I was delighted to hear two of my regular guests on Recruiting Future were writing a book together. “Talent Acquisition Excellence” by Kevin Wheeler and Bas Van De Haterd is now available, whether you get your books, and it is brilliant to welcome them both back to the podcast to talk about it.
Kevin is the founder of The Future of Talent Institute and is highly respected for his skills in predicting how Talent Acquisition and HR will develop and evolve. Bas is a consultant whose keen sense of curiosity has helped him map the evolution of assessment technology and deliver an annual state-of-the-nation report on corporate career sites.
In our conversations, they bring different perspectives to the concept of Talent Acquisition excellent, offer some actionable advice and give us a sense of what the future might hold.
In the interview, we discuss:
• What is talent acquisition excellence?
• Why AI could be more disruptive than the invention of the Internet
• Shifting mindsets
• Improving selection by using science
• Driving the evolution of recruitment marketing
• How the recruiting function will change, and what skills will recruiters need
• Why employers aren’t moving quickly enough
• Where will TA be in a year?
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Transcript:
Matt: Support for this podcast comes from Harver, the industry leading hiring solution helping organizations optimize their talent decisions. Rooted in over 35 years of rich data insights, backed by I-O psychology and cognitive science, Harver delivers a suite of automated solutions that enable organizations to engage, hire, and develop the right talent in a fast and fundamentally less biased way. Visit harver.com to learn how you can take the smart path to the right talent.
[Recruiting Future theme]
Matt: Hi there. Welcome to Episode 597 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. I was delighted to hear that two of my regular guests on Recruiting Future were writing a book together. Talent Acquisition Excellence by Kevin Wheeler and Bas van der Haterd is now available wherever you get your books, and it’s brilliant to welcome both of them back to the podcast to talk about it. Kevin is the Founder of the Future of Talent Institute and is highly respected for his skills in predicting how talent acquisition and HR will develop and evolve. Bas is a consultant whose keen sense of curiosity has helped him map the evolution of assessment technology and deliver an annual State of the Nation report on corporate career sites. In our conversations, they bring different perspectives to the concept of talent acquisition excellence, offer some actionable advice, and give us a sense of what the future might hold.
Hi Kevin and welcome back to the podcast.
Kevin: Great to be here as always, Matt.
Matt: It’s an absolute pleasure to have you back on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do for people who may not have come across your work before?
Kevin: Sure. I run an organization called the Future of Talent Institute, and basically, we’re a think tank that tries to look a couple of years, two to three years into the future, look at the trends and try to make sense of those trends for the talent community in general. So that’s what I’ve been doing for the last 20 years or something. It’s forecasting in a way, but it’s really compiling all the various trends that are out there. And then, just as I said before, “Try to make sense out of them. What does this mean for us in recruiting? Where are things going and what’s it potentially going to look like in three years from now, let’s say in our profession?” So that’s kind of what I do.
Matt: Fantastic stuff. Now, your coauthored book has just come out. Tell us a little bit about the book and why you wrote it.
Kevin: Sure. It’s called Talent Acquisition Excellence, and the subtitle kind of sums it up in a way. It’s called using digital capabilities and analytics to improve recruitment. And I think the primary driver in writing this book was that AI and analytics are core to the future of recruitment and probably the core to the future of almost every function in the corporate world. So, I think it was just really important to highlight some of the trends that are happening and then how technology and analytics is playing out in that space. So that’s really the motivation behind the book.
Matt: As you say, you’ve been looking into the future of people, HR, talent acquisition, for a really long time now, and we’ve been through a number of different technology revolutions and kind of shifts and changes to the way that things work over that period of time. How does this compare to, for example, the introduction of the Internet, or the introduction of mobile or social media into recruiting? What’s different this time in terms of where we are right now?
