AI adoption is still slow in talent acquisition. Employers are experimenting with AI for tactical tasks while missing its transformative potential. This gap between tentative experimentation and strategic implementation stems from multiple challenges, including ethical concerns, a lack of training and awareness, overblown vendor claims, and anxiety about what AI means for job security.
So, how can talent leaders shift from automation anxiety to augmentation advantage, transforming their teams from tactical processors to talent advisors?
My guest this week is Matt Burney, Senior Strategic Advisor at Indeed. Matt has deep expertise in recruitment technology and workforce trends and explains how AI can elevate recruiters’ roles rather than diminishing or eliminating them.
In the interview, we discuss:
• The current state of AI in recruiting
• Why organizations remain trapped in tactical AI implementations
• Understanding the root causes of automation anxiety
• Asking better questions, not just getting faster answers
• Automation versus Augmentation
• Why efficiency needs to be about proving value, not replacing people
• The role of AI in skills-based thinking
• Why training, education, and greater awareness are vital
• What does the future of work look like?
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00:00
Matt Alder
Are we just tinkering with AI to do things like rewriting job descriptions while the real future of recruiting is passing us by? Why are we settling for tactical tweaks when strategic transformation beckons? And how do we move from automation anxiety to augmentation advantage? To find out, just keep listening. Support for this podcast comes from Indeed. They’re a brand that I’m sure you all know as the hiring and matching platform where employers can connect with over 580 million job seeker profiles. But did you also know that their front row seat to the global economy gives them a massive data set which you can access for free? This allows you to see the latest information on job postings, salary trends and much more.
00:51
Matt Alder
Or did you know that Indeed’s new AI tools make it easier than ever for you to find and connect with active and passive job seekers? There’s much more to Indeed. Visit Indeed.com. Hi there. Welcome to episode 698 of Recruiting Future 1 with me, Matt Alder. AI adoption is still slow in talent acquisition. Employers are experimenting with AI for tactical tasks, but missing its transformational potential. This gap between tentative experimentation and strategic implementation stems from multiple challenges, including ethical concerns, a lack of training and awareness, overblown vendor claims, and anxiety about what AI means for job security. So how can talent leaders shift from automation anxiety to augmentation advantage, transforming their teams from tactical processors to talent advisors? My guest this week is Matt Burney, senior Strategic Advisor at Indeed. Matt has deep expertise in both recruiting, technology and workforce trends. He explains how AI can elevate recruiters roles rather than diminishing or eliminating them.
02:18
Matt Alder
Hi Matt and welcome to the podcast.
02:28
Matt Burney
Hey Matt, good to catch up.
02:29
Matt Alder
Well, it’s an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
02:37
Matt Burney
Absolutely. So I’m Matt Burney. I’m a senior strategic advisor at Indeed, which is a very grand job title, which essentially means that I get to be a thought leader. That’s literally what my role is. So I spend a lot of time doing research about current trends in the world of recruitment, employment and to an extent, economics and tech. And I translate that with a very helpful content team into content I can share at events. So typically I do any event where we are. I think the phrase is one to many. I own those on behalf. Indeed. So I get to go to lots and lots of events and speak to lots of Employers.
03:21
Matt Alder
Fantastic. So, you know, with all of that, you’ve got such a good sort of take on the market and what’s happening. And we’re going to talk about a few things around that. But I can’t help but dive into AI first, because AI is one of your key areas and I’m just kind of desperate to hear you talk about it, basically. So, AI and recruitment, what’s going on right at the moment? Where are we going?
03:46
Matt Burney
It’s a really interesting point that we’re at the moment. There was a huge amount of hype, the recruitment ta, HR people. As we all know, we have a tendency to be the magpies of the tech world. Something new and shiny comes out and we must immediately go out and buy that or employ it in some way. And that’s a good thing because there’s been an awful lot of experimentation and lots of people exploring new ideas. But I think we’ve to an extent stalled. I think there is a kind of problem around analysis paralysis when we’re looking at kind of big bits of tech, but I think there’s lots of smaller tech that’s been implemented along the way that’s doing a really good job. My worry around a lot of this is that we are probably fixed in that drudgery cycle at the moment.
