Innovation in recruiting is hard. TA leaders are experts at running their operations, but improving them in a structured way is a different discipline, and the AI revolution has made it one that no one can avoid. Before any function can innovate, though, it has to know where it is starting from, and that is where benchmarking becomes critical.
Recent research from the Recruiting Excellence Foundation, which has assessed the maturity of hundreds of TA teams worldwide, reveals that TA teams are struggling to move from operational to strategic.
So how should TA leaders get started?
My guest this week is Toni de Graaf, Co-Founder of the Recruiting Excellence Foundation. In our conversation, Tony shares what the global benchmark reveals, why so many teams are stuck in operational mode, and how to prioritize the improvements that matter most.
In the interview, we discuss:
- Benchmarking TA maturity across the globe
- The most surprising insight from the results
- The two areas where TA teams struggle most
- The difference between an operational and a strategic function
- The impact of AI
- AI and broken processes
- Resource, capacity and value
- Knowing your starting point
- What does the future look like?
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Matt Alder
The AI revolution means talent acquisition has to innovate. Before any function can improve, though, it needs an accurate picture of where it stands today. So how do you establish that starting point? Keep listening to find out.
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Matt Alder
Hi there, welcome to episode 808 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder.
Innovation in recruiting is hard. TA leaders are experts at running their operations, but improving them in a structured way is a different discipline. And the AI revolution has made it one that no one can avoid.
Before any function can innovate though, it has to know where it’s starting from. And that’s where benchmarking becomes critical.
Recent research from the Recruiting Excellence Foundation which has assessed the maturity of hundreds of TA teams all over the globe reveals that TA teams are really struggling to move from being operational to being strategic.
So how should TA leaders get started? My guest this week is Toni de Graaf, co-founder of the Recruiting Excellence Foundation.
In our conversation Toni shares what the global benchmarks reveal, why so many teams are stuck in operational mode, and how to prioritize the improvements that matter the most.
Hi, Tony, and welcome back to the podcast. Just start by introducing yourself and telling everyone what you do.
Toni de Graaf
Yeah, sure. So my name is Tony, Toni de Graaf, really Dutch last name. Though being Dutch, I live in Italy, and I am the co-founder of the Recruiting Excellence Foundation. And we work with TA teams around the world to help them build high-performing TA teams, right? So we believe that every TA team on the planet should be very consistent in delivering the right talent exactly on time in a cost-effective manner. And we have an entire methodology behind that. And that’s… What we help TA teams with and what we train them on.
Matt Alder
Behind the methodology, you have a really interesting piece of, I suppose I’d call it rolling research. Tell us about that.
Toni de Graaf
It’s an interesting thing because we figured out if we standardize the way how you actually build a high-performing TA team, we kind of discovered that we can assess TA teams’ maturity in exactly the same way. So it doesn’t really matter if you’re a small organization that you are the first recruiter or you are like the large conglomerates with 300, 500 recruiters hiring 100,000 plus people a year. The structure and how you can assess the maturity, how are you actually doing things? We saw a through line in that, the same way of assessing it, right? So we built out what we call the Recruiting Excellence Business Assessment. And this allows individual TA people to see, hey, how am I doing? And how am I actually comparing to everybody else in the world? So we built this platform. We have hundreds of results in there from all over the world, from New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, China, Middle East, North, South Africa, all over Europe. That allows people to, in let’s say, 15, 20 minutes, if you sit down for it, if you want to do the full version, and then you see exactly where you sit, and then you can compare yourself against the global benchmark.
Matt Alder
We’re going to dive into the specifics around this in a second. But before we do, just give people a kind of a flavour of what you found so far. What’s been sort of surprising about the results? What’s the big picture look like?
