do we do that’s unique, what do we do that’s different? Where’s our value in this? And for me, and I am incredibly biased, but for me, I think the thing that makes us unique is we talk to more of our competitors every single month than the rest of us organization probably does. In the entire year you talk to more competitors than your sales teams do you, you can dig into their product range better than any of the competitive Intelligence teams can. You can understand what’s going on internally and culturally, what’s going on from a compensation perspective, what’s going on from an organizational design perspective, what’s going on with their leadership and what, how it’s landing with the workforce. You can do so much, but we don’t bubble any of that to the surface because we get fixated on filling jobs and our conversations are around filling jobs. So I think we really don’t, as an industry, we understand what we do. I don’t think we understand what our value is.
Matt Alder [00:08:15]:
No, absolutely. And you talk about TA taking a pivot, being reactive to proactive, and really going from being a cost to really sort of illustrating that value. What are the elements of that give people a bit of a. Kind of, a bit of a sort of a sketch of what that might look like, the kind of things that a business kind of really needs from a TA team and how they should be talking about what they do.
Toby Culshaw [00:08:40]:
Yeah. So I think there’s, There’s a couple of things to think about and I, I’m. I think that there’s two ways of approaching you either go like evolution or revolution. And there is a part of me that sits there and thinks, we’ve just got to fundamentally change the paradigm, we’ve got to change the conversation, we’ve got to move upstream, we’ve got to have much more strategic impact. And obviously doing the talent intelligence work I do now, that’s kind of where we’re focusing all the time, is those big decision points and that big impact, low volume, etc. That’s going to be really hard for the vast majority of TA to pivot to for two reasons. As a skills, capability, competency piece, which it’s just a new muscle to learn and develop, and also a volume piece. You know, if you’ve got a ta org of 2, 300, 400 people, if they’re all trying to do that at the same time, you’re going to overwhelm the business and there won’t be that many decisions generally being made. You’re just going to drown the business in consultative advice. But underpinning all of that is the data and the analytics and the insight that you have to get much more comfortable playing with, get much more comfortable understanding, get much more comfortable bubbling up and synthesizing. And it can sound terrifying, it can sound intimidating, but. But it really isn’t. Most recruiters, if you go to them and say, we’ve got a red flag in site A, B and C with function and xyz why we’re not recruiting there. Anecdotally, they’ll be able to tell you. Anecdotally they’ll know their market, they’ll know their candidates, they’ll know their competitors because as we say, they’re talking to them all day, all day, every day. So they, they know the market really well. We’re just not very good at capturing that. So we’ve got to get a lot better at saying how do we capture this, how do we synthesize it, how do we bring it together, how do we anonymize it? Because quite often this stuff, depending on your region, you might be able to use it because of the GDPR or equivalency where you can’t necessarily use all this stuff at an individual level. But how do we get these themes and bubble this information up so that it’s not necessarily at the hiring manager level, it’s not necessarily at the individual recruiter level, beyond taking these key themes and bubbling them up and surfacing them to leadership to say we’ve got some issues here or we’ve got some opportunities here. So that could be something as simple as, you know, we can’t hire software engineers given location because our compensation is out of sync with the market. One or two anecdotes doesn’t work. You suddenly take that and say we’ve got a thousand people, people that we’ve spoken to and this is what’s going on. Suddenly you can have that difference.
Matt Alder [00:11:10]:
Yeah, I think it’s interesting there because you’re kind of really highlighting the issue that people have. They’ve, they’ve got to fill these jobs, they’ve got big TA teams. You know, how do you make that, how do you make that strategic move? And again, one of the things that you’ve kind of written about before is, is almost kind of a tiered approach to TA with sort of different things happening for different levels and types of job. Tell us a little bit about that.
