Celebrating 10 years of Recruiting Future!
Over the last 10 years, I’ve interviewed hundreds of TA Leaders as well as CEOs, thought leaders, and the people building the technology that drives the industry forward.
Back in 2015, we thought the pace of change was super fast and that the level of disruption was off the scale with social and mobile technologies reshaping how we communicated. In some ways, we might think it was impossible back then to imagine the world we live in now, but many of the changes we see in TA today have been in the works for a long time.
The speed of change in talent acquisition is governed by the tension between organizational inertia, which slows things down, and external events like the pandemic, which can cause things to move at lightning-fast speeds.
The Generative AI revolution is most definitely in the latter category. We are on the cusp of the most significant changes to TA and recruiting we have ever seen.
So, as a TA Leader, how do you manage that change and make sure you and your organization are fit for the future?
Over the last few months, I’ve been using the power of AI to unlock the Recruiting Future archive and model the mindset and behaviours of the most successful TA leaders that I’ve interviewed. People who have changed how their organizations think about talent, who thrive on disruption as a catalyst for positive change, and who know how to use technology to enable their vision.
These leaders all have four things in common. They use foresight to understand and shape the future, they build influence with the most senior stakeholders in their organisation, they think different to create innovative talent strategies and they use the impact of new technologies to accelerate change.
Foresight, Influence, Talent and Technology = Fitt
This episode features clips from interviews with two TA leaders, two CHROs, a Behavioural Scientist, and a Futurist talking about these four key areas and what you and your teams can do to be fit for the future.
Featuring:
• Laszlo Bock, former CHRO at Google, on skills
• Lisa Montieth, Head of TA UK at HSBC on foresight
• Lyndsey Taylor, Global Head of HR Transformation at Brooks Automation, on influence
• Rory Sutherland, Vice Chair at Ogilivy UK, on talent
• Laura Coccaro, Chief People Officer at iCIMS on technology
• Kevin Wheeler, Future Of Talent Institute, on job displacement
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00:00
Matt Alder
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the very first episode of the Recruitment Future podcast. This is a podcast about recruitment innovation…
00:07
Matt Alder
That was me launching Recruiting Future 10 years and 699 episodes ago. Keep listening to find out what I’ve learned from a decade of interviewing the world’s most successful TA leaders and how you can be fit for the future. Support for this podcast comes from smart recruiters. Are you looking to supercharge your hiring? Meet Winston Smart Recruiters, AI powered companion. I’ve had a demo of Winston. The capabilities are extremely powerful and it’s been crafted to elevate hiring to a whole new level. This AI sidekick goes beyond the usual assistant, handling all the time consuming admin work, so you can focus on connecting with top talent and making better hiring decisions.
01:00
Matt Alder
From screening candidates to scheduling interviews, Winston manages it all with AI precision, keeping the hiring process fast, smart and effective. Head over to smartrecruiters.com and see how Winston can deliver superhuman results. Hi there. Welcome to episode 700 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. Well, I want to start by saying thank you to everyone who’s helped get Recruiting Future to this 10 year milestone. It’s been an amazing journey and certainly one that isn’t done yet. Over the last 10 years, I’ve interviewed hundreds of TA leaders, as well as CEOs, thought leaders, and the people building the technology that’s driving the industry forward. Back in 2015, we thought the pace of change was super fast and the level of disruption was off the scale with social and mobile technologies reshaping the way we communicated.
02:18
Matt Alder
In some ways, we might think it was impossible back then to imagine the world that we live in now. But a lot of the changes that we’re seeing in TA today have been in the works for a very long time. Here’s one of the early interviews that I did for Recruiting Future. This is Laszlo Bock, who at the time of recording back in May 2015, was the Global CHRO at Google.
02:42
Laszlo Bock
Well, so our hiring approach used to be we, you know, we get 2 to 3 million applications a year. We comb through all of those, we have a bunch of recruiters who do this and do great work doing it. And we would focus historically a lot on where you went to school, what your grades were, what your test scores were, because the idea was we wanted the smartest people we could find. What we since learned was that none of that predicts performance. It’s helpful when you’re just out of college, but after a year or two, doesn’t matter where you went to school, it doesn’t matter what your grades were. So we look beyond that. And what we now look for is four things. General cognitive ability, so smarts and problem solving. Emergent leadership. And I could talk about that if you wish.
03:15
Matt Alder
Yeah, please.
