Recruiting Future is a podcast that helps Talent Acquisition teams drive measurable impact by developing their strategic capability in Foresight, Influence, Talent, and Technology.
This episode is about Talent.
After years of hype surrounding skills-based hiring, the data is showing that it is really happening at scale and becoming strategically important across all sectors and company sizes, with some surprising patterns emerging. Organizations are seeing benefits beyond just filling roles, and the implications for TA and HR are significant. What’s driving this shift, and what do TA teams need to know?
My guest this week is David Wilkins, Chief Product and Strategy Officer at Talent Neuron. David has produced some exclusive data insights for Recruiting Future that paint a clear picture of where skills-based hiring stands today. In our conversation, he shares where the market is, what specific companies are doing, the real benefits they’re seeing, and his thoughts on how AI might change everything in the future.
In the interview, we discuss:
• What the data tells us about how skills-based hiring is being adopted
• Which types of companies are moving the fastest
• Expanding talent pools
•
• Driving internal mobility
• Spotting potential at scale
• Implications for talent acquisition
• Breaking the silos in the talent function
• The full impact of AI is not yet being felt.
• The intersection between tasks and skills
• What does the future look like?
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00:00
Matt Alder
Everybody talks about skills based hiring, but very few organizations have actually been implementing it. The data now shows that things are changing fast. Real companies are now implementing skills based approaches and seeing real benefits. So what are they doing differently and why does it matter? Keep listening to find out.
00:24
Matt Alder
Support for this podcast comes from Hiring Branch, Creators of the world’s first soft skills AI. Meet Susan. Every Monday she interviewed candidates with great resumes and by Friday she was letting some go. Why lack of soft skills? This week, no stress. Susan used Hiring Branch to evaluate candidates soft skills at scale. Now she’s moving batches of candidates through the funnel based on real skills data, not gut instinct. Hiring Branch measures soft skills like communication, empathy and collaboration with precision so you don’t have to visit hiringbranch.com to start hiring for soft skills.
01:31
Matt Alder
Hi there. Welcome to episode 717 of Recruiting Future with me Matt Alder. Recruiting Future is a podcast that helps talent acquisition teams drive measurable impact by developing their strategic capability in foresight, influence, talent and technology. This episode is about talent. After years of hype surrounding skills based hiring, the data is now showing that it’s really happening at scale and becoming strategically important across all sectors and company sizes. Organizations are seeing benefits beyond just filling roles and the implications for TA and HR are significant. So what’s driving this shift and what do TA teams need to know? My guest this week is David Wilkins, Chief Product and Strategy Officer at Talent Neuron. Talent Neuron has produced some exclusive data insights for Recruiting Future that paint a clear picture of where skills based hiring stands today.
02:33
Matt Alder
In our conversation, David shares where the market is, what specific companies are doing, the real benefits they’re seeing, and his thoughts on how AI might change everything in the future.
02:46
Matt Alder
Hi David and welcome to the podcast.
02:48
David Wilkins
Thank you Matt. Great to be here.
02:50
Matt Alder
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do.
02:55
David Wilkins
So, Dave Wilkin, Chief Product and Strategy Officer for Talent Neuron. Been with the organization for about 18 months now. Talent Neuron is really provider of three key solutions. One is global labor market intelligence. So think supply, demand, cost, competitive characteristics in the overall labor market. Additionally, we bought an organization in October of last year, 2024 that was focused on skills and job architecture. So think skills, intelligence, job architecture, normalization as well as strategic workforce planning and talent marketplace. That organization was HR forecast based out of Germany. So we really are kind of Living in four different spaces now that are all very adjacent to one another, complementary to one another. And we built all of that on top now of the same shared data architecture and you know, sort of skill stack.
03:54
Matt Alder
Fantastic. Now you’ve actually pulled some data for us specifically for the podcast, all around skills, haven’t you?
04:02
David Wilkins
We did, yeah.
04:03
Matt Alder
Tell us more about what you have for us and how you kind of put it together.
04:07
David Wilkins
Yeah, I think, you know, the question were trying to answer was how has skills based hiring changed over the last few years? Right. And how do we think about skills based hiring? So we set about to analyze our global data set. So we’re catching between 3 to 4 million job posts per day across around 80 countries and 44 languages. So we distilled all of that data down and extracted from that raw sort of unstructured information some signal. And so we analyze all the job postings across all HR functions over two year window.