Kevin: Well. This, I think for sure is a much bigger and much more powerful and impactful invention, you could say, than anything that you just mentioned. It comes close to the Internet, but it may actually be even more important than the Internet. I think that we’ve struggled for 30 or 40 years or more to try to create artificial intelligence that was truly intelligent and that could really offer solutions to things, and we’ve come very close to being able to do that now. So, I think that people like Reid Hoffman, who’s the founder of LinkedIn, and other luminaries, are equally convinced that this is a fundamental technology, probably more akin to electricity or the wheel, that’s going to completely change how we do everything. So, it’s a big deal, a very, very big deal.
Matt: What does Talent Acquisition Excellence look like, bearing in mind we have this huge technology revolution going on?
Kevin: Yeah. Well, I think it’ll be an evolution, probably not a revolution, as some of us might hope, but it will be evolving pretty quickly. And I think one of the things that people don’t quite comprehend or take into consideration is the speed that things happen. The Internet took 20 years to become universally adopted and used. This was going to take, probably has already taken less than a year. So, what does it mean for recruiting? It means that more and more functions that recruiters used to do and take pride in and have skill in doing are going to become at least heavily augmented, if not completely automated, by technology. And so take, for example, sourcing candidates. I think more and more the technology is already being used to find people, not only find them, but to do a quick assessment of their general capabilities to fill a particular role. It can even engage them and reach out to engage them.
So, the role of a sourcer over the next few years is going to become much less critical. It’s going to be many fewer people doing that. And I think that the sourcing that remains will be for those extremely hard-to-find positions, the positions that really for people that do not have an Internet presence and so forth. And it will start with a volume recruitment. So again, with the high, the routine jobs, the jobs that are probably 80% of all the jobs out there, we can already find, engage and even hire the people with very little human interaction. I think it’s going to be able to do assessment and screening in real time, combining whatever you’ve put in your CV along with your LinkedIn profile, any other information that’s on the Internet about you. It can compile all that and derive from that what your skills are. It can probably find skills that you haven’t even indicated that you have. For example, you might speak a language that you’ve never put on any of your documentation, but it will figure out that you’re probably going to be able to speak this language. So, it’ll be able to do assessment.
Now I’m not saying that assessment will be so we automatically hire you, but it will give a recruiter or a hiring manager an incredibly good picture of who you are and what you can do. It will engage you, it will engage candidates and conduct conversations with them. Tools are already out there that do this quite effectively and they’re just going to get better and better. And all of these things I mentioned are going to get better exponentially, not in a linear way, but they’re going to make incredible strides overnight. And that’s what’s so challenging about it, frightening about it and exciting about what’s going on. So administratively, it will be able to do all the typical routine data entry, report generation, all of these things. So, I mean, when you look at the recruiting function and the steps in the function, I’d say somewhere around 75% to 80% of it will be heavily augmented or automated within the next two to three years.
Matt: If that’s the case, and I completely agree with you in terms of the speed of change. And I think people really underestimate just how much can be automated and probably be made more effective than it is now. So with that being the case, what does the TA team of three or four years’ time look like? What does the function look like? What are people’s jobs, if indeed there are any jobs for humans?
Kevin: Yeah. Well, we dedicate a whole chapter in the book to this topic and I think probably our chapter will be out of date very quickly as well.
[laughter]
Kevin: But to be quite honest with you, it’s going to be a very different function. I think the primary role of a recruiting function over the next few years will be marketing and branding to attract the right people to your organization and to be discovered by the various tools that exist out there. I think right now the marketing and branding that most functions do for recruiting is truly elementary. It’s not even 101 level in most cases. So, I think this is a role that recruiters are going to play a big part in and I think much better role than AI will be able to play. So they may be assisted by AI, but I really think the creativity, the innovation, the ideas, the context is going to come from the recruiters and the organization. So marketing is a big one.
