This Week, In Recruiting - Issue 207

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Open Kitchen: From Talent Acquisition to Talent Everything (Part Two)

So we are onto Part Two of our thesis on the necessary and inevitable transformation of the Talent Acquisition function.

Part One sketched a brief history of the emergence of TA as a distinct function with a particular emphasis on the underlying drivers which created it. My argument is that changes in these drivers haven reshuffled organisational priorities such that will have a transformational impact on the Talent Acquisition function. In Part Two, we will examine these priorities and explore how TA might respond to meet them.

But before we go on, to address a valid critique of last week's post - its only about tech.

Firstly, it is accurate to say that my account is centred on tech startup / scale up sector, which by any measure cannot be considered representative of talent acquisition in general. In fact, the numbers of people employed in the tech sector - defined here as software product businesses - amount to at most 10% of all white collar workers, and something like 1-2% of all workers. Far more people work in customer service, office clerical (still), logistics, transportation, public administration, manufacturing, agriculture and so on - and therefore far more recruitment goes on in those sectors than it does in tech.

That said, Talent Acquisition as a concept first became embedded in tech startup / scale ups, mainly because rapid acquisition of tech talent was considered so central to the eventual success of these businesses. The demand for recruiters with the ability to 'scale' engineering teams drove up compensation such that they become the highest paid - and therefore highest status - of all TA folks. That is probably still the case today.

Many of the main social innovations we have seen in Talent Acquisition over the past decade - EB, CX, Community based hiring, radical candour, DEI - also came from tech, being first incubated in Silicon Valley Startups before being promulgated to other regions and other industry sectors. From 'Lean In' from Sheryl Sandberg to 'Talent Density' by Netflix, it is US tech startup / scale up that took the lead and had us all (often uncritically) following along.

In sum, whilst tech in absolute numbers of employees is a small slice of TA, it has outsized cultural significance, maybe even to the point of being culturally hegemonic. We all do Standups and Retros today, measure each other via OKR's and KPI's, talk about data driven decision making and iterative processes and such like - all concepts from tech, even though our businesses may have very little to do with tech. When Marc Andreesen said 'Software is eating the world' he probably 'only' meant the digital disruption of previously analogue processes; it also turned out to mean a cultural colonisation from tech to everywhere and everyone else. This is not an endorsement of tech's cultural role, but I think a fair observation of it.

Tech will again lead us to the next phase, given than tech again is at the forefront of transforming the world. There was a world pre and post AI and we're barrelling forward on the latter with no brakes.

If I were a tech CEO today, my priorities in this world would fewer, but higher quality hires, increased organisational agility heading toward a talent-on-demand model, continuous improvement on operational efficiency (aggressively implementing AI in the workflow), tight cultural coherence of the core human team and deep organisational resilience bounded by commitment to mission. How this translates to a demands on Talent Acquisition function might look like this:

1. Increase Talent Density

Talent Density is a re-popularisation (again by tech, Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase) of the McKinsey-ite idea that only 20% of the employees provide 80% of the value in the business. What if you were able to get that number up to 21%? Increasing talent density has got a good chance of being one of the more persistent responsibilities of the Talent Acquisition function, any TA team or professional which can demonstrate a capability of doing this is likely to be high demand.

• Competitor talent intelligence - this is deep research on the talent base of leading competitors, active monitoring of the behaviour of key contributors, active cultivation of future targets for hiring. Some Senior Execs already do this directly themselves, but it is today more usually outsourced to an exec search practice; with the increase in productivity provided by AI-enablement, the opportunity is there for TA to centralise the practice and build institutional capacity on competitor talent intelligence.
• Continuous pipelining / succession planning against critical roles - this happens already as a risk mitigation strategy for many publicly listed companies, where there may be a legal required to have active succession plans per senior exec, but we can imagine a scenario where this approach is expanded to include key contributors at every level of the organisation.
• Bar raiser / Culture fit interviews - one of the distinct reasons for hiring humans instead of automation is when there is high collaboration intensity involved in the role. Few people can operate at high level irrespective of the team context - we all influence each others performance. We can expect Hiring Manager to take a great part of the responsibility of hiring for fit into team, but the TA responsibility will be ensure fit into organisation. Yes - we are going to rehabilitate 'culture fit' - though will likely have to call it something else to avoid the negative connotations that have accrued around the term.
• De-siloing TA + TM - you cannot do Quality of Hire without connecting employee performance data with candidate assessment data. The practical impediments of doing this are being ameliorated by AI, for which ingesting different data sets and finding patterns is base level application of LLM's. Both TA and TM need to be aware of the inherent de-siloing effect of AI, and work together to merge the functions into a holistic people & performance function.
• Re-installing credentialism at upper edge, deleting credentialism everywhere else. Credentialism rightly gets a bad rap but really only because we have expanded the idea to include proxy's for quality rather evidence for it. At the upper edge of industry performance, we can probably safely rehabilitate credentialism. Hiring Jony Ives as your chief designer for consumer electronics division should require no process other than 'do it'. Active cultivation of leading known figures in industry might be another quality new TA can add as value to the business.

