I recorded four conversations at UNLEASH World in Paris in October, and there was one theme that kept coming up in all of them. My interviewees argued that AI is starting to redesign the work itself, and with it how organizations are built, how roles are defined, and how people are hired. Most of them build HR technology for a living, so they see further ahead than most employers, but they obviously have a stake in the future they describe. So what does all of this mean for how companies are run and how they hire?
My guests are Mervyn Dinnen, an analyst and author on HR and talent trends; Allyn Bailey, Senior Director of Corporate Narrative and Executive Communications at SmartRecruiters; Ronni Zehavi, Co-Founder and CEO of HiBob; and Dalit Brosh, Co-Founder and CEO of Glimpse. In our conversations, they discuss why talent acquisition may stop being a separate function, what it takes to put an agent on the org chart, how to assess people for roles that have not been created yet, and why the experience people have at work still decides whether they join and stay.
In the interview, we discuss:
- The missing debate about what should stay human and what should go to AI
- Does talent acquisition still make sense as a separate function?
- Hiring people into the company rather than into a role
- The widening gap between forward-looking and transactional organizations
- Four dimensions of AI change, from employee psychology to government regulation
- Agents on the org chart and what it takes to onboard, govern and review them
- Is the era of the large enterprise over?
- Assessing what people are capable of rather than what they have done
- Measuring learning agility and adaptability to AI
- What will the big HR narrative of 2027 be?
Mervyn Dinnen
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mervyndinnen/
Allyn Bailey
https://www.linkedin.com/in/allynbailey/
https://www.smartrecruiters.com/
Ronni Zehavi
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronni-zehavi-99a6271/
Dalit Brosh
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dalit-brosh/
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Key takeaways
- The debate about which parts of hiring should stay human and which should go to AI is not yet happening in any real detail, with protectionism and fear on one side and aggressive sales and marketing on the other.
- One argument made at UNLEASH World in Paris is that talent acquisition will stop existing as a separate function, because organizations will weigh internal talent and AI agents against external hiring for every need, and that work has to sit inside the business.
- AI agents are starting to appear on org charts with human names, which creates a need to onboard them, govern them, review their performance and link them to the people who built them.
- HiBob’s co-founder and CEO believes AI forces every organization to rethink how work gets done, and that a large enterprise rebuilt from scratch today would need a fraction of its current headcount because agents can do so much of the work.
- Glimpse assesses what people are capable of rather than what they know or have done, using short online tasks with built-in moments of pressure to predict how someone will perform in roles that have not been created yet.
- The big HR narrative of 2027 may be about people rather than technology, and it comes down to whether people are proud to work for an organization, whether they can do their best work there, and whether it helps them accelerate their careers.
Transcript
Matt Alder 0:00
I recently attended UNLEASH in Paris, and AI and AI agents were everywhere. The conversations I recorded there, though, weren’t really about the technology, but how it’s changing work and what that does to organisations and the people in them. So what did I learn? Keep listening to find out.
Matt Alder 0:38
Hi there, welcome to episode 835 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. I recorded four conversations at the recent UNLEASH conference in Paris, and there was one theme that came up in all of them. My interviewees argued that AI is starting to redesign work itself, and with it how organisations are built, how roles are defined, and how people are hired. Most of the people I spoke to build HR technology for a living, so they see further than most employers, but they obviously also have a stake in the future they’re describing. So, what does this all mean for how companies are run and how they hire? The first interview is with Mervyn Dinnen, an analyst and author on HR and talent trends, and a regular interviewee on Recruiting Future. We recorded this live on the podcast stage, and I asked him what he was seeing at the event and what the conversations there were missing. Hi, Mervyn. Welcome back to the podcast.
Mervyn Dinnen 1:37
Hello, Matt. Thank you for having me back on the podcast.
Matt Alder 1:40
Well, it’s a pleasure. And we are sitting on a stage at UNLEASH in Paris with cameras, with an audience, with all kinds of things. So slightly more upmarket than the last time we did a podcast where I think we were sitting on a coffee table in a corner somewhere. So always good to talk to you in many different circumstances. It’s an interesting show. It’s UNLEASH. It’s certainly bigger than it was last year. And there are literally, I feel like I’m drowning under AI and being attacked by AI agents. It’s just absolutely everywhere. What’s your perspective on what you’ve seen so far?