I think the second big thing for the recruiting function is to look at the make versus buy discussion around talent. How do we encourage and develop internal talent? How do we partner with the learning and development function to develop more people to fit these roles? Yeah, we know that there’s a tremendous shortage of talent. It’s driven partly by demographics, partly by the attitude towards work, partly by the lack of education or the right education. So, we know that it’s going to get more and more difficult to find the right people to fill most of the jobs we have. And therefore, for smart organizations we’ll start to develop the ones they have, which will encourage people to stay, will give them more loyalty and will give them the skills the organization needs to achieve its goals. So, one of the roles may be for more of TA to morph more into learning and development or to merge more with the learning and development function and really foster true internal mobility, which is today mostly talk and not much action and very minimal amount that goes on in most organizations. We still very focus on external recruiting.
I think the other role for TA in the future will be the conversation and relationship building with both candidates and hiring managers. AI can do a certain level of engagement, certainly the early stages, but when I get right down to talking to you, Matt and saying, “What will it take, Matt, to get you to take this job? What’s the one thing that’s going to make you say no to this job?” That’s where a human is going to have to play that part. They’re going to have to understand the psychology of the candidate. They’re going to have to talk to a hiring manager and say, “Why won’t you hire this person? What’s the one thing that’s holding you back from making an offer to this candidate, how can you influence hiring managers? How do you influence candidates overcome objections?” So, these are going to be the key things for the recruiting organization of the future to focus on. Marketing, internal development, and the relationship building with both candidates and hiring managers. I think those are the key threats.
Matt: I talked to a lot of TA leaders and a lot of TA teams, and there’s kind of a real spread of opinion and reactions to what’s going on. And at one extreme, people are running at a million miles an hour because they think there might not be any recruiters next year. At the other end of the extreme, people don’t think anything’s going to change. But in the middle, where most people are, there is a bit of a sense of, well, let’s kind of wait and see what happens. Let’s wait and see what other people do. Do you think employers and TA is moving quick enough in this kind of current environment? And what are the implications of not moving quick enough?
Kevin: No, they’re not moving quick enough. Most of them absolutely are not. I mean, we’ve got the old– This is a common theme throughout history. There’s nothing new about this. Whether it was the automobile, people resisted it strongly. Some people, early adopters, loved it and started driving really crappy early cars. And other people said, “No, the horse will never go away. And they will always have the horse.” And other people said, “Well, yeah, the car is coming, but it’s going to be years before it gets here, blah, blah, blah.” Okay. So, I think this is a common theme throughout history, and it’s no different for us in recruiting. Some people are going to adopt the technology quickly and leverage it and use it, and others will be very slow. But those who get on the bandwagon first, those who do it more quickly, those who understand its long-term potential, they’re going to be the ones who win in the end. They’re going to hire the better talent. They’re going to have a more efficient and sustainable recruiting function that’s got respect and budget to do what it needs to do.
And I think over time you will find the ones that don’t adopt technology and don’t adopt– they will fade away or be replaced by other things. So, to me it’s an imperative. The automobile had 30 or 40 or 50 years, the Internet had 20 years. We don’t have that kind of time with this. So, the technology is advancing so quickly that I think CEOs are going to say, “Why aren’t we doing this? Why aren’t we doing something? What’s going on here? How come company X is doing this and you’re not?” So, I think it’s absolutely critical that we move with great speed and experiment broadly. Even though many of the tools aren’t quite there yet, we still need to start experimenting and using them.
Matt: Yeah. I agree with you 100%. I think that in the past there’s always been the opportunity to course correct as technology embeds in. But this is moving so quickly, that opportunity just isn’t there. As a final question for you, in some ways this is a more difficult question than asking you what’s going to happen in 10 years’ time? How much change do you think we’ll see this year? Where might we be by this time next year?
Kevin: Yeah, that’s a really good question. Unfortunately, we’re not going to be where I would hope we would be, I don’t think. I think some of the more progressive talent leaders and companies will start to really use the technology that’s coming. I mean, one of the interesting things that’s going on is the technology is moving faster than some of the people are in adopting it. So, I look at some of the tools that are coming today, the sourcing tools and so forth. They’re already morphing into offering far more than just sourcing, and they know they have to do that to survive. So, I think that the companies that are really using and leveraging the technology out there, companies buying the more current, up-to-date sourcing tools that are really looking at the ATSs and what they’re starting, how they’re morphing, how they’re changing, that are beginning to look and experiment with using ChatGPT to rewrite job descriptions and so forth, that’s happening already.