2. Creating Elastic Hiring Capacity

Increase volatility of hiring demand is an inevitable consequence of the huge changes occurring at the macro level in the world today. Anyone following Donald Trump on Truth Social will know that volatility is not going to go away any time soon - in fact, it can only escalate as the Rules Based International Order is actively unwound. This will increase pressures on Talent Acquisition, demand on capacitty can expect to swing to ever greater extremes. The response of TA must be to create a more elastic capacity to deliver outcomes to the business.

• Hybridization with AI is going to be a key component to increasing elasticity. AI Agents can be activated 24/7 and parallel process multiple streams of work; increasing capacity might in near future be a matter of simply upgrading your subscription tier to onboard more AI Agents. Critically, they can also be switched off without delay should the requirements change. For significant components of the hiring funnel - candidate sourcing, screening, initial engagement, self assessment - are all time and labour consuming tasks AI Agents can absorb.
• Talent Communities - one of the best innovations from the tech startup scene is the idea that you can 'pre-acquire' users / candidates by first engaging them outside of any sales or hiring pipeline. Building talent communities around your evergreen hiring needs is an investment which provides competitive edge on brand awareness, culture fit analysis, fraud mitigation and even technical / functional capability. More importantly, the channel of communication is open with pre-acquired community members - increasingly important in an era when we will increasingly revoke our attention from public spaces.
• Build relationships with external talent providers - no part of the recruitment market has had it worse than the embedded recruiter / RPO. These companies blossomed during the period when the right number of hires was 'as many as you can', then had to retrench as the market collapsed. They will come back again as denuded TA teams look for flexibility on scale, with external talent partners providing a human switch on / switch off resource now in demand. Last poll ran by Recruiting Brainfood - ideal make up of team in future is 75 FTE / 25 Non-FTE. TA's will the ability identify, partner and performance manager external talent partners will become a premium

Note: each of these means less FTE for TA teams. The FTE component of all teams will get smaller, but access to capacity should increase if we surround core team with AI Agents and an eco-system of hot swappable capacity. On aggregate, we may see less people doing the work of TA, but maybe not so many less - many will move into floating population of capacity Uberised TA

3. Increase Hiring Manager Self Serve

Technology innovation will increasing enable Hiring Managers to retake a central role in hiring.

With AI Agents are now able to generate job descriptions, actively search candidate databases and the open web for viable prospects, present and rank returned results, with explanations as to why those candidates were returned and ranked that way, and with a small touch of Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) - hiring manager clicking Y/N - refining the search to produce more relevant results. Candidate activation is an easy next step - auto generate personalised messages based on candidate profile and perhaps online behaviour, activate smart and responsive drip campaign based on prospects responses and then alert the human user on the employer side when human intervention might be next needed.

Where does the human recruiter sit in all of this?