Toni de Graaf
Yeah, it’s a very interesting one. It’s one of the first questions you get from many TA teams. Can we benchmark ourselves? How are we doing against the rest of the world? Or if you travel and do a lot of events globally, like I do, if I’m in Australia, they want to know what are we good at versus EMEA, or we get the idea that this other region is so far ahead of us, etc. Those questions are exactly the same wherever you go in the world. I don’t know how you experienced the same in that respect. Everybody is hungry for that benchmark. The funny thing is there are not that much differences between the regions. It’s more nuances, but it’s not like a massive maturity gap between, for example, the Middle East and APAC or EMEA and America. So I think the big themes that all TA teams struggle with are basically the same. You can cluster them together. So that was the first thing that came out of the research. Like, are there actually differences in the maturity of TA around the world? Or are we in general… Struggling with the same type of things and then there is of course some local nuance or context to it, right? So some people focus more on A versus B, but in general where the TA sits and how they are functioning is relatively the same. So that was the first remarkable thing.
Matt Alder
Just to say on that, it’s interesting because it does reflect a lot of the conversations that I have when I go to events in different countries. People very often come up and say, well, we’re two years behind this area or this country, and they’re really not. So that consistency kind of does ring true, but probably will be a surprise to quite a few people in different places.
Toni de Graaf
It is very surprising, right? Everybody always has the feeling that they are behind someone else. And the second thing that really stood out to me is that if you talk to organizations, the benchmark is very interesting, right? It can spark a conversation. It can be very good in building a business case why you need to improve something because you can prove that your individual organization is behind on something versus the global average. It can definitely help this third party insight instead of my personal opinion is that we need to do A, B, and C. Use it for that. But the funny thing is that when you actually dive into what individual organizations need to do, the benchmark and how others are doing it never matters. That’s actually crazy to say. So if you look at, okay, it’s interesting to see, how we stack up against the world, but what we need to do to be successful is always individual to the company.
Matt Alder
What I think would be interesting is, across all of the facets and the areas that you kind of measure, is there an area that really stands out as something that lots of TA teams struggle with that really needs a lot of improvement?
Toni de Graaf
Yes, definitely. To be honest, I was, somewhat disappointed in some way with the results. It kind of hurt in my recruiter heart to say it like that because we assessed, we assessed TA functions across 21 individual components, and the ones that came out the lowest across the board, across all regions I’m sorry, is the job kickoff meeting and the hiring decision meeting. And why that hurts is that for me, that is exactly where added value sits, right? Really helping the business understand exactly and help them identify what they actually need, the job kickoff moment. And how do we support the business in taking the right decision between candidate A, B, and C? And the crazy thing is across the 21 components, those two came back as the lowest maturity.
Matt Alder
Which is really interesting because I think if you talk to individual recruiters, is they would tell you that they are the most important bits, as you say, where they add value, and that’s where the magic happens, as it were. Why is it? Why have they come out so low?
Toni de Graaf
I guess different reasons, but my personal take on it is you see that it really focuses on the difference between an operational TA function versus a strategic TA function. So if you are more a reactive and operational TA function, you receive whatever the business needs to hire and you directly start working. So you see that the job intake is not fully properly done as good as it can be or being not done at all, if we’re honest.
And that also then translates to that hiring decision, right? We push candidates into that process. And when the final interview finally happened, we are just waiting for the hiring manager to tell us which person they hire. So the moment the TA team is more in that operational and reactive modus, you see automatic lower maturity in these two areas. So I think it’s a reflection of that struggle that also everybody recognises. How do we actually move from being that reactive operational TA function to become really talent advisors and more thinking how can we help build the right talent mix within the organization and being an advisor in that role? So I think that is the biggest reason why, because yes, if we filter on the organizations in the data set that have a high maturity, you see that it totally flips, that the job kickoff meeting and the hiring decision are one of the strongest areas across the board of those 21 versus then, in this case, the global average. So you see that more TA teams are more in the operational function versus being strategic talent advisors.