Mervyn Dinnen 2:16
I kind of half expected it to be like this because there’s so much that still seems so new. There’s so much that people are experimenting with, different ways of using AI, different ways of bringing it into the, I suppose, the day-to-day operations of different businesses. That is clearly top of mind. And there’s a lot of people who are here, I’m guessing primarily, to find out what they should be doing with AI.
Matt Alder 2:42
I think you’re right there. I also think that we’re not properly having the what’s human, what’s AI debate. People are sort of holding onto things that they could give to AI, and at the same time, giving things to AI that they should hold onto. And I’m not seeing, I’m seeing a lot of protectionism, a lot of fear, a lot of aggressive sales and marketing on the other side of it. But I think we’re lacking that proper debate about actually what does need to be human, what does need to be AI, because I think it’s more nuanced than people think.
Mervyn Dinnen 3:12
And I’ve not seen a huge amount of discussion that really kind of gets into the detail of that.
Matt Alder 3:20
No. And I think there’s probably two angles on that. The first one is people aren’t getting too heavily into the detail because they don’t maybe fully understand it themselves.
Mervyn Dinnen 3:34
Yeah, they don’t feel qualified to talk about it in detail.
Matt Alder 3:39
And the other one, as I said, is almost this wild west of experimentation that, you know, it’s let’s try and use it for this. And then if we can use it for something which isn’t seriously work related, then let’s see how we can adapt that to use it for something seriously work related.
Matt Alder 3:53
Aline Bailey from SmartRecruiters joined me on the same stage straight after I’d spoken to Mervyn. Around this time every year, Aline and I compare notes on where recruiting’s headed, and this year, she makes a very big prediction about the future of talent acquisition.
Matt Alder 4:09
Hi, Aline.
Aline Bailey 4:10
Hey, Matt.
Matt Alder 4:11
Good to be talking to you again.
Aline Bailey 4:12
I know. I can’t believe. I feel like we haven’t talked in a while, yet I feel like we talk all the time. It’s a very weird…
Matt Alder 4:19
It is, isn’t it? I think the last time we were talking, we were actually in New York filming that film, weren’t we?
Aline Bailey 4:26
We were. That’s what it is. And then I spent hours upon hours editing. So I feel like I’ve seen your face quite a bit. There we go. Which is fabulous. It’s in a great way.
Matt Alder 4:36
Absolutely, yeah. Well, it’s great to catch up with you. And it’s that time of year again. So for the last, I can’t remember how many times we’ve done this, but around about this time of year, we’ve had a conversation about what do we think the future of recruiting is gonna look like. Obviously lots of things have changed in the last 12 months or so, but where’s your head at now? What’s on your radar? And what do you think has shifted? Where do you think we’re heading?
Aline Bailey 4:59
Wow. So, Matt, I’m going to be a little controversial yet again. And this is non-sanctioned. This is an Aline opinion where we’re at. But, you know, a few years ago, before everybody was really even starting, they were just in the infancy of the AI stuff. We were talking about how dramatically it was going to change the role of the recruiter. I think that ship has sailed. We’re past there. If your role hasn’t shifted or changed, then… you know, maybe you’re not watching the tea leaves here. It’s gone. I think that we are entering a phase where the idea of an independent talent acquisition organisation starts to become less and less viable. And so let me explain what I mean by that, right? People joke with me that I’m always killing off things, right? But I kind of am. And it’s not that I don’t think that what specialty or value is there is understanding how to connect people to talent. But I think we finally have the technology now to be able to look at this in a much more holistic way. And this idea of an independent talent acquisition organisation that is focused primarily solely on external sourcing and recruitment workflow management and et cetera, it becomes less interesting for organisations who are now trying to look at it, not just at what is this external headcount job description I need to fill, but are now asking questions like, where is my business? What am I going to need in three to six months? Is it internal talent? Okay, great. So then maybe we say we add internal mobility to it. But now we’re also saying, or is it an agent that I need to do a particular component or task? I think that’s one level that’s going to shift the dynamic so it’s not necessarily, you know, I’m gonna route this through an external headcount, I’m gonna route it through internal. That’s gonna be much more holistic. And in order for that to operate, you can’t do that in a silo as an organisation. It’s not very deeply embedded in the talent and HR VP organisation. But I actually think it’d be much more embedded in the business organisation, which many recruiting firms are, right? Teams are, but they haven’t necessarily been fully embedded. I think the next step to this, however, is going to be past there, not just kind of who I’m going to hire, how I’m going to fill these roles with. The idea that I’m going to fill a job, one role, one set of skills or one sort of capabilities, one set of behaviours, this can do this thing. And that’s what they’re going to get hired for and have a career for 20 years. We know that that’s not realistic anymore. As people have more insight into not just the prescribed, inferred interest of what they’re going to need for tomorrow’s workforce, businesses are also changing as dynamically. So that means when I’m bringing somebody into my company, I’m not bringing them into a role so much anymore in the future. And when I say the future, or probably not 18 months, or maybe it will be, who knows?