04:43
David Wilkins
We analyze the postings in that period that really we’re looking for candidates with expertise and skills based hiring and then related sort of like nomenclature like skills intelligence or internal mobility or skills taxonomy or skills architecture, you know, things that would be indicative of a skills based mindset or skills based sort of approach.
05:04
Matt Alder
Right, yeah, were looking for that being mentioned in the, in the job listings.
05:08
David Wilkins
Yeah, exactly. So that, you know, that became the basis of, you know, sort of the, the nature of sort of what the ask was.
05:15
David Wilkins
Right.
05:15
David Wilkins
Is anything that would tie us back to a skills based hiring sort of framework.
05:19
David Wilkins
Right.
05:20
David Wilkins
And what we found was there’s about a 26% increase in HR roles on a global basis requiring some kind of skills based focus just in the last couple of years. The other key thing I think Matt, that was I guess not surprising given our experience with clients, but it’s really not isolated anymore to early adopters. It’s really becoming an increasingly common thing across all verticals and really seems to be strategically important even at SMB level practices, not just at large and enterprise level clients.
05:53
Matt Alder
I mean that’s kind of really interesting in terms of how it’s becoming sort of normalized and all of that kind of stuff. So you say it’s going across all sectors and things like that. How does that split down into sort of sectors and particular organizations?
06:06
David Wilkins
Yeah, so there’s, I mean there’s definitely some that stand out. I mean if you break that down a little further and just look at like the, you know, Fortune or S&P 500 rather it’s more like a 33%.
06:19
David Wilkins
Year over year growth.
06:20
David Wilkins
So there does seem to be some level of sku mat to those organizations that are larger sort of coming at this in a more comprehensive and strategic way. You know, if were to think about some of the bigger organizations that, you know, have been in the news around this sort of approach, you know, it’s IBM, Amazon, Bristol Myers, Squibb, our Accenture has been making a lot of noise. And then, you know, if we look in banking and financial services in particular, that was another one that stood out to us. In the analysis there. There’s been about a 36% year over year growth in the use of skills in that sub industry.
06:59
David Wilkins
Right.
07:00
David Wilkins
And we surmise, and you know, this is speculation, but I think given, you know, some of the regulatory pressures in those spaces, the need to be agile and to really understand the skill sets that support agility in that model, you know, are things that I think are probably driving that in that space in particular.
07:19
Matt Alder
Yeah. Any particular organizations stand out?
07:22
David Wilkins
Yeah, I mean, you know, there’s a few for us that, you know, I think are interesting in sort of what they’re doing.
07:27
David Wilkins
Right.
07:28
David Wilkins
I’ll tell you one project we did with Sage that I thought was fascinating. So Sage is, you know, sort of a cloud provider of business, you know, sort of services and capabilities for SMBs. And we did a really interesting project with them where we looked at the way that they were hiring for certain kinds of marketing roles. And we did a presentation with them at People Analytics World last year. And what they found was that they were unnecessarily constraining their talent pool by looking for folks that didn’t just have experience with their kind of solution sets, but also specifically had SaaS experience. And when they took that SaaS layer off from a skills perspective, Matt, what they discovered is the actual available supply pool was about twice as big as they thought it was.
08:19
David Wilkins
They were sort of, they were sort of unnecessarily like constraining the supply data.
08:23
David Wilkins
Right.
08:25
David Wilkins
And, and the funny thing was when they actually had some internal conversations, they realized they could basically teach a new marketing person the ins and outs of SaaS marketing as opposed to B2C marketing or other kinds of marketing in about a two week window. And so for the cost of two weeks, you know, they were, you know, cutting their supply, you know, pool in half.
08:44
David Wilkins
Right.
08:44
David Wilkins
Which I think is sort of interesting. And then, you know, I think as we look at other orgs, you know, I mean, I, I think there’s been a lot of Work right now done by Lufthansa Group. They have a project right now called the can do platform, which is really about skills data, but internally focused. So to really for support internal mobility and using skills to identify internal talent that could fit other roles in the business, which I think is fascinating. And Salesforce is doing a thing right now with a company wide project for AI readiness that’s really around AI skills internally and again assessing and identifying who has the potential to move into AI type of roles based on who they have internally.