Toby Culshaw [00:11:34]:
Yeah, this one kind of gets a bit contentious. Well, for some, which is why I asked you about. For me it’s it, it kind of makes sense. I genuinely think that the old 8020 rule, 80% of recruitment is business as usual. And the value add within our, within the process that we, as a TA function add is limited. It’s a process administration piece, it’s AD responsible now, selection of candidates, et cetera, et cetera. I don’t see a way where in the future that sort of work isn’t hiring manager self service. And to be clear, this is me Toby talking. Nothing to do with my employer. But I can’t see why we would want to hang on to that work, why we wouldn’t want the business just to be able to self service it and move faster, particularly as the tech improves. That makes it a lot slicker. Hiring managers can hit silver medalists in the system. They can recycle a lot more efficiently. You’re not having that huge amount of waste in the process through the ATS and etc. So I think you do end up with a tiered system. And I, as a hiring manager, I would quite happily go in and say do I want a recruiter from day one support to me or do I want to give it 60 days where I’ll give it a go myself, see what the ad response is like and if I need to, you know, in case emergency, break glass, talk to a recruiter. Cool. I’ll click the button. Tier 2 kicks in and we talk to recruiters and then you have kind of the, the roles that you know are going to be difficult. So more of the kind of sourcing search type piece where you focus your time and money and effort and resources. I think at the moment we’re, we’re almost like it or HR were 20 years ago before you had a move to low cost country and self service. So the kind of Ulrich model type piece I don’t think TA is really nailed that I don’t think we’ve really got to grips with. And this comes back to where our value is. We’re holding on to stuff that isn’t actually our value. It’s not actually where we add any value in a process. We’re just owning it and holding onto it from a remit and from a headcount perspective. But more and more I see organizations caring more about your value, your impact than your headcount and your, your army of people.
Matt Alder [00:13:47]:
No, absolutely. Absolutely. And what does the, what is the kind of that top level, that sort of strategic approach? What does that, that look like? What kind of. You mentioned that companies have struggled for years to define, even define what quality of hire means, let alone measure it. What kind of sits in that strategic bit, do you think?
Toby Culshaw [00:14:07]:
Yeah, I think you’d probably end up with your exec search stuff just by relationship and the nature of it. I don’t think exec is always the hardest to identify, but it’s that relationship face piece and the engagement piece I think that probably rolls through though. You’d look at things where it’s a high value, low volume, high touch, high Engagement piece. Yes. You can absolutely use all the new sourcing tools and the automation tools we’re seeing coming through at the moment. But I think we’re probably going to flood the market with outreach. And you know, we had a problem in sourcing 10 years ago where identification was a problem and it was really hard to find people and now it’s really not hard to find people, it’s really hard to engage people and I think we’re going to see a wave where we get a full on wave of engagement tools and big scaled sourcing tools. But the problem is if you’re, you know, we’re seeing at the moment, if you’re a Gen AI researcher, you’re just going to get absolutely flooded with outreach reach and you’re not going to talk to people anymore, you’re just going to switch off. So I think it will go for me it will go back to the future or go old school where you’re going to end up with a lot more recruiters or sources that are back to picking up the phone. They’re going back to going to conferences, they’re going back to networking, they’re going back to taking high value prospects out for a coffee and just finding out what they want from their career because it’s going to be those meaningful value driven pieces rather than a volume of activity type active piece.
Matt Alder [00:15:35]:
Yeah, I think it’s really interesting because I think that when you, when you automate, you know so much of this, it is that, that human element that that’s the thing that the way where humans are still needed. And I think that there’s a lot of talk about recruiting going old school again. And by old school that doesn’t mean cold calling 100 times a day. It means, you know, building those relationships and you know, working out how to find people and how to engage with them. So it’s really interesting and I suppose part of that is one of the, that I get asked about a lot is what does the TA team of the future look like? What kind of skills, what kind of people are going to be in TA in a few years time? What are your views on that?