03:16
Laszlo Bock
Well, so briefly, emergent leadership is. So traditional leadership is. Were you president of a club? Were you captain of a team? Were you a vice president? Did you get promoted? We don’t care about any of that. Yeah, what we care about is that when you see a problem, you step in, whether it’s your job or not, to help solve it. And just as importantly, when your role is kind of done, you relinquish power and let somebody else step in and you step out. So we look for that. The third thing is what we call googliness. And simply what that means is kind of cultural fit, but not are you like us? We actually want people to bring something different to the party, something new. We also want intellectual humility and conscientiousness. And then the last and least important thing is expertise.
03:54
Laszlo Bock
Do you actually know how to do the job? Okay, interesting, because again, going back to. If you’re hiring the right kind of people, right curious people, and they meet these other three attributes, they’ll figure the rest out.
04:04
Matt Alder
Although we didn’t mention the word skills based hiring, many of you will recognise this as the core part of the philosophy that sits behind it. The speed of change in TA acquisition is governed by tension between organizational inertia, which slows things down, and external events like the pandemic that can cause things to move at lightning fast speeds. The generative AI revolution is most definitely in the latter category. And we are on the cusp of the most significant changes in TA and recruiting that any of us have ever seen. So as a TA leader, how do you manage that change and make sure that you and your organization are fit for the future?
04:49
Matt Alder
Over the last few months, I’ve been using the power of AI to unlock the Recruiting Future archive and model the mindset and behaviors of the world’s most successful TA leaders that I’ve interviewed. People who’ve changed the way their organizations think about talent, who thrive on disruption as a catalyst for positive change, and know how to use technology to enable their vision. These leaders all have four things in common. They use foresight to understand and shape the future. They build influence with the most senior stakeholders in their organization. They think differently to create innovative talent strategies and they use the impact of new technology to accelerate change. Foresight influence talent and technology FIT. I’m going to dive much deeper into being fit for the future in the coming weeks with a podcast episode on each element.
05:44
Matt Alder
I’ll also be launching an online tool that will help you benchmark yourselves against other TA leaders as well as playbooks to help you and your team have the strategic impact that you need. If you want to be amongst the first to know when everything launches, head over to Mataulder Me Future and let me know. In the meantime though, here are the thoughts of a selection of practitioners and thought leaders on each element of the FIT framework, drawn from the 10 year archive of recruiting future. First of all, foresight. Here’s Lisa Monteith, head of Talent Acquisition and Onboarding for HSBC in the UK, talking about having a proactive approach to the future.
06:27
Lisa Monteith
I read a really scary fact today on a piece of research that in the next 10 years, and this was from 2020 and so by 2030, 90% of the UK workforce would need to be retrained because there would be very different roles. Now I think there is a, there’s a, it’s incumbent on organizations to be able to provide availability to skills growth, skills development, new acquisition of skill. But I actually think we all as individuals have to take responsibility for that too. If we want to remain relevant, if we want to continue to sort of drive our careers in the way that we want them to, then I think we have to drive our own learning for ourselves. And I think traditionally we’ve waited.
07:13
Lisa Monteith
There’s, there’s this culture of, you know, I am going to wait till I’m put on a training course or I am going to apply to go on a training course and that would be an in person training course and it will be for X number of days and I will learn this when I’m there. Whereas I think now is very much part and parcel of, you know, bite sized chunks. There’s bite sized bits, pieces of learning, there’s bits of research, there’s bits of, you know, if you think about LinkedIn and the various different modules you can pick up there, we have a degree platform in the hsbc so you can do bite sized pieces of learning in a number of different ways to build your skill in the time that you’ve got available.
07:52
Lisa Monteith
And so I think that, you know, there are, there is still an argument for that in person training, there’s still an argument for all of those different things, but I think as individuals we have to take charge of our own destiny because if we wait for organizations to convey that upon us, then I think we’re going to be a long time waiting. I’m not talking about hsbc, I’m just talking generically in organisations. I think if we want to remain relevant, we have to take charge of our own learning.
08:18
Matt Alder
The second element is influence. Here’s Lindsay Taylor, global head of HR transformation, talent attraction and global mobility at Brooks Automation, on the role that TA should be playing in shaping business strategy.
08:33
Linsday Taylor
I do believe, Matt, that TA needs to transform. And I believe as a function we are very good at adapting and being agile enough to transform. And we have been doing as a function for many years now. But the nature of the work is rapidly changing due to globalization, remote work, and we can’t avoid the topic of any technological advancement. So AI, which does require a much more adaptive and responsive TA function. And again, forever trying to move away from that transactional role of putting bottoms into seats, which is not TA. I’m sorry, it really isn’t. And moving into being more of that strategic business partner to really influence business outcomes and aligning those talent strategies with the organizational goals. But I do feel we have been doing that for a long time.