09:30
David Wilkins
So that’s been an interesting component of this analysis is looking at those organizations who aren’t just using a skills based strategy externally, but also applying that same lens internally for internal mobility strategies as well.
09:43
Matt Alder
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it kind of seems to be very much in keeping with what’s going on at the moment in terms of, you know, understanding those skills and all of that kind of stuff. Really? I mean, what do you think is kind of driving this? I think the Sage example is really interesting in terms of just broadening that talent pool. What is it you think that companies are really trying to do with kind of embracing a more skills based approach?
10:07
David Wilkins
I think there’s multiple factors that are going into this that are causing this move. One is, I mean, I don’t think I need to share with you, Matt.
10:15
David Wilkins
Right.
10:15
David Wilkins
I mean, there are certain segments that are just really hard to hire for, sort of intrinsically.
10:21
David Wilkins
Right.
10:21
David Wilkins
I mean, and it’s an odd collection of those roles. I mean, certainly in the US you have challenges with the health care system. Any, pretty much any role in health care in the US is fraught. Oil and gas is tough because there’s not a lot of new entrants and people are aging out. Mining’s the same way. You can look at the construction industry, at least in the US but it’s also true globally where you’re losing tradesmen and the average age of a plumber or an electrician keeps going up year over year.
10:48
David Wilkins
Right.
10:49
David Wilkins
And so you have those sort of pressures and then you have immature economies, especially in Western Europe and the US and even parts of Asia where people are just aging out and the demographics are upside down. There aren’t enough new people coming into the workforce and the older folks are aging out. So you have these large sort of like systemic pressures. And at the same time, you know, if you look at some of the data from like World Economic Forum recently about the pace of change of skills, you know, they estimate that 54% of the current workforce is going to need to be fundamentally reskilled in the next five years because of the pace of change of skills.
11:25
David Wilkins
Right.
11:26
David Wilkins
That 11% are going to be left behind entirely and just not get the skills training that they need to be current with current expectations. So I think increasingly there’s this notion that because of the pace of change and because of the challenge in finding talent, it’s much more important now to find someone who has the skills that are necessary than it is to find someone who necessarily has held this particular role before, or even who’s held this role for any number of years. It’s sort of more of a how do we get the right people in seat that can do the work based on the nature of what the work is? And by thinking that way, I can potentially more make a more expansive talent pool from which to pull.
12:08
David Wilkins
And that’s the general sort of zeitgeist behind, you know, a lot of the thinking that we hear from our clients.
12:15
Matt Alder
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13:24
Matt Alder
What implications are we seeing for sort of recruiting in HR right now because of this? Because as you said, 26% increase in people coming into those disciplines with skills in these kind of areas. What does that mean for recruiting in HR right now?
13:42
David Wilkins
Yeah, so I think it means a couple of things, right? I mean, one is it’s an interesting answer to this whole question of dei, which obviously in the US right now is a bit of a fraught concept given the current administration, but, you know, a skills for a strategy actually ties directly to DEI efforts because it helps you not think about any other demographic characteristics that might creep into the conversation. It’s just a straight do they have the skills or do they not have the skills? So that’s an interesting intersection with other parts of, you know, of the overall HR function. Similarly, we’ve seen a real massive uptick in Clients interested in working with strategic workforce planning.
14:21
David Wilkins
And there again, a skills focus on the hiring side of things allows for a more fruitful and robust discussion with their SWP counterparts so that recruiting can be part of a much more proactive strategy. Leaning forward into the future and starting to think about in my talent pools and the passive pools that I’m cultivating, what are the skills I should be thinking about for next year or the year after? How do I start building out longer term strategies around those things? And how do I think about internal mobility as part of my play rather than just always going external? Is there a play to start thinking more internal and blended?
14:59
David Wilkins
Or, you know, the example that I shared from Sage where they ultimately decided they could hire a different class or type of candidate if they coupled that with a little bit of internal training. So what’s the intersection between your TA that’s skills driven and your internal L and D that can then supplement any gaps that’s also a skills driven conversation. So I think for me, Matt, it’s starting to unlock what should have been a much more fluid movement between the HR functions anyway.