Toby Culshaw [00:16:18]:
So I’ve kind of got two fairly different. It’s where I think it will ultimately go and I wrote a piece up called the Talent Nexus where I think it is, where it would ultimately go but I don’t think that’s feasible in the medium term. I think it’s stepping stones to get there. I think we’re probably going to see a state where TA will have to Start pivoting further from, as I mentioned, just filling jobs. I think that there’s got to be a rebuild where there’s a bit more higher value service there, that higher touch piece, whether that’s purely based around filling jobs still, whether it’s bringing in more workforce planning and understanding the demand signals a bit better, I think we need to address that because if we don’t, someone will. And I see more and more jobs being created around workforce planning, strategic workforce planning, that aren’t being created within ta. And traditionally HR is very good at having silos and siloed data and siloed information. That means that TA doesn’t really know what’s going on with the strategic workforce plan, doesn’t even know what’s going on with the operational workforce plan. Or they really get is the resource plan and suddenly they’ve got to fill all these jobs they don’t know anything about, or the jobs that come through aren’t in any way, shape or form aligned with the jobs that were highlighted in that workforce plan or in a timeline or a location or A level, etc. So I think we probably need to get a bit more robust there and say, okay, well, actually, do you know what? We need to get a bit tougher with the business. If they’re not giving us accurate demand data, we need to own that space and really dial that up. I think we’re going to have a bit of a challenge in that companies don’t want us, I don’t think, to rebuild in the same way. You know, we saw a huge spike of recruiter activity, market activity and recruiter salaries over the last five years or so. It’s a very expensive resource if we’re providing what is considered a transactional activity. If we can’t articulate that value, we become a very, very expensive resource. So I think we’ve got to pivot. We’ve got to get better at the advisory, we’ve got to get better at the workforce planning and the planning overall. And some of that starts with KPIs and metrics, and some of that starts with capabilities and some of that starts with relationships. One really simple metric to change immediately, get rid of time to hire. Time to hire is an utterly irrelevant metric. If you do want to know what, how good you are at doing this, have a forecast of how long you think it’s going to take to fill this job and then have a time and accuracy off that. So if you say it’s going to take 60 days and you come in at 50, great you’re minus 10. If you say it’s 60 and you take 90, well, you’re plus 30. Businesses generally, I find they don’t need everything immediately. They just need to know when they’re going to get the resource they need. Because if you’re, if you’re really good at forecasting it and saying, you know, your software engineers are going to take six months, well, as the hiring men join, then know, all right, I’ve got to get you that demand signal six months before I need this. As long as I can trust you’re going to deliver when you say you’re going to deliver. So I think nailing that sort of stuff down, that’s just going to. It’s pretty operational, to be honest. It’s not rocket science stuff, but it will fundamentally change the relationship and the type of conversation you’re having with the business.
Matt Alder [00:19:41]:
I want to talk about your vision for the future in a minute because it is fascinating and quite out there, but it makes perfect sense to me. What other advice, though, would you give to TA leaders who are looking at the function that they have now? They want to make that move to be more strategic. There’s a huge amount of disruption and change in the air. What are the. What should people be doing and thinking about?
Toby Culshaw [00:20:06]:
I think a very common Amazonian thing is you work backwards from the customer. So really understand your business. What do they care about? Because realistically, if they do just want it really, really, really cheap and they don’t really care about quality of hire, they don’t really care about time to hire, they just want a really cheap service delivery model. Great. You can build against that, you can absolutely build against that and you can understand what those key strategic deliveries need to be for the business. But equally, they might want something that’s really high quality or they might want something that’s really fast and agile and nimble, reactive, they might have really big strategic goals that are going to be pivoting fast. Like you need to be really clued into what are the business leaders trying to deliver, what are they trying to achieve and then work backwards from there. Work backwards is say, okay, well, what’s going to stop you from delivering X, Y and Z? It’s going to be the people. How do we tie in to make sure we’re delivering what you need for when you need it? I think we can have a habit of tinkering with TA and changing things that frankly, the business don’t care about. They just don’t. HR might care about some of it. TA cares about it, but I don’t think the business really cares. So I think we probably got to get a bit tougher with ourselves around having that line of sight between what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and if we are saying that things are valuable enough for us to do. Highlight that to the business. That that pushback on comms and that comms strategy of this is how we highlight all of the good value and all of the good work and all of the impact we’re doing back to you on a monthly, weekly, quarterly, whatever it is, basis. Have a, have a defined comm strategy, know what you’re trying to say, know who you’re trying to impact, know, know the, the goals organizationally that you’re impacting and how and why it fits in. It’s all, for me, it’s all around line of sight and then constant, constant communication over communication. Not about button seats, recruiting. It’s not about we’re filling X, Y and Z. Unless that is absolutely core to what you’re delivering. It’s, it’s around what are you trying to achieve as a strategic goal and how does this tie into to that?