Matt Alder 8:20
Who knows, yeah, very true.
Aline Bailey 8:20
But I’m really bringing somebody into my company, maybe permanently, maybe temporarily, with the assumption that they’re going to do a series of projects or work as demand requires it. That changes dramatically, this idea of talent acquisition, how we operate it, how we sit with it. So at a minimum, yes, your workflows and processes are going to change, because the demands of the business are gonna change. But in a maybe more controversial take, I think the idea of this independent talent acquisition business group within kind of HR, the business starts to dissipate.
Matt Alder 9:01
Yeah, I think it’s interesting. All the silos that we’ve kind of put up in talent and HR, you can almost see them sort of merging and collapsing in real time. It’s a fascinating time. We’ve been talking about the future for a long time and making, you know, making these kind of predictions. And they’ve always been very much along the, along the right track.
Aline Bailey 9:18
I’m telling you, we’ve won every time, Matt.
Matt Alder 9:19
I think history is, history is on our side here. But out of all of that though, what’s kind of surprised you the most? What’s come at you from left field or what hasn’t happened quite the way you would expect it to have?
Aline Bailey 9:34
So I think, and again, because I work with a lot of different size companies, I don’t think I was fully prepared for the amount of variation and disparate impact that these changes are having across kind of companies and company size, dynamics, etc. So I think I should be clear that most of the time that when I’m talking now, I’m probably talking about larger multinationals who are really looking at this from a kind of much broader perspective. Yeah. The individual who’s running a talent acquisition organisation inside a tyre manufacturer in the Midwest, right, in the US, is probably not seeing things all that dramatically different and can’t quite understand where all of this is. Like they may, they’re listening to your podcast, maybe, or they’re trying, and they’re not seeing those same effects. I think I anticipated that that variation would start to shrink much quicker than it has. And in fact, I don’t, I not only don’t see it shrinking quicker, I actually seen it getting much more divergent. And I don’t necessarily know how solution providers or how even those who are helping support these organisations, think through it, navigate that much difference. That chasm is getting wider and wider and wider.
Matt Alder 11:01
I think that’s interesting because there’s, I think there’s a thing about AI in particular, that actually, if you’re a smaller business, it’s kind of easier to adopt. You’ve got kind of more agility there. But I suppose that there is a big piece around knowing what it can do and having it packaged in the right way for you. So maybe that will change over time.
Aline Bailey 11:21
Who knows? It could get there. And by the way, I mean, I think it will. But I think this is a microcosm of a larger workforce economic challenge that we’re seeing. The variation between businesses who are looking forward, bringing technology in, adapting the way in which they operate is dramatically different from kind of the normal shop. And we used to break it up by calling it things like this is enterprise and small and medium businesses operate this way, et cetera. I don’t think it’s as clean cut as that. It really is. Are you operating in this kind of forward talent direction? Are you operating this transactional direction? And in between nothing shall meet because the tools are set up to support you in both ways. You’re either going to pick one or the other and off you go.