15:30
David Wilkins
And skills is almost the language then that can be used to have those conversations and really drive TA to be the heart of some of this rather than the, you know, the end of the, you know, the caboose of the train, you know, but really be much more central to it as one of the arcs of incoming skills and skills.
15:49
Matt Alder
Thinking, you know, and I get a sense that we’re obviously talking about an increase over the last two years, I guess sense that the full impact of AI on talent, on work, on hr, on recruiting isn’t kind of baked into this yet. I think that there’s obviously a lot of change to come. As a kind of a final question to you, what do you think the future might look like? What impact is AI likely to have and how is that going to change HR and TA again?
16:20
David Wilkins
Yeah, right. I think pretty profoundly. You know, I think one of the things, you know, we’ve been thinking quite a lot about, you know, given that we’re playing in multiple spaces that are affected by all of this and have many, many large clients who are thinking about this as well. What’s interesting to me, Matt, is like, I think what is going to be a growing intersection between tasks and skills? You know, there’s been this movement towards skills, rightly so, for the last few years, and I think that’s been a correct move. But as AI starts to come in and you start thinking about, you Know AI agents and identification and notion of just AI being part of a day to day work and how you do your work. What AI is going to do is it’s going to take away tasks or augment tasks.
17:06
David Wilkins
It’s not really going to take away skills, right. Like communication skills persist, but the ability to do a transcript from a teams call, that’s a task, right. And that task is now automated through AI. So the question that then starts to get interesting. If 15 or 20% of someone job is going to be AI iFied and you know, removed through automation in some way then and somebody else’s job is also going to be affected by 15%, how could I think about merging those jobs together and thinking about job redesign and redesigning the nature of that Ask.
17:41
David Wilkins
Right.
17:43
David Wilkins
But then that means you have to understand the tasks, right? What tasks are part of the job and what task adjacencies exist and which kinds of task clusters exist. And then you need to understand what kind of skills power the tasks.
17:56
David Wilkins
Right.
17:57
David Wilkins
So what skills do I need to do the task? So I think we’re going to see the emergence of some additional intelligence. Like just as there’s become skills intelligence, I think you’re going to see the emergence of task intelligence. And I think really smart companies are going to try to figure out what that intersection looks like so that as they’re chasing automation strategies, they’ll have a point of view of what can be automated, what the impact is on the workforce. And then how do we think about what does that mean from a hiring, internal mobility development standpoint relative to what tasks I’m now creating capabilities to do versus what I’m automating and that all different fascinating angle to all of this.
18:36
Matt Alder
That is fascinating because originally the whole idea of skills was, you know, we’re going to break down skills in roles so we can be more agile and flexible and all that kind of stuff. But this is kind of breaking it down further to a whole.
18:49
Matt Alder
New level and go.
18:51
David Wilkins
It’s almost, I, I refer to it sometimes as like it’s almost atomizing the job down to its constituent parts. Like at really an atomic level of how you think about how the work is done. Because it really. Interest introduces fascinating questions Matt. Like if 30 of a particular job is, you know, is eliminated in some meaningful way and that affects a hundred people or a thousand people, you then have to then calculate what does that mean in terms of like headcount savings and or the way you redesign or rethink that job.
19:25
David Wilkins
Right.
19:27
David Wilkins
So there’s something really interesting about sort of understanding the data at that level and then connecting that to skills, connecting it to job descriptions, connecting it to what you look for in the market versus what you automate internally.
19:39
Matt Alder
And I’m guessing it’s going to be AI that does that because the sheer amount of sort of data and work that will be required.
19:49
David Wilkins
Well, I think they say, I think OpenAI admitted a few months ago that 30% of ChatGPT is written by ChatGPT. Did you see that announcement?
19:58
Matt Alder
No, I could believe that.
20:00
David Wilkins
And Cloud and some of the other have said the same. So you have AI writing AI. So it wouldn’t be surprising for AI to detect what the role of AI is in a business.
20:11
Matt Alder
We truly live interesting times. David, thank you very much for talking to me.
20:16
David Wilkins
Thank you.
20:17
Matt Alder
My thanks to David. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can search all the past episodes@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.