Matt Alder [00:22:12]:
Absolutely. And I think the challenge here is that lots of people will find what you’ve been talking about as a revolution is a really big change in what TA does, what TA stands for. And you know, obviously, you know, there are challenges in moving that forward. However, the overall context of everything is for even more fundamental change. I think if we look at all the things that are driving change at the moment. So, you know, whether that’s economics or demographics or technology, the way that work is changing, the way that businesses are changing. There’s a seismic shift coming in the next few years about how we think about everything. And I was really delighted to read the piece that you wrote about this because it kind of really resonated with, you know, some of the things that I’ve been sort of researching and thinking. Give us your vision for the future. Where is all of this going? What could we expect in, I don’t know, five years time?
Toby Culshaw [00:23:07]:
Yeah. So I think with that initial change piece I mentioned, I think, you know, the underpinning thing there is around ramping up our consulting and consultative abilities and breaking down those silos. And obviously to do a lot of that, as I say, you’ve got to have a really strong consultative environment, really strong data analytics. You’ve got to know your stuff. The external context of how that’s changing at the same time is obviously seeing a big ramp up in skills Intelligence and skills based hiring and skills based organizations. The irony being that if you’re a good recruiter, you can do skills based hiring your entire career. Like the irony of all of this is that’s exactly what acquisition should have already been doing. We should have been looking at those parallel skills developments, parallel career paths, etc. So getting much better at this pan silo piece is going to be cool. Where I see it going to eventually, and this is going to be largely driven by computing power is in the article, I call it a talent nexus, but it’s a really holistic business intelligence structure and foundation that happens to look at human capital data. It’s much broader than ta. It’s beyond talent management, it’s beyond people analytics. It’s a pan organizational piece where the systems would look organizationally wide at the skills you have within the organization, at the gig workforce you’ve got and how it’s going to fit in and how it’s going to tie together. So a business leader for example, might go to IT and say, I want to open up a new software center in woods to develop this new business. We’re trying to stand up delivering X, Y and Z in the next five years and the system would be able to go well to deliver that you’re going to need X headcount or Y skill set. It comes into the workforce planning piece of, you know, buy, borrow, build, bot and all the other 15 Bs you could have within there to really say, well actually we can develop these highly intuitive and agile workforce plans rapidly and suddenly it takes a lot of the ownership away from individuals into the organizational piece and challenges everything around what the value is and what we’re doing. It will mean that you can really have workforce management and resource management organizationally wide. Rather than having hiring managers hoarding talent and not letting great people go, you can suddenly have the system identifying high performers and pushing them onto stretch projects much more aggressively and proactively. Rather than having TA teams pulling their hair out saying can we do internal headhunting? And the people saying no, can’t touch our own people. You can head on anyone externally, anyone external can head on our people, but we can’t head on our own people. The system will own that. The system will put it all together when it does its resource plan. If it’s looking at it going well, actually we do need to buy in some of this talent. Great, let’s trigger ta. Let’s look at the internal systems to say, well actually we’ve already identified all these silver mets Silver medalists. I can automatically message them to see if they’re even available. Let’s look at and say, well actually we don’t want to buy this in, we want to co create it with an rpo, we want to co create it with one of our vendors. Let’s automatically trigger an RFI or an RFP to get this information in and get things moving immediately. So rather than that same VP that wants to do this strategic priority, having to sit there and have 56 meetings with 17 different silos about everything else and slowly trying to like pull the hair out as they get all this together, the system will take a lot of that burden and will give us that holistic view. And we’ve mentioned it a few times, it’s that the silo thinking going away to holistic thinking. And how do we tie all this together to make it a commercial intelligence and commercial commercially impactful function? You know every VPs when they’re on, what’s your biggest asset? It’s your people. What’s the biggest risk, your future? It’s your people. And yet we have better supply chain management, procurement management tools to understand a nut and bolt with its QR code, scanning through our systems than we do about any of our people and any of the human capital landscape that we’re trying to play in.
Matt Alder [00:27:21]:
Yeah, no, it’s a really strange, it’s a really strange thing. But in this kind of vision, I mean, I think the two things that strike me about it, first of all, it’s real time. So this is happening, this is happening incredibly happening at a speed that we just couldn’t even imagine sort of making some of these decisions and doing some of these things at the moment. And then the other side is that kind of automation, that scenario building that intelligence, that data driven stuff where effectively the system is making a huge amount of decisions that are normally made by, and normally they’re made by humans. But actually the objective is to really effectively get the right people with the right skills or the right skills into the right place at the right time, which has got to be better for everyone.