04:42
Matt Burney
If you look at the amount of hours it takes to go and do manual tasks in a TA team, there’s various stats out there. I saw one came from the CBI a little while ago saying it was about 10 hours a week were wasting on average on manual tasks. Bursin and HPR have said 14 to 14 and a half hours in TA specifically, and I think we’ve spent a long time focusing in on that. Can we rewrite job ads, can we send more effective emails, all that kind of thing, which is good, but we’re not seeing as many people moving towards strategy and productivity. You know, if you look at the. The kind of CIPD reports, It was what, 62% of HR leaders said they were either piloting or adopting AI last year. Great.
05:33
Matt Burney
But of that group, only 18% of that 62% said they’d actually integrated it into core recruiting processes. So I think there’s a bit of a disconnect going on still. I think there’s adoption of tech like the tech that we’ve already got integrated into the Indeed platform because it’s relatively an easy lift and you don’t have to go and learn something completely new. But I think the wider adoption is kind of slower than I expected initially.
06:05
Matt Alder
Do you kind of have any suspicions as to why that might be the case?
06:09
Matt Burney
I think there’s a degree of fear which I think is it was valid to start with, but I think as we move further into this tech being around and broadly available, I think that’s probably not a valid fear because the whole everyone’s going to lose their job thing, the headlines of, what was it, 8 million jobs in the UK are at risk, which I think was a headline that was on various newspapers not that long ago. The at risk thing just simply means that they’re at risk of change not disappearing. But I still think there is a bit of fear that I’m going to lose my job and therefore I’m not sure I want to wholesale adopt things.
06:55
Matt Burney
I’ve seen this with a couple of organizations where I’ve spoken to people who have said, yeah, within our team, when we try and implement new technology, there are some people who simply don’t want to adopt and they don’t want to make that change. And that makes change even harder. The problem that sits behind that is when organizations make change. And let’s face it, Matt, we’ve been around long enough to see probably giving our collective ages away here a little. We’ve seen the adoption of email, the Internet, mobile phones, social media, everything else, and we sort of just adopted them when we kind of went with it. And companies explained what they were trying to do with those.
07:41
Matt Burney
I think the clarity behind how you introduce new technology has perhaps not been there because I think it’s been a bit quick for a lot of people and that’s where that fear has come from. I think on top of that, there is so much you could do at the moment. I think a lot of people are saying, I’m not sure where to start. And that, I think, is a real shame. I’m. I’m a great believer in experimentation. You know, I’ve always been of the philosophy of if someone gives me a new piece of tech, my first instinct is to try and break it, which I think is probably not a bad instinct to have. But I think we’ve kind of got a societal problem in that there’s not really as many people who want to try and break technology straight away.
08:33
Matt Burney
There’s not as much room for experimentation, perhaps in some organizations as there was. So, yeah, I think there’s a lot of problems in there. And then there’s also the genuine and very valid fear of what if I put the wrong thing into a piece of technology, am I going to lose my job as a result of doing that. So we need some probably better clarity and we also need probably better guardrails so people understand how, when and why they should be using technology. And it saddens me a little bit because I think embracing tech is a really important thing to do. I’m a believer in Sundar Pichai’s philosophy that this is actually as big as the invention of fire or electricity.
09:19
Matt Burney
I genuinely think this is a fundamental shift, but if we don’t embrace it in the right way, then we create our own problems. Right.
09:28
Matt Alder
I kind of agree. And someone said to me a couple of weeks ago that this is the biggest conversation about technology that we’ll have in our lifetimes. I think it’s right. I think it’s bigger than the Internet conversation. But you kind of sort of nailed quite a few of the issues there. And I think the one for me is that it’s just the speed at which this goes and also the amount of disinformation and marketing spin and arguments about marketing and all those kind of things that are around it. So I think it can be quite difficult for people to really get a sense of what’s going on. What would your advice be to people in terms of keeping up to date or being more strategic?
10:05
Matt Alder
What have you seen other TA leaders do or senior HR people do that seems to work that could help the people listening?
10:13
Matt Burney
I get asked the kind of question of where do I start all the time? And I think the most obvious thing that everybody should be doing is go ask the question of the AI tool that you’ve got. You know, the AI is actually. Well, and let’s be clear here. We’re not talking about AI, we’re talking about generative AI. Two very different things. That’s a whole different rabbit hole conversation. However, when we’re thinking about whether it’s ChatGPT, Gemini, whatever it is you want to go and use, they’re actually really good at providing advice on how to utilize them really well. And if you have access to one of those things, then start asking the question and actually start saying, you know, if this is my job, where can I find efficiencies by using an artificial intelligence tool?