And I think that’s probably one of the areas that’s most commonly being used right now, is to use ChatGPT or other tools. And there’s a number of companies offering tools that can assess your current job descriptions, improve them, remove bias from them, help you to make better decisions about where to post your jobs and how to advertise your jobs. The chatbots are improving on the career sites. So, the companies that are at the forefront of this are leveraging everything I just said. They’re using these chat bots, they’re building better career sites, they’re posting using AI to help build better job descriptions. They’re also starting to use more tools for assessment. And even if they’re only at the screening stage, they’re at least starting to be able to screen CVs and filter and rank CVs more effectively than they have in the past.
So, I think things are coming. They’re moving more slowly than I would hope they would. And it’s probably less than 10% of the companies that are actually using these tools well, but I think it’s going to move very quickly in the next year. This year is kind of an introductory year. I’ve dubbed this the first year of a decade of change, and I think this is just in the beginning of this. I think we’re not going to see real significant noticeable changes for probably three to four years.
Matt: So finally, tell us where people in the US can get the book. And also, you write an absolutely excellent newsletter, so tell people how they can subscribe to that.
Kevin: The book is generally available anywhere you would likely buy a book. It’s available both as a paperback and as an eBook. And as far as my newsletter goes, it’s fotnews.futureoftalent.org. So, if you just do that fotnews.futureoftalent.org, you will come to the subscription page. It’s free subscription if you want, it’s also paid. Every other week, every other post is paid and the other one is free. So, there’s something for both the paid and the free subscribers. I’ve been doing this newsletter for five or six years now and we’ve got a large number of subscribers. So really encourage everybody to read it and comment, give me feedback on it.
Matt: Kevin, thank you very much for talking to me.
Kevin: It’s been great Matt, as always, thanks.
Matt: Hi Bas, and welcome back to the podcast.
Bas: Thank you.
Matt: Always a pleasure to have you on the show. But for those who may have not heard one of your episodes before, please could you introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Bas: Well, my name is Bas van der Haterd. I’m a Dutchman. I consult with some larger organizations mainly on either improving their careers website or improving their selection process. I host a major Dutch event called Digitaal Werven. I speak on a lot of international conferences and I just published my sixth book actually, already, but the first one, all in English.
Matt: Well, congratulations on the book. I know from experience how difficult they are to write. Tell us a little bit about this latest book. What’s it about and why did you write it?
Bas: Well, it’s called TA Excellence, Talent Acquisition Excellence. And it’s basically about how you’re going to structure TA in a world which is filled with AI, but also the entire changing world of work, hybrid, remote global workspace falling apart in some pieces of the world. And how is that going to change, changing labor markets or desires from people. And we tried to look at what’s happening, plot models on that, and especially show people that there’s no one way to do recruiting right. There are several ways to do it right, but there are even more ways to do it wrong.
Matt: Just want to ask you a question sort of based on your experience working with all the companies that you work with and the conversations that you have with TA leaders, we talk a lot about why this is a significant time, why things are changing. You really sort of laid out some of the reasons there, and it really does feel like this real inflection point in talent acquisition. The talent acquisition leaders that you speak to, do they share that opinion? Are they having issues that need to be solved? Can they be tracked to some of the changes that you’re talking about?
Bas: Definitely. Well, some of them do, some of them don’t. Let me be very clear. I mean, like in every profession, you’ve got the people who are actually more leaders, and you’ve got people who are more the managers, making sure the store is open but not really changing anything. Those who see the changes are looking at, for example, I had one client who completely revamped his entire talent acquisition strategy, was looking at how can technology support us on every part of the journey, the candidate journey, because he realized, first of all, it was getting harder and harder to get quality recruiters. But also, he saw, on the one hand, for many jobs, because they had a strong employer brand. So, it was an employer who still got a lot of applications, and on some they were just ballooning, and on others, it was impossible to find somebody. So, he basically said, “We need to change everything we do or at least we need to question everything we do. The fact that we’ve been doing this for 25 years doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to keep doing.