Matt Alder
And it’s interesting because with all the talk of AI and the implementations and everything that’s going on, making our recruiters and talent advisors is always the thing that’s kind of spoken about. And I’m not sure that people always know what that means or have kind of really thought that through. And I guess this kind of underlines that, doesn’t it? So, I mean, from an AI perspective, people are bringing in AI tools. Are they going to fix this? Are they going to make it better? Or are they going to make it worse?
Toni de Graaf
Yeah, that’s a very good question. I think both can be true, right? They can fix it and can make things worse. I think AI can only fix things if the underlying process is good, right? There is a condition before you can apply AI. You cannot apply AI to your, for example, reviewing process, which is a very popular one these days, if you don’t have a really strong standardized and documented reviewing process. So based on what are you actually reviewing? What are the exact success drivers when we go through these 1,000 candidates? Which are the actual 10 strongest ones, if you don’t have an exact idea of what this is, how are you going to instruct the AI to magically solve this for you? And this is what a lot of AI tools offer. They’d say, yeah, our magic algorithm scores these candidates, but how are they actually scoring it? This is a generic appliance of AI on how candidates are scored. But even if we just talk about one particular role, a performance marketeer or an email marketeer in one company is different than in another company, right? But then these general models score.
Candidates in a general way. Yeah, it’s a little bit based on the job description but it’s not good enough, right? You need to be in control, and be need to be able to explain exactly what the success drivers are. So if you have the feeling you want to implement any form of AI and automation, your first question is always go back to the process. Is it standardized? Do we control it? Can I explain to an external person exactly how our selection and reviewing process works and how we float up the best 10 from these thousand? If you cannot explain what gets there, you shouldn’t implement AI.
Matt Alder
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it kind of reflects a lot of conversations I’ve been having with TA leaders who are being successful in this. It literally is if you apply, AI to speed up a process and that process is broken, it just gets broken quicker and probably does even more damage. And I suppose there’s a few stages to this, aren’t there? Because there’s looking at how the process works at the moment and trying to judge, is this driving strategically what we want? And is it broken? And are we just doing things because we’re working around that or we’re doing that sort of stuff? And then I suppose it’s looking at that process and saying, actually if we, if we apply AI to bits of this, does it allow us to do things differently, more efficiently? And then it’s actually, you know, making those changes and then
Toni de Graaf
Implementing it, isn’t it.
Matt Alder
So it’s, there’s a, there’s a lot more
Toni de Graaf
To this than.
Matt Alder
Just buying a bit of technology.
Toni de Graaf
Yeah, exactly. I think there was actually a second point to it as well. So one, is the process standardized and how is AI gonna make this better? Sure, that’s one side of the medal. But on the other side that is often being forgotten is if we apply, again let’s just stick to the reviewing one, I think this speaks to the imagination of most people listening to the podcast. It’s a popular topic.
But if you apply AI to do your reviewing for you, have you thought about how much time this actually saves for your recruiters or sourcers, whoever is doing the human side of the work right now? And what are those people exactly going to do with that free time? If you don’t think about that and redirect the time that they now save into a whatever other direction that is, productive, it doesn’t magically automatically happen that people become more productive if you just throw AI at it, right? You need to really think about these sourcers are now spending 40 hours a week on task X. We can save half of the time for them. Doesn’t really matter how much, but with those 20 hours, what are they exactly going to do? What other value added task? And if you leave that open, they’re all going to come up with things on their own and everybody’s going to fill in their time in a different way. And then it becomes very hard to prove what the actual ROI is, because then you say, yeah, now we saved 20 hours. Like, yeah, but I’m still paying them for the 40 hours. So it’s not that we saved 20 hours in payment to these human beings. So what are they actually doing with the time? And you need to include that in your business case. Everybody understands AI reviewing a thousand candidates is more efficient than a human doing it. Like, that’s not up for discussion, but what do you do with the saved time, right? You need to think about that in your business case.
Matt Alder
I think that’s critical because I actually made a list of the phrases that I was hearing when I’m asking people that question or hearing people answer that question. What are you doing with the extra time that this technology is going to create for your team? And there are some really set answers that always come up, which is like, they can do the things that they should be doing. They can work on valuable stuff. And it’s just these set phrases that don’t actually really mean anything, or they mean very different things to very different people. And I think that’s where the danger is here, isn’t it?
