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 644: AI, Innovation & HR Tech
Ep 645: Recruiting Nirvana
Ep 646: Skills Intelligence
Ep 647: Attributes
Ep 648: Unstoppable Transformation
Ep 649: Building A Personalized Candidate Experience
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Transcript:
Matt Alder:
Support for this podcast comes from Plum. Plum is a revolutionary workforce solutions provider that knows when people flourish, business thrives. With their powerful new platform, Plum Thrive, you can unlock science based data to help you measure and match human potential to job needs. Plum Thrive provides personalized career insights, improves quality of hire and creates high performing teams from a single simple to use platform. Want to learn more? Visit www.plum.IO and discover all the ways that Plum can help you thrive.
[Recruiting Future theme]
Matt Alder: Hi there, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to the October Roundup episode of the Recruiting Future podcast. If you’ve not listened to Roundup before, it’s a short review of the episodes that I’ve published in the last month to make sure that you don’t miss out on the valuable insights my guests are sharing. My thanks to Plum I.O. for their support of Roundup. I think the approach they’re taking to skills based thinking is is both highly innovative and highly pragmatic. You should definitely check out their website to find out more. In October I published a number of episodes that I recorded face to face both at the HR Tech and hiring success events. I love it when I get the chance to record in person and thanks to everyone who sat down to talk to me for the podcasts. There are 15 guests across six episodes that I published in October sharing some amazing insights on TA transformation, the AI revolution and and skills based thinking.
First up was episode 644 which features three interviews that I recorded at HR Tech. The event was full of energy and optimism for the future as hundreds of vendors showcased new AI products and AI integrations. Everyone was playing up the new heights of efficiency and effectiveness AI can take us to as an industry. However, there was much more debate about the level of genuine innovation on offer and a sense that rather than thinking radically and reinventing what we do, we’re just looking at faster ways of solving old problems that don’t live up to AI’s potential to challenge the status quo. The first interview is with Allyn Bailey from SmartRecruiters, who predicted the rise of recruiterless recruiting on the show last year. I was interested to see how far she thought we’d come on that journey and what she thought is going to Happen next. The second interview is with Josh Sklüt, co founder of MyStandard, who was undoubtedly the vendor trying to be the most disruptive with a very different way of looking at the relationship between employers and potential employees. The final interview was a conversation with David Nason, founder and CEO of HireBrain, who seeks to better align hiring managers and recruiters, and who are the winners of the PitchFest competition at the conference. Technology is evolving quickly and advances in AI are likely to change talent acquisition forever. If you’re a regular listener to this podcast, you’ll know that I firmly believe there’s an opportunity here to make recruiting better for everyone, with the potential for AI to increase effectiveness, efficiency and experience exponentially. I call this recruiting Nirvana. However, other less favorable future scenarios still exist, and there’s only a short window of time for TA’s future to be in its own hands. It’s critical then that TA leaders keep up to date with the art of the possible when it comes to AI and technology and have a clear vision of the future that they’re moving towards.
Episode 645 features six short practitioner and analyst conversations I recorded at GEMS booth on the HR Tech Expo floor. I asked them all what they thought the biggest challenges are in TA at the moment, which of the current use cases of AI they feel are most valuable, and most importantly, what their own vision of recruiting Nervana looks like. The participants were Lindsay Saylors, Head of TA Insights and Enablement at Dropbox, Matt Corette, Director of Client Delivery at Hudson RPO Sarah White, founder of Aspect 43 Matt Jones, chief Product Officer at Cielo Talent, Maureen Clough, Creator and Host of the It Gets Late early podcast and Matt Charney, Editor in chief@decruiter.com skills based organizations and skills based hiring have been some of the hottest topics this year. While it’s hard to find anyone who disagrees that this way of thinking about talent strategies has enormous benefits, there’s still much debate and about some of the practicalities around strategy and implementation.
For episode 646, I was lucky enough to speak to two genuine HR thought leaders in the HR Tech Analyst room Heather Jerrehain, VP of Product Management employee workflows at ServiceNow, and Mike Bollinger, Global VP of Strategic Initiatives at Cornerstone on Demand. They both shared their thoughts and insights on the power of skills, the journey towards skills based organizations, the role of AI, and their sense of what the future future might look like.
Episode 647 continued with the skills theme, but through a very different lens. Soft Skills Hard skills Attributes Traits Competencies These words sometimes get used interchangeably when we talk about assessment and team building. As the momentum around skills based hiring increases, it’s important to know what we really mean when we talk about skills generically and how exactly we’re measuring someone’s ability to do a particular role. My guest on this episode was Rich Diviney, founder of The Attributes. Rich is a former commanding officer in the US Navy seals where he was responsible for assessing and selecting the elite of the elite for the famous Seal Team 6. He now speaks and writes about the use of attributes in team building and hiring. We had a fantastic discussion about the difference between skills and attributes in the context of hiring and development. We also discuss my somewhat surprising results from taking Rich’s Attributes test In the last few weeks, many established software vendors have launched AI augmented products, helping us to move past the hype and get a much more hands on view of what AI means for talent acquisition. There is still a massive amount of unknowns, but it’s evident that AI is the chief catalyst in what is now an unstoppable transformation of TA and the broader talent function. AI and automation fundamentally alter the speed and scale at which TA can operate, constantly pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. So what does this mean for TA leaders and practitioners right now? How prepared are organizations for this level of transformation, and how can TA raise its game to drive more value for its organization?
On episode 648, my guests were Dr. Swathi Palasamudram, Enterprise Business architect Bosch and Nazeem Ünlü, Global people and Organization Lead at Novartis. In two interviews recorded at the Smart Recruiters Hiring Success event in Amsterdam in September, Swathi and Nazim shared insights that reveal why the transformation of talent acquisition is truly unstoppable and how TA leaders can harness this momentum not only to keep pace, but to lead the way. Improving the candidate experience has always been a perpetual goal in recruiting. Despite the best of intentions, the improvement process’s effectiveness still ebbs and flows with the changes in supply and demand in the labor market. However, are things finally about to change? Ever since the exponential acceleration in the development of AI, I’ve been excited about the possibility of technology delivering a genuinely personalized candidate experience at scale. So what does this vision look like? Which elements are already possible and what do TA leaders need to do to make it a reality?
My guest on episode 649 was Don Tomlinson, CTO at Daxtra. In our conversation, Don gives us a refreshingly pragmatic view of the AI use cases that can be combined to build a personalized candidate experience and also highlights the pitfalls and dangers to be aware of. Areas that we discussed included the possibilities of adapting the hiring process in real time, the importance of transparency, bespoke communication at scale and the dangers of losing the human touch.
A huge thank you to Plum Gem and Smart Recruiters for sponsoring Recruiting Future during the month of October. So onwards into November, which is going to be a bumper month for episodes of Recruiting Future. So don’t miss out and make sure you subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