Matt Alder 12:12
There’s a final question for you. What’s the thing that you’ve seen with this technology that’s really made you stop and think this is going to change everything?
Aline Bailey 12:20
So I’ve been very, very sceptical about whether or not we could deploy or leverage AI effectively, ethically and compliantly to allow us to understand people at a unique enough level and a business at a unique enough level to actually solve this workforce planning problem. I think we’re getting there. I think we’re going to be there relatively soon. I know as a company, that’s definitely a direction that we’re moving in. I mean, SAP just announced its intent to acquire TechWolf. And the purpose behind that is very, very clear. The technology now exists and if we can deploy it correctly, we could finally solve this problem which would make me super happy. If I don’t have to listen to anybody or myself sit in another conference room and debate with one product owner or one business group owner to another about what a project manager’s skills actually are, I think that if for all those people who hate that, I think we’re past, we’re going to be very quickly past that, faster than anybody can imagine.
Matt Alder 13:23
Let’s hope so. Yeah. Aline, thank you for talking to me.
Aline Bailey 13:26
Fabulous. Thank you so much, Matt. I appreciate it.
Matt Alder 13:31
Aline’s prediction was about the future of the talent acquisition function. Ronni Zehavi’s prediction is about the whole organisation. He’s the co-founder and CEO of HiBob, and he believes that AI will force every organisation to rethink how work gets done. In our conversation, he explains why, what it means to put an agent in an org chart, and how he expects companies to be structured as a result.
Matt Alder 13:58
Hi Ronni, good to be talking to you again.
Ronni Zehavi 14:00
Hi, good to see you again.
Matt Alder 14:02
Quickly introduce yourself for everyone who’s listening. Tell us who you are and what you do.
Ronni Zehavi 14:06
So I’m the co-founder and CEO of HiBob. HiBob was founded about 11 years ago. We focus on serving customers at the mid-size to sub-enterprise. We provide the full HCM stack.
Matt Alder 14:27
I remember last time we spoke, you had some really interesting perspectives into what AI is doing to work. There’s a temptation to sort of look at AI as something that’s just making what we do already more efficient, but it’s becoming obvious it’s much more than that. What kind of vision do you have for it? Where do you think it’s going?
Ronni Zehavi 14:45
That’s the, I don’t know, multi-trillion, billion dollar question, Matt. So, I think there are several assumptions that it’s way easier for us to answer today versus a year ago. The first one, AI is here to stay. There’s no doubt about it. I think the following assumption is that humans and agents will walk side by side. And someone, a persona or a system or department will have to orchestrate humans and digital workers all together. But to me, the main change in my perspective about AI, I think it’s the fact that AI forces every organisation to redesign or to rethink about how work gets done. So it’s not only about the technological disruption, it’s a given. I think it’s more about the impact and the expectations that a modern organisation will have to consider when it comes to AI. And I think to get to answer this question, I see basically four dimensions. The first one is the tech disruption. There’s no question about the impact but it’s not enough, you have to have other elements supporting the change. So the first one, so out of the four the technical adoption is one. The next one is the psychological and the behavioural change. Let’s assume that you really want to push the agenda and you’re convincing your employees to use it, but all of a sudden they realise that their job can be done in seconds, a mission that they used to do in days. So they are seriously thinking about, am I cutting the branch I’m sitting on? Will I be irrelevant and AI will be able to displace me? So, the psychological change, the behaviour change is mandatory and it will take time and it’s the company’s obligation to make sure that they focus on it. The following one, which I believe is the strongest impact, is the way that businesses have been operating. So you know this is the blueprint of how B2B works, the relationship between vendors and customers, the procurement process, pricing, packaging, measuring the impact, how you run demos. So I don’t see organisations abandoning the best practices that were basically the map and the compass for companies how to run businesses. You know, you had ERP for finance and CRM for sales. So the impact will be on a personal level, but also at the organisation level. And the fourth one is governments. They will draw the line on what you’ll be allowed to do and what not. And it’s still in the early discussions, but I guess they will be pulled in to help put the right guardrails on how to run it. So I think redesigning the way work gets done, that’s the number one agenda for any modern organisation.