Toni de Graaf
Yeah, exactly. I think this is also in that discussion that you now see in our industry about, the token use or that the AI is actually more expensive than the human. And I think it’s a little bit exaggerated discussion. It’s not really a point, but at the core, I think it’s exactly what we’re talking about here. If you apply AI, you do free up humans, but you need to be in control. You need to be the architect of what those humans are going to do with that time you actually save. If you don’t control it, it’s just random stuff, right? Like, yeah, they’re going to do more value added stuff or they have more time to do things they should be doing. Yeah, that’s kind of, excuse my English, no shit Sherlock moment. But what is that exactly? You need to quantify that.
Matt Alder
Yeah, I think that’s much more important than a lot of time and effort seems to be spent on debating the ins and outs of the technology and how it’s charged and all this sort of stuff. And actually, that’s so much less important than the strategic bit that we’re talking about.
To kind of make this sort of easier for people, break this down for us. How should someone be approaching this kind of issue? What are the sort of steps and things that they should be thinking about?
Toni de Graaf
Let’s define the issue first, right? I think the issue is, in my mind, as a TA leader, you are on one end responsible for the operational part. So filling the jobs, moving the pipelines from open to closed, basically. And on the other hand, as TA leader, you are responsible to do it faster and more efficient and against a better quality tomorrow. So what are the things that you do to improve, right? Because if you don’t spend time on that.
Next year, so 12 months from now, you do everything exactly in the same way, right? And then you’re falling behind other TA teams that are actually improving and innovating. So that is the first mindset I always try to give to TA leaders. Yes, you’re responsible for the operation, but you’re also responsible for improving it. And how then to, and the operation, I don’t think we need to tell a lot of TA leaders how to run their operation. We’re very good at that. That’s our bread and butter. But I think the other half, how do you,
in a structured way, improve your TA function or test things or innovate or however you want to call that? I think that’s where the learning sits for us as TA leaders. So that part is exactly what we train from the Recruiting Excellence Foundation, right? And the assessment is a great way to actually start because the number one point where you should start is figure out, where am I? What am I actually good at? What are the points? What am I weak at? Or what are the areas that I could potentially improve? Yes, we could all probably go to a whiteboard and write a few things down. But you need a structured approach to this, right? And this is exactly what we offer, right? So people can take that assessment for free, by the way. We’ll put a link somewhere, I guess, later. I don’t know exactly how we do that. But people can take a look at that. And that you can actually see if I break down my TA function into its core components, which are the 21 that we talked about earlier. Where am I good, where am I weak, and which one should I actually improve that have the biggest impact on my ability to consistently deliver the right person exactly on time. That is the focus that you should have. So not just improve what you can improve, right? Great example is that probably.
Every TA leader listening to this, I know it’s always true for me, are our email templates always up to date? Do they have the best content and is it the best it can be? Probably not, right? So that is a project that everybody could pick up and we could improve today. But is that actually the highest priority that helps us deliver more consistently exactly on time in a cost-effective manner? No, it isn’t. So it should not be a priority or at least not the number one priority, right? So we always say to people, if it contributes to this outcome of consistent delivery, that is what you should make the list or the priority. If you will, just write everything down you could improve, and every individual topic, to what degree helps it improve my consistent delivery of talent, and match it against that.
Matt Alder
We’ll put the link to the assessment in the show notes and also at the end of our conversation I’ll read it out as well so people have it. And also so they’re able to just go in and just do the part of the assessment that’s about the kickoff and the review meetings.
Toni de Graaf
Yeah, exactly. We have an option to do the full assessment like we talked about earlier, 15, 20 minutes. It’s quite the investment. If you just want to get a feel of how this works, everything that we just talked about, we created a mini assessment that only assesses in this case the two topics that we talk about here. So indeed the job kickoff meeting and hiring decision and this will take you probably two minutes to fill out. So you get an idea how to think about your current state, you get an idea how that looks of your maturity versus the global benchmark. And if you like it, you can complete the full assessment at a later stage.