09:40
Linsday Taylor
It’s just something that’s the nature of the beast of ta, that we’re forever having to adapt, to grow with the needs of the business.
09:52
Matt Alder
No, absolutely. And it’s something that gets said a lot in terms of, you know, TA needs to align itself with the business objectives and those kind of things. How does that actually happen in practice?
10:04
Linsday Taylor
It takes time. That would be the first thing I would say. I know in TA we’re very driven by metrics and governed by data and outcomes, but actually a lot of this is about not just seeing what we’re going to do, but doing it. I know that it’s a cliche when we talk about TA or HR should be at the table with business leaders, but it’s true. And that’s one of the important turning points for just HR in general, where you’re contributing to discussions about whether it’s future workforce needs, or the skills that we have today versus the skills we need in the future. And how are we going to bridge that gap and how are we going to help shape the business strategy through insights and to. Whether it be talent trends or labor market dynamics.
11:00
Linsday Taylor
And then I would say turning it into reality is what I’m finding. This is my 24th year in TA and I’m finding that Agility is most definitely essential so that TA teams can quickly pivot and respond to those changing priorities. Where we are leveraging technology to scale efficiently, where we are focusing on measurable outcomes, and then, you know, as we are implementing more and more AI and analytics, not only to streamline processes, but to provide more predictive insights about the future. Talent needs.
11:43
Matt Alder
The third element is talent, and this is legendary behavioral scientist Rory Sutherland urging us to think differently about recruiting to ensure we get diversity of thought in organisations. I think one of the really interesting examples that you have in your book is talking about recruiting for diversity of thought and how in some ways the way that recruitment works is just not set up to deliver that. And actually, if you want diversity of thought in your business, you need to think differently about how you do it.
12:14
Rory Sutherland
No, it’s actually set up to deliver the opposite of it. Because our universities really were developed to produce colonial civil servants. In other words, people who are completely reliable and sensible, but weren’t necessarily experimental or wild. Now you add on to that an additional problem, which is the need to appear fair and objective requires you to apply the same criteria to every applicant, okay? Which means you end up with people who are disproportionately similar. Diversity can’t, by the way, be a tick box thing, because in order for it to be meaningful, you have to create an environment in which it’s okay to be diverse and which in which you feel comfortable being diverse. And that’s not just about ethnic diversity, it’s about every kind of diversity.
13:03
Matt Alder
And what about the process of recruitment? What could companies be thinking about if to sort of improve the diversity and diversity of thought that they’re bringing into their organization in terms of how they actually run their recruitment processes.
13:16
Rory Sutherland
But at Ogilvy, we’ve made a first step which is something called the pipe, which is a parallel system of recruitment of talent where we don’t demand or even consider their university performance or their academic performance. We simply set a variety of exercises to spot people of exceptional, what you might call non standard ability. Okay? And it’s particularly used for recruitment to the creative department, but it also applies elsewhere. And that agency is quite an interesting place because accidentally it’s produced an environment which does have a range of cognitive styles or modes and it generally tolerates them. We’ve had creative department, planning department, account handling department, Finance department, all of those require different skill sets.
14:06
Rory Sutherland
So one of the things we are doing, and I think it’s a very important first step, is to understand that the optimal solution in a Complex system is very rarely an average. Really, really important point. I’ll, I’ll give a nice analogy which I think makes sense of this. Okay? I hate open plan offices because I think they’re neither one thing nor the other. They’re an attempt to solve for the average. Okay? Actually, what you want for productivity is two extremes. A mixture of solitude and sociability. You also need a mixture of very high intensity work, concentrated work, and, you know, periods of discretionary free time. And what generally leads to productivity in a knowledge economy is actually a highly varied working environment. So this attempt to optimize for an average is a fatal mistake.
15:03
Rory Sutherland
In any complex system, what you want is an optimal level of variance, not an optimal average. And we’re optimizing for the wrong thing. The question should not be what is the perfect working environment to impose on everybody for 35 hours a day, a week? Okay? It should be what’s the optimal variety we need to provide people with so they can find an environment that best suits their own cognitive style at a time, which suits what they’re trying to do in the moment. And if you want the real intellectual backdrop to this, the creation of artificial and unhealthy uniformity is a product of top down thinking and decision making where people at the top tend to understand the world through averaging and through aggregation. Lived experience is often about variety.