Matt Alder 19:09
I think it’s interesting. When I come to events like this, people talk about AI. They talk about companies that have agents as AI employees. They will work alongside humans. And we kind of describe a vision of the world that everyone kind of nods and says, you know, this is what we talk about at HR conferences. What does that look like in practice now, though? Because obviously, this is starting to have an impact in companies. It’s not just a theory that we’re talking about anymore. Where are we with that sort of agentic employee? Is it something that you have in your business? What does it look like in practice?
Ronni Zehavi 19:45
It becomes more and more popular than before. And it’s an open-ended. Nobody can stop it. So maybe a year ago, if a company would decide to add an agent to an org chart, and give it a name, everybody would look and say, seriously? Are we going too far with this idea? I think today, and we see it, it becomes more and more popular. So for example, at the beginning, agents were named after trees, and the new trend that we see, they all get human names. And you see them on org charts. So they become a part of the organisation. And think about what does it take to onboard an agent, to govern the agent, to review the performance, to associate the agent to the humans who built it. So this entire new area that must be developed and then operated to allow customers to have humans and agents work side by side.
Matt Alder 21:15
I always ask people about the future. What do you think the future is going to look like with all of this in a couple of years’ time? And in a lot of cases people are just speculating, but I like asking it to people who run software companies because you’re building this stuff. So what does the future look like in two years’ time? Where do you think we’re going with this?
Ronni Zehavi 21:32
I think in the short term a lot of confusion and uncertainty, like what does it mean, it’s hard to answer, yeah. But then in the long term I think it will have a huge impact on everything in our life. You know, medicine and healthcare, the collaboration and social media that we use. But when it comes to work, I think it will be interesting to see how organisations will be redesigned and structured. I’ll give an example. I think the era of large enterprise is over. You don’t need so many people to run your company because it’s all about the hybrid between humans and agents. So if, I don’t know, Salesforce has 75,000 employees, if they have to rebuild it from scratch, most likely they will need 10% of the amount of people. Why? Because agents can do a great job side by side with humans. So if I look at the future from my, I would say, very narrow lens as a player in this industry, I believe that we’ll see so many things changing, from juniors and the inexperienced employees. Think about the way you run budgets, how you balance between salaries and token spending, how you inject the right culture code to agents and basically guide them. That’s the way humans behave in our company and we expect agents to have the same DNA. So, everything in our life will change and then specifically when it comes to work, I totally believe that if we have this conversation in two years or a year from now, we’ll have so many things to discuss that we can’t even imagine what they can be.
Matt Alder 23:57
Ronni, thank you very much for talking to me.
Ronni Zehavi 23:59
Thank you.
Matt Alder 24:00
Predictions like these leave employers with a practical problem. If the work keeps changing, the role that someone’s hired for may not exist in that form for long. So what are you assessing them against during the hiring process? Delit Brosh is the co-founder and CEO of Glimpse, a company that assesses people on what they’re capable of rather than what they’ve done. She explains how that works and talks through the type of insights that the system’s giving to employers.
Delit Brosh 24:30
I’m Delit Brosh, and I’m co-founder and CEO of Glimpse. Glimpse is a startup, and what we do is we model success. We model organisational success.
Matt Alder 24:43
How does that work?
Delit Brosh 24:43
So we use science, neuroscience, basically, and combine that cognitive neuroscience with machine learning to generate a new type of signal. So everyone’s talking about AI and how AI only works if you have the right signal. So we’re generating a new kind of scientific signal that helps measure how people actually perform, not what they say about themselves but how they actually perform.
Matt Alder 25:12
This sounds absolutely fascinating and I’m not sure we’ve got time to go into the absolute detail of it but I’m sort of desperate to know a little bit more about that. So you’ve sort of got traditional assessment tools and the science that sits behind there, you’re talking about neuroscience. What’s different about it? What does it tell me that a traditional assessment wouldn’t tell me?