Matt Alder
I think it’s something everyone should do because I think there is some really, really valuable benchmarking insights.
I just want to sort of finish by talking about the future a bit. So obviously, there is a transitional process to go through, which is where we are at the moment. But where do you think we’re heading with this? I mean, I’ve seen some really interesting technology being introduced that could change things. I’ve seen something that sort of automates intake meetings using conversational AI. Lots of things going on. Where are we going to end up in a few years’ time?
Toni de Graaf
Yeah, that’s a very interesting one. I think nobody knows exactly, but in my opinion also changes on that. Every interesting person I speak to, sometimes if I go to an event, I was at a very interesting event couple of weeks ago in Budapest.
Johnny Campbell from SocialTalent was on stage and showed a few practical examples of how different TA teams around the world actually use AI today. Are great examples. And it really, again, reshaped my way of thinking about it, how TA teams are actually using it. So I think the most important thing for everybody, keep listening to these types of podcasts, keep reading, keep talking to people, because that is I guess the best way to understand what will happen in the future. And then to say, like, where do I think we’ll go? I think we’ll go slower than all trends will say, right? Because three years ago we already said that the recruiter was no longer needed and we would all have been replaced in a couple years. We still haven’t and we won’t be this year. We won’t be next year. But the core of that message I still think is true, but I think it’s more on a longer horizon. So let’s say five to ten years where a lot of the manual labour will be automated and then we will see bigger displacement of human workforce. That for one.
For our industry as talent acquisition, I think there are two main trends. One, I think there is a ridiculously steep learning curve to that, not the operational part. We run our TA functions well, but to learning to innovate, to learning to implement new pieces of technology and implement AI and test and grow. That is the name of the game. That will be the game changer. TA leaders that build awesome stuff and that will be ahead of the curve are the ones that learn how to innovate and iterate really quickly. That’s one.
And two, with that big displacement, will we be out of a job? Well. I don’t know. Let’s say that first. But I think the volume in hiring will go up, strangely enough.
Because there is one trend that is lurking on the horizon for the last 10 years, but never really got the traction that they thought it would. And that’s the gig economy, right? I think if AI and automation can run big parts of the organization, it becomes less interesting to hire, for example, an accountant that works for your company for 40 years, because it’s a risk in the amount of money you pay that person versus the job that he or she does.
What will happen I think is that for example you need a report every quarter. You need an annual tax report. You need to have, there are different tasks that that accountant does over the year, and if AI and automation can control large amounts of the operation of the function, you just hire the specialist to do that particular job for you, right? Building an annual report or doing the taxes for one year, that only takes a couple weeks, right? So you just need that one person. So that one accountant that may be working for an organization for 30 or 40 years now turns into I need five times for a couple days or a couple weeks somebody who executes this job. So I think there could be a very interesting case that the number of hires per year will explode, and now with the rise of AI and we’re starting to automate our functions, we’re actually able to handle that. So it could very well be that the number of people in talent acquisition will reduce a little, but I think if an organization now hires 10,000 people a year, it could very well be that they hire 100,000 to 200,000 gig workers a year for small particular jobs, if we look to the horizon, let’s say five to ten years from now. That’s my take on it anyway.
Matt Alder
Tony, thank you very much for talking to me.
Toni de Graaf
Thank you for having me.
Matt Alder
My thanks to Tony. I strongly recommend that all the TA leaders listening take the Recruiting Excellence Business Assessment. To make that easy, we’ve created a short version that just focuses on job intake and the hiring decision, as Tony discussed in the episode. And also from there, you can go on to take the full assessment if you want to. You can find it by going to mattalder.me slash July. That’s mattalder.me slash July.
You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or wherever you listen to 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.