Matt: Again, that’s interesting, I think, because you’re illustrating there a mindset shift that we’re all seeing the people who are kind of leading and really kind of leaning into this change making. How do people go about that? What is that kind of mindset shift that you think people need to take right now if they’re going to achieve talent acquisition excellence in the future.
Bas: Well, in his case, I don’t think it was a mindset shift. The interesting thing is he came from outside of TA, and he was looking at processes, and he’s like, that’s just weird. He came from the business itself, and he became the head of talent acquisition. He now left the organization– or at least he went back into the business again. He left the TA part of the organization after, I think, six years, seven years. But he was just looking at processes. He’s like, this is weird. And then he found somebody like me who said, “Yeah, I agree.” It was about selection. And they sent the very last candidate to an assessment center, and basically, they already decided, this is the guy or girl we’re going to hire. Let’s spend an insane amount of money on getting a checkbox. He’s like, isn’t that weird? And I’m like, “Yeah.” He says, “How can we do this better?” I said, “Well, the earlier assessments are the better and the more candidates.” And he’s like, “Yeah, but we don’t have the money.” And I’m like, “Well. Hello, technology.”
So, we did a pilot on that and things like that, and others are just involved. What I usually see is as soon as I have, for example, a TA leaders’ dinner, which I organize, we’ve got a great client speaker who’s showing them some amazing piece of technology. A lot of people are like, “Oh yeah, that’s a part of the process I should have looked at some point, and half of them do and half of them don’t.” It’s also about the inspiration and that’s why I love, for example, in the UK, you’ve got the RL100. We don’t have something exactly similar here. We’re trying to set some things up, but the inspiration, and I think that’s actually what you’re talking about a mindset change. I think it’s about a mindset which should have always been there. TA leaders going to events, getting inspired and just realizing we might need to do something about this.
Matt: Where should TA leaders be focusing their energy in terms of practically improving their talent acquisition? What are the key things to focus on in 2024?
Bas: I’m sorry, I’m going to answer this question with a very unsatisfying answer. It depends, but it does. The thing I always used to do when I was training this was look at what’s most important for your specific organization. So, are you having trouble attracting people or are you having trouble selecting the right people from the immense amounts that you are attracting? So, it depends on where your weaknesses are and how important that is. I think for high volume, if you’re still getting into volume, you should focus on the selection part. I think if you’re having problem attracting people, you should be focusing on the attraction part. It’s that simple. What I do see now is amazing developments, and we wrote about that in the book a lot. TA excellence is the way AI is changing sourcing. I’ve seen demos of tools which are looking at doing automated outreach messages even. I see great recruitment advertising campaign tools which are now not just sending out like two or three different ads, but just really quickly checking over 1000 ads. We call it next generation programmatic. But I also see amazing developments in selection.
Matt: So out of all the technology that you’re seeing at the moment, because I know that you look at lots of different things and their potential, what’s the most interesting area out of all of that you think has the biggest potential moving forward.
Bas: Right now, but that might because I’m biased, because as far as I’m concerned, overall, the biggest issue is in selection. I mean, we’ve been relying on the CV and on cover letters for ages, even though no scientific research has ever been able to show any correlation between future achievement and a CV, let alone a cover letter. I know actually, there’s a great academic research right now going on, trying to see how different recruiters think about different things in cover letters. Amazing research, and I’m really curious to see the outcome there. So when it comes to selection, I think there’s the biggest possibility for improvement also, because in selection, we’ve got the biggest issues with labor market discrimination and bias. And I think especially in Europe, America is a little easier on immigration, although they’re still cracking down on it. But America has a lot more input from new Americans. Their labor market isn’t shrinking, ours is, yours in the UK, mine in the Netherlands, Germany, everywhere we’ve got a shrinking labor market. So, we need to make full use of everybody’s full potential and we’re not doing that.