Delit Brosh 25:26
So most assessments tell you what someone knows or what they’ve done. Our assessment focuses on what they’re capable of. So in a world that changes so fast and all the skills, everyone says skills, right? They have a very short shelf life. What we care about is not what someone has predicted their performance in the past, but how will they perform in the future when the roles haven’t been built yet? So things like ability to deal with change, ability to deal with stress, ability to deal with cognitive overload. But how do you measure these things, but not based on what someone says about themselves or what others say about them, but based on how they actually do. So we basically have a 45-minute set of very short online games, tasks we call them, and they have nothing to do with questions. It’s not asked to rate yourself on a scale of one to seven how good you are at whatever. It gives you these tasks and allows you to do them. It doesn’t really matter how you do because what happens behind the scenes is we create what we call critical moments, interventions that increase the level of frustration or increase the level of whatever. And we check to see how your game changes. And those are the markers that we generate. And we use those to model. If you’re using it for hiring, it’s part of your hiring process. So companies that work with us that use it for hiring have it somewhere pretty close to the top of funnel because it’s so quick. And basically say, this is part of our hiring process. Please do this. You can do it at home. Companies that use us to, for example, predict leadership potential, then do it as part of their leadership pipeline process. And, you know, so depending on where the decision happens.
Matt Alder 27:08
What problem is it that you think you solve for organisations?
Delit Brosh 27:11
Well, we solve the challenge that while it’s very important to figure out what you know and what you’ve done, a lot of the decisions are made ultimately by a combination of that and your sense of the person. You use different words, right? Your gut feeling about them. How well will they fit into my team? How well will they work with us? And it’s all things that are not very defensible. They’re not very measurable today. And what we want to do is provide a measurable, objective, unbiased metric around that. And that is what our science has been able to do. My co-founder is a professor of cognitive psychology. That’s what he’s researched for years, and that is where the core of that part of our IP comes in. And the other part is the machine learning algorithms that we’ve developed to be able to model those markers.
Matt Alder 28:01
And what kind of results are you seeing? What have you been able to sort of deliver for employers?
Delit Brosh 28:04
We’ve seen really interesting results in different sectors. So, for example, we’re working with an organisation that has a really long training programme for a high-stakes role. It takes years for that programme to complete. And they’re leveraging us as the first part of their screening process because they don’t want to invest three years of training in people who don’t have likelihood to succeed. And we’ve been able to divide all their candidates into six different categories based on their likelihood to successfully complete the programme three years out. And the bottom category, they don’t even continue the screening with them. And everyone else, they’re just tracking it. And we’ve been working with them for many, many years and we can see that. And another organisation is about, we’ve been able to show that based on the way we divide at the very beginning of the programme, we can see people’s learning agility, their ability to learn new things, how that differentiates. And we’re able to translate it into one group being able to learn at a certain speed, and the other group being able to learn five times as fast in terms of how well they complete different tasks. And that gives us some basic capability to help with concepts like AI adaptability.
Matt Alder 29:34
Thank you very much for talking to me.
Delit Brosh 29:34
It was lovely to talk to you as well. Thank you.
Matt Alder 29:37
The last word goes to Mervyn. At the end of our conversation on stage, I asked him what he thought the big narrative in HR would be over the next 12 months.
Matt Alder 29:48
What do you think might be the sort of the big narrative of 2027? What’s going to be the big sort of HR talking point in the next 12 months?
Mervyn Dinnen 29:57
I would like to think it’s humanity. You’ve heard me say before about kind of, you know, keeping humanity in an AI world. I think it’s the experience that people get. I think will still be important. If organisations want to attract people and retain people, it still comes down to the basics of what kind of place are you to work? What kind of freedom, not freedom, but I mean, what kind of boundaries do you place on people? Are you an organisation people are proud to say they work for? Do they feel that they’re achieving their best work and their best results with you? Are there structures within your organisation that actually are almost working against people who maybe want to do things or want to try new things? I think these kind of conversations will be ongoing and at most, most of what I’ve heard on the stage, you can, it’s not worded like that but you can boil it down to those things. Are we an organisation that supports people? Are we an organisation that people are proud to work for, where they can achieve their best work, where they can enjoy their work? And are we able to help people accelerate their careers?
Matt Alder 31:20
Thanks to all my guests and a huge thank you to everyone at UNLEASH for hosting me at the show. 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.