11:02
Matt Burney
ChatGPT is really good at telling you that kind of thing and then having that curiosity to go, great, let’s try and build a model for things. I’ll give you a really good example. I was talking to a company not that long ago who said, we really would love to be at the point where we could do strategic workforce planning and you know, that’s the age old thing. Are you doing strategic workforce planning? I think for the last 25 years I’ve been in recruitment. Everybody said we’d love to but we’re not. But I sat with the person in TA there and said look, can we just spend a couple of hours working with GPT and trying to build a model for it.
11:45
Matt Burney
The issue they had was have a data scientist internally who didn’t really understand what the ask was and how to go and build out a kind of model for workforce planning. So essentially what we did is we sat down and worked out all the elements of this. We worked out what that should look like. We put all that into GPT and we got a very large, very complex spreadsheet out the back of that. Sadly, GPT doesn’t put formulas into that, but we separately got those out and we created something that broadly worked. The outcome of that was that they could go and have a really grown up conversation with the data scientist to say this is what I’m trying to do or data analyst rather, this is what I’m trying to do and this is the kind of format I want it in.
12:30
Matt Burney
And that data analyst looked at it and said oh cool, I understand that, I understand where to get that data and I can make this better. And that was from a standing start of somebody that didn’t use AI in their day to day job. To clarify, that’s not something that I did on my work time indeed that’s not my job indeed with somebody that I know very well in the TA space who wanted a bit of help. But I think that’s a really good example. Right.
12:58
Matt Alder
You know, I’ve used Gen AI to do quite a few things like that. It’s so good sometimes, I mean you obviously have to be very careful that it’s not making stuff up, but it feels like cheating. It’s like this should take me a month and it just took me four minutes. It’s just like magic like that. Which kind of segues this nicely onto productivity, which I think you kind of mentioned before. And obviously one of the concerns that I have about the speed at which HR and TA is not adopting AI is from a kind of a C suite perspective. Obviously productivity is, you know, is a big kind of corporate driver and it’s associated with AI and I just feel that it’s going to kind of be forced upon people if they don’t do anything about it. Talk us through productivity.
13:40
Matt Alder
You know what’s kind of going on there.
13:42
Matt Burney
We have a real opportunity to be more productive. But we really need to think about what this really means. The greatest value that we’ve got in AI isn’t automation, it’s augmentation. So it’s about helping people ask better questions, not just get faster answers. So I think we really need to make sure that we’re not using AI to replace judgment, we’re using it to kind of sharpen judgment, really. So there’s lots that we can do here. We’ve seen, obviously, you know, there isn’t a TA person that hasn’t told me that they’ve got more applications coming in and that people are using artificial intelligence to get through a process quicker or to send out more applications. That’s problematic. But it’s kind of no different to whenever we’ve ever seen a new inflection point. You know, suddenly email comes.
14:41
Matt Burney
You’re not sifting through 100 paper CVs, you might have 300 email CVs. We’re in a kind of similar situation where we can improve efficiency, is actually looking at things like CV matching, CV passing, CV screening, scheduling, job optimization. All of that stuff actually has traction already. So we’re already seeing that change happen. That should be something that we’re doing. And if we take that number of 14 and a half hours a week of time spent on manual processes, great. If we’re already looking at CV passing, screening, scheduling, job ad optimization, great. We should be able to automate all of those. And that frees you up, what, 35% of your working week. Brilliant. What we need to be very careful that we’re doing, though, is that in freeing up 35% of someone’s time, at best, I’m not saying that’s a hard and fast figure.
15:44
Matt Burney
If we said that to our business, what’s our CFO going to say? You need 35% less people. And that’s the real problem. What we really have to do is show that in using technology, in using automation, using AI, we are allowing those people that we hired to do the job that we hired them for. And I think that’s really, really important. This isn’t about replacement, it is about augmentation. But it’s also about us proving the value that we have. We spend an awful lot of time focusing on the wrong things. But if we can improve that efficiency, then we can make those people that are doing the job do that job much better. And I think a good example of that, I was chatting to some people in the public sector.