Matt: Couldn’t agree with you more. And I think the assessment thing is interesting as well because I think you came on the podcast two or three years ago, maybe talking about some of the interesting assessment technologies that were around. And I think certainly, I suppose, particularly in the last 18 months, we’ve seen big adoption of those tools and the real potential of them. Haven’t we?
Bas: In the assessment realm, I haven’t seen amazing new developments, to be honest. It’s now, as you say, the adoption. The one thing I have been noticing is the term skill-based hiring, which is a very ambiguous term, but at least everybody’s now thinking about skill-based hiring. And I really like the fact that people are thinking skills, not college degrees, skills, not experience. And in the Netherlands, there’s now a big movement to what they call transferable skills. And with technology actually still looking at your resume, but then taking skills out of your resume and saying, but these skills also apply to these jobs, so this person might be able to make a really good switch. I’ve seen a really nice piece of Belgium technology actually, where it extracts the skills from your resume, gives you on the website as a candidate. These are the skills that we extracted from your resume. Have you forgotten any? Do you want to add any? Did we extract some that you don’t have? Adjust it. They click on submit. And I know that for one of the major Belgium banks, because they say, “We’re doing skill-based hiring.” The first selection so the CV selection is fully automated but also fully transparent.
Matt: You were talking there about adoption. Although people like you and me get frustrated that it takes so long for technology to be adopted, it’s certainly a lot quicker than it was 10 years ago. And I think we can now see from, as was just saying about assessment, we can see these things coming through and starting to change the way that people think. You mentioned automated sourcing there. You mentioned AI-driven recruitment advertising. It’s really clear that we’re going to see a lot of these things coming through into the mainstream in the next weeks, months, years, delete as appropriate. Where does that leave recruiters? Where does that leave talent acquisition? What do you think the role of talent acquisition and recruiters is going to be in two or three years’ time?
Bas: So where are we going with talent acquisition in a couple of years? I think recruiters need different skills, other skills, or basically some of the skills which have been useful up to now will be immensely important. I think, for example, interpreting information, interpreting data, for example, assessment data will be immensely important. I think being more of a talent advisor, talking to the hiring manager on what do you actually need and how can we measure that is going to be very important. I think data analytics skills are going to be very, very important. You need to be able to question AI, and I’m not saying you need to be able to program in Python or anything. I can’t, but I’m able to ask developers smart questions and see if the AI actually does what I wanted to do and what I expected to do. Those types of questions are very important. In the book, we actually write about the three things which the three skills in general in a world of AI, and not just for recruiter, but in general, who are going to be amazingly more important and who are currently really underrated, that’s the editor.
Right now, we emphasize the writer, like me. But in the future, AI will do the writing and the editor will make it better. And making it better is a very important factor. We’ll have the annoying researcher, the people that keep on asking questions, “Yeah, but what’s our foundation, what’s our base? What data is it based on? How do we know that’s unbiased?” You know, the people we usually don’t invite to meetings because they ask all the questions that we don’t want to be asked because we don’t know the answer to. And the third question is, who recently in Recruiting Brainfood, referred to them as the oddballs. I call them the Picassos and the Gaudis, misunderstood creatives that go a completely different route.
Matt: That makes a huge amount of sense. So lastly, tell us where everyone in Europe can get hold of the book.
Bas: It’s available on Amazon. All major retailers, if I’m not mistaken, at least all online retailers. And just look for Talent Acquisition Excellence by Kevin Wheeler and Bas van der Haterd.
Matt: Bas, thank you very much for talking to me.
Bas: Thank you so much.
Matt: My thanks to Kevin and Bas. You can subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow the show on Instagram. You can find us by searching for @recruitingfuture. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com. On that site, you can also subscribe to our monthly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track about 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.
The post Ep 597: Talent Acquisition Excellence appeared first on The Recruiting Future Podcast.