15:54
Rory Sutherland
By the way, in recruitment, if you have a graduate recruitment scheme, you’re trying to optimize for the average. Now one of my suggestions to overcome this is hire people in groups because then you’ll see diversity as complementary, not contradictory. Okay? The only reason I got hired is because they were hiring four people and basically they said, okay, let’s take a punt on the weirdo. If they had four jobs which they advertised and recruited for separately at Ogilvy back then, I wouldn’t have got any of those four jobs. Because when you hire in groups collectively, you become more cognizant of variance. When you’re hiring one person at a time, you’re hiring against a template. And risk aversion also changes. Because if you think about it, if you hire four people, you can afford to up one of them.
16:44
Rory Sutherland
But if you hire one person, you’ll try and hire as close as possible to an expected norm to minimize the risk of blame if your hire doesn’t work out.
16:52
Matt Alder
The fourth element is technology. In this clip, Laura Coccaro, CHRO at iCIMS talks about the fundamental role talent professionals should be playing in the AI driven transformation of organizations.
17:07
Laura Coccaro
The way that I think about this for myself, for my CHRO colleagues, this is a tremendous opportunity. You know, when we think about everything that’s happening in the market right now around AI and how fast it is moving and the impact it will have on our workforce, this is a people transformation. This is not just technology at play. This is about how we’re going to figure out how we’re leveraging the right set of technology and our broader workforce needs and what that means in terms of skills availability, our need to think about what skill sets we have internally versus those that we need to go out and hire versus those that we can train and really drive. You know, material impact on what’s happening across our organizations. You know, one of the things that we know is that this is about driving.
17:57
Laura Coccaro
Not just, you know, okay, you can use this in your own house, but every piece of our business is considering new ways of adopting AI. And it’s so important that we think about communication, enablement, strong partnership with CEOs and CIOs across our business to not just be a part of this transformation, but actually lead from the front in terms of the material impact that I believe that it will have on organizations in relatively short order.
18:26
Matt Alder
Finally, one of the best things about running a podcast on the future of recruiting for the last 10 years is the ability to track back and see how the predictions that people made about the future and actually panned out. It’s very clear that the people who are the most accurate in their predictions were the ones both with a deep understanding of technology and a deep understanding of the human context that technology operates in. There’s one person who stands head and shoulders above everyone else, and that’s Kevin Wheeler. Here he is back in 2016 talking about what he thought work might look like in 2025.
19:06
Kevin Wheeler
I think you’re going to see a lot of jobs that you and I take for granted today disappearing or shrinking in volume. That includes things that are really hot right now, like coders. And I think you’re going to find a lot of coding becomes automated. I think you’re going to see a lot of scripts and modules that can be plugged in to make things work. I think you’re going to see simplicity in that space that’s going to reduce the number of people required in the coding space.
19:39
Kevin Wheeler
So I think the world and the world of work tends to get on a fad, and I think we’ve seen this numerous times in the past where suddenly we need everybody to be something and Then in a short time later, we automate or become more efficient and we no longer need that many people in those occupations. And I think that’s clearly indicated in the case of coders. I think in general you’re going to see a lot of discussion and focus on where should we apply automation and how. And I’m not necessarily a doomsayer that says everything is going to become automated or roboticized, but many things will. I think the question is, if you automate something, what’s the role of the human in that automation process? And I think we will find there is a role. I’ll give you one good example.
20:34
Kevin Wheeler
It’s pretty clear that an airplane pilot can be replaced with automation. There’s clearly many articles, many experts out there who are predicting the end of commercial pilots. And while I think that definitely technically is possible, I’m not sure we will ever see a commercial airplane without a pilot. Because I think as human beings, we want someone up there to talk to and communicate with, so that pilot may become more of a generalist, more of a person who can communicate effectively, who can calm fears, and there may be one instead of two up there in the cockpit. So we’re going to see changes like that in the changes in the role that people have. We’re going to see a lot more augmented people, meaning people that use technology to do things that they couldn’t do before.
21:30
Kevin Wheeler
The doctors using robotic operating equipment to operate on you. All sorts of devices that will come out that make us smarter, wiser, able to see further. But they’re not necessarily going to just replace us all. But the reality is a lot of jobs are going to become automated and new jobs will emerge.
21:58
Matt Alder
So I’ll be talking a lot more about the Fit for the Future framework over the next few weeks. And again, if you want early access to the online tool, please go to Mattalder.me/future to register. That’s Mattalder.me/future. Thanks again to everyone who’s been a guest on the podcast over the last 10 years. Thanks to the sponsors for making it all possible and thanks to all of you for listening. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