16:35
Matt Burney
I did an event last week and we took the example of two recruiters that would be working in a very high volume area and say they’ve got 500 wrecks. You’ve got one person who fills all 500 racks and one person who fills 350 wrecks. The current way of thinking for a lot of people is that person who did 350 wrecks didn’t hit their number. Therefore we’re going to put them at risk or put them on a pip or whatever. If we’re using technology to go and have a look at how those people performed, it might turn out that the person who did 500 wrecks is really good at the manual processes. But the people they hire don’t stay in the job. They only stay three months, six months, maybe nine months.
17:22
Matt Burney
Whereas the person doing 350 wrecks isn’t so good at the manual processes, but is really good at finding talent. And they don’t enjoy the manual processes. Now, the intervention there is obviously we can probably get that person who’s doing 350 wrecks up to 500. But you know, realistically, do we need to do that? I’m not sure that we need to, but also that person is doing 500 reqs. We probably need to go and look at their skill set and actually say, can we train you better to go and be that connector of people? Can we train you much better to go and do what this person is only doing 350 reqs. What they do well is what you need to do better.
18:06
Matt Burney
So I think this kind of bleeds very quickly from we’re automating, we’re finding efficiency to actually we’re allowing and enabling people to be much better at the job we’ve hired them to do. We’re giving them the space and the air and the headroom to go out and do that job really well. Recruiters are the best example of this. They’re great connects of people, they’re great stakeholder managers. They can manage up, they can manage down, and they can manage people who are external to their business. But if they don’t have the space to do that, it’s really difficult for them.
18:45
Matt Alder
Give us a little bit of kind of overall context with your sort of economist hat on in terms of what’s going on in the market. What are the sort of real challenges that you think TA is trying to deal with at the moment?
18:57
Matt Burney
My caveat will always be, as our chief economist Jack will remind me, I’m not an actual economist. I’ve just done a few courses and I’m interested in it, which I always find hysterical, Matt, because I failed maths three times and now I spend time talking about economics, which is really amazing. But when we look at what’s going on from the kind of economic backdrop point of view, we know we’re in a bit of a tough time at the moment. Jobs have dropped back down to the pre pandemic level or below the pre pandemic level. GDP per capita is down to lower than pre pandemic levels. Know if you. And that’s, you know, the ONS were saying that only very recently we’ve got a kind of stagnation in productivity growth. It’s stagnated for arguably for a decade.
19:49
Matt Burney
And there’s some challenges right the way across the line here. You know, unemployment’s about 3.9%, economic inactivity is pretty high. And all of that is the kind of backdrop that you’ve got to work in as a recruiter. So you, I think truly understanding the workforce is a big part of your job. If you are probably at leadership level in talent, being able to clearly communicate to the C suite about why you need investment in new technology, why you’re having to deal with more applications than perhaps you’ve done before, where technology is an intervention here and what you can do to, A, find those people that you really need much more quickly and effectively and B, kind of combat that challenge of, you know, recruited dissatisfaction. So I think there’s a lot here.
20:49
Matt Burney
We’ve got a challenging labor market, I think, and I think one of the big problems that we don’t talk about enough is underemployment. There’s a lot of people that are in jobs that are below their skill level and that’s definitely rising. The CBI report from last year said that skills mismatch affected about 54% of employers. If you look on top of that, there was a lot of data came out of government last year and forgive me, I can’t remember the exact source. I think it was from the ONS that said 72% of firms had said that there were. There was a mismatch of skills as well that cost something in the order of the last figure that I saw that was published was 275 million.
21:41
Matt Burney
I’ve chatted to a few people in government and external think tanks who actually believe that something much closer to around about a billion in productivity cost. That’s hugely challenging. And this comes back to that whole kind of life cycle of employment, technology, work and the economy. All those four things feed into each other and are supported by each other. But if you have declining gdp, particularly declining GDP per capita, the result is always in, well, historically, let’s put it that way, has always been that you underinvest in technology and countries that underinvest in technology grow at a much slower rate. If you’re trying to employ lots and lots of low skilled workers, it’s really tough for your economy to grow.