Toby Culshaw [00:28:06]:
Oh yeah, 100% agree. The biggest thing holding this is the raw compute power. So to do this in the article I talk about quantum computing and to really do it, you’ll need to run all of these scenarios, all of these analyses in parallel to everything else. So it’s got to be running incredibly fast data sets all at the same time, all running in real time, which will be an insane amount of compute power. And we’re definitely in My mind we’re nowhere near that at the moment. Like if you compare this sort of model to like a traditional ATS system or an LMS system or you know, your skills based talent cards or whatever it is, we’re, we’re just a world away. I think we’re gonna see baby steps towards it. I think you see more and more of these talent management systems coming in where you can combine, you know, your skills profile with your learning management system or your mentoring system, et cetera. We’re going to see baby steps towards it where people do try and understand the skills people have and what they’re trying to achieve with their career and where they want to go and how they could flex and develop. But to really push it to the degree I’m suggesting in the article, it takes a whole different type of computing power that I don’t think HR has resources for at the moment.
Matt Alder [00:29:27]:
Absolutely. But I think with all of these things, the thing I suppose we’ve learned in the last few years is that these changes can happen a lot quicker than we anticipate they will.
Toby Culshaw [00:29:36]:
Yeah. It’s funny you mentioned that. I often look at the Genai stuff and I think I’m both amazed with how far we’ve come in the space of what, 18 months. And I’m really shocked at how slow and how little has changed in 18 months because fundamentally a lot of the outputs are same. You know, you’ve got more, more mature models, you’ve got more access. But the vast majority of the tooling, the vast majority of the use cases hasn’t really changed. I don’t think it’s been as revolutionary as a lot of people thought it would be. That’s because the underlying architecture to build this stuff is the same kind of RPA robotic process automation stuff that we’ve had for a decade already. The reason we weren’t already automated was it’s really hard to do that stuff now. All you’ve really got is all the automation stuff with built in gen AI capabilities and it’s still really, really hard to build all of that. I’m excited about where the next five years go and I think we’re going to get a lot of efficiency gains. But yeah, it makes me chuckle how little has really changed in the last year of it.
Matt Alder [00:30:45]:
And perhaps that buys TA some time to go through the type of transformation that we’ve been talking about.
Toby Culshaw [00:30:51]:
Yeah, 100%. So I think, you know, when, when you really think about TA and I, I asked this both on a poll, probably about a year ago and also at the ERA Exec Research association conference year before last might be the year before that. But I was asking about where the really unique value of recruiters comes from and I was slightly concerned honestly with some of the results. Some of the answers were it was stuff we were mentioning earlier around we put butts in seats or I can find unique things in a CV to show that somebody’s got a skill set that is an exception explicit in the CV. Or I can find a diamond and rough CV that suggests a career path that wasn’t there, etc. And I just terrified because I thought this is exactly the stuff that systems will do far better than you, far faster than you are at a scale that’s unimaginable that this isn’t our value. I think since then more people are realizing actually recruiters true value and TA’s real value is that people, the people side, it’s the connecting the dots between different organizations. It’s understanding the human element of recruiting. So for me, I think I’m hoping this period will be a period of let’s use tech where it’s valuable and where it’s better than us. Let’s use it to automate. Let’s use it so that people don’t have to get a job description from one field and copy and paste it into another field and pretend that that’s an advert. Like let’s use it for what it’s good for. The large language models, let’s use them for language. Let’s use them to help create better copy. Let’s use them for create chatbots so candidates can have a better experience, whatever it may be. Let’s use them for what they’re good for. But let’s use our people for what they’re good for. Use our people to really drive that value, drive that high touch, drive that relationship, have that human connection. Because if we don’t have that, I think we’re at risk. We really are at risk.
Matt Alder [00:32:51]:
Toby, thank you very much for talking to me.
Toby Culshaw [00:32:53]:
Thank you so much.
Matt Alder [00:32:55]:
My thanks to Toby. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts on Spotify, or via your podcasting app of choice. You can search all the past episodes@recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to our 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.