22:36
Matt Burney
We’re in that situation at the moment and we need to make sure that those 8 million people that are exposed to risk as a result of new technology, that we are upskilling those people, that we are providing them opportunity, that we are even at the level of schools, we are making sure that people are prepared for the world of work. But also all those people that are in work right now that we’re asking more or different from, we actually train those people in the right way, we bring them along the journey because if we don’t, we have an enormous amount of risk that goes on here. That skills decline is a real problem. We’re busier than ever, but we’re arguably contributing less to the economy. That’s a failure of systems, not people.
23:24
Matt Alder
And I think out of all of this and all the disruption and all the craziness that’s going on, that’s the kind of, the one thing that kind of really worries me the most in terms of skills are also going to keep changing because of AI and other things like that. And no one seems to do anything about it. I always kind of think that when we talk about the workforce in 10 years time, everyone who’s in the workforce in 10 years time is either in the workforce or they’re in the education system. And I have a 9 year old in the education system. Some of the way that the education system works I kind of recognize from when I was nine and it kind of wasn’t really relevant then.
24:01
Matt Alder
So I think it’s a huge concern and something that as you say, is very much at that sort of systems level.
24:07
Matt Burney
Yeah, I think, you know, if you look at this, we’ve essentially confused education with certification and we’ve kind of confused training with onboarding. And we’ve got a generation of people who feel they’ve done everything right but still aren’t actually ready for work. And that’s a really big problem. If you look at companies in the uk, one in three companies reduced their learning and development Budgets post Covid and never reinstated that. And if you look at adult learning participation, the UK ranks 20th out of the 27 OECD countries. Those are pretty worrying stats to be honest, because as we now know, new technology is coming down the pipe really quickly. There is very definitely a need for training out there. Companies are telling me that they need to make sure they’re training people and getting them up to speed.
25:07
Matt Burney
But they’re also saying when people are arriving in work that they’re having to take on that training burden because education hasn’t necessarily prepared them in the right way for them to join the ranks of the workforce.
25:18
Matt Alder
The irony at a time where we have more access to the world’s information than we’ve ever had is just kind of massive. I suppose that kind of leads nicely onto a final question for you. So, you know, talking about the workforce in 10 years time, that kind of stuff, what does the future of work look like? Where do you think, what do you think it in the kind of full on age of AI is going to be like?
25:42
Matt Burney
There’s a few things that we should all be thinking about. First. We need to start embedding true skills first thinking into how we hire and develop people. And I think artificial intelligence has a real role to play in that. Where this might have been a consultancy piece where you’d hire somebody in and it would take six months to a year and thousands and thousands of pounds, we can build those models much more quickly, much more effectively and we can start understanding where our gaps are and actually probably start thinking about what does the future of our business look like and therefore what skills do we need to support that? I think along the road, as a result of a lot of this work, AI is really there to help illuminate talent and not just streamline a process.
26:35
Matt Burney
I think that’s where we’ve kind of got into it. And we’ve got a labor market that’s built on quick wins and quarterly targets. And that’s not the way that we’re going to build a solid future. So we need to really think about illuminating talent skills first. And the kind of conversation around where we are from a productivity point of view needs to kind of move a bit out of the boardroom and kind of into the classroom. You can’t fix the economy without fixing how we teach, train and how we trust people ultimately to go and do their job. So I think there’s a lot in there. And from a recruitment perspective, we’ve got some amazing people who work in this industry.
27:18
Matt Burney
And the last thing that I want to see or hear from those people is that they’ve either been scared off using a piece of technology or they’ve not been brought along in the conversation internally. Because people in recruitment and talent resourcing have all been drivers of technology change in businesses for years and years. You and I have been around long enough to remember the early days of new tech going into companies. You know, we’re very good at driving that. But AI won’t save recruitment particularly. It will probably expose a lot of what was broken and it will probably give us a new avenue to go down, but it’s not going to happen if we don’t have the right kind of attitudes and the right kind of investment in people.
28:10
Matt Burney
So I think there’s a lot there and I don’t think I’ve solved the future of recruitment by any stretch there, Matt, but I think those are the things that I. We need to address.
28:20
Matt Alder
Matt, thank you very much for talking to me.
28:23
Matt Burney
No worries. Really nice to speak to you.
28:25
Matt Alder
My thanks to Matt. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track on 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.