• Train the AI Agents - RLHF cannot be left to the Hiring Managers at the point of candidate ranking. Talent Acquisition's role will be to prepare the AI in advance of interaction with any HM and in advance of any interaction with the candidates. Someone will need to train the agents to understand the unique hiring considerations of the company, correct the hallucinations and other mistakes the AI will inevitably make, work with the AI as if they were a hyper intelligent apprentice learning the ropes on how to hire for the company.
• Train the Hiring Managers - HM's retaking a central role on recruiting will need support on all aspects of the hiring funnel they might now be expected to embrace; CV screening, interviewing, candidate assessment etc. We already have outstanding interview intelligence software which is helping HM better understand how to improve their interviewing. Ultimate aim: increase quality of interviews + increase quantity of interviewers.
• Synch on Alignment - a great of the most important information is not documented - even in the most rigorous write first company cultures. Synching on alignment in an AI-heavy recruitment process is still going to be crucial - especially in moments like job definition at kick off. Automation might play the role of scribe, but the humans involved in that conversation will need to agree what the words mean, how important they rank and how best to assess for those qualities in CV or at interview.
• Flex up / down capacity according the HM preference or need - its no news to any recruiter here that HM are going to have variable interest in the activity of recruiting. TA might be able to offer tiered internal service to HM's based on their interest / capability / capacity / importance of role. This would actually be a good way to measuring the efficacy of Hiring Manager self serve, when we compare the QoH to roles differently recruited for.
• Oversee the hiring process, triage if required - TA operates like a surf instructor on the beach; after giving the coaching, they observe from the beach how the surf is going and enters the water when needed. The ultimate aim is to reduce the interventions, but even in best case we can anticipate that the back stop will always need to be there.
• Manage performance of AI / HM / TA - AI Agents need to be KPI'd. If they are indeed to be considered autonomous workers, then we need to measure their performance alongside everyone else in the process. This will be data driven of course, but the TA might again be operating more like a TA coach or instructor and assist the AI / HM in improving performance

4. Activate Internal Mobility

Elite performers are great but can actually stymie the development of others once they become entrenched into teams. The phenomena of a superstar worker diminishing the performance of others is well known in elite sports. There seems to be two mechanisms at work - firstly, they basically become a crutch for the teams which they are on, because they so consistently deliver that the others slack off because subconsciously 'don't worry Sharon will be handle it'. A second theory is that the performance of the superstar is such an outlier that other team members begin to doubt their own capability. Once this 'overthinking' is in place, self sabotage takes place as formerly strong performers weaken their output to conform to their new understanding of themselves.

The solution is simple - periodically move the elite performers, in order to encourage the rest of the team to 'step up'. Talent Density is increased by Talent Mobility.

• Personalised & dynamic career pathing for all employees (positive feedback loop to EB, CX, EX) - career pathing had a moment in late 2010's but it always lacked the responsiveness to dynamically changing environments to be any use. With AI, we should be able to connect the changing resources and demands of the business with the motivations and capabilities of individual employees.
• Provision of optionality on working arrangements (positive for DEI), blurring the boundaries between who is in / out of the business. Creating diverse job opportunities is the best way to ensure retention of staff whose life changes outside of business have never previously been recognised. Retain the relationship not the employee - employee may become a contractor, a gig worker, a supplier or anything else.
• Pro-active circulation of talent will also remove the stigma currently attached some kinds of internal moves; 'it's a sideways step' or a betrayal of an existing team etc - all language which supports rigidity. Internal moves should be routine, enriching for the individual and strengthening for the organisation alike.

5. Fuse Business Intelligence with Talent Intelligence

Demand planning has been something neither TA nor HR have ever truly got to grips with. The process is always some version of the CFO coming up with a budget and then dispersing to functional heads who then consult with TA / HR to come with a hiring plan. Its one of the most important things a company does but it is locked into an archaic process which involves the extraction, compilation, translation and interpretation of data from different sources, in different formats, often in different languages.

One promise of AI is that it will remove the data processing problem - forget about integrating incompatible software products, or trying to solve the problem by going for one enormous ERP like system, AI should be able to interact with the data from any source and conduct the processing for us. This post from Aaron Levie, CEO of Box was super interesting

As he rightly says, there is plenty to do but the problems are now becoming known and once known they become solvable - each product has a Verticalised AI Agent which natively understands all the data that can ever go into the database structure, and which can then interact with similar agents from other products the human users wants access to do. Talent Acquisition - as super users of Talent Intelligence systems, need to hold hands with HR and together connect with Finance and Sales to bring into being a system which will dynamically be able to monitor the 'talent health' of an organisation.

• Automatically ready hiring campaign based on a gauge of current staff capacity vs incoming deal flow.
• Track sentiment data on existing TA team to monitor morale and factor that into resourcing capacity
• Constantly measuring employee engagement to track attrition risk, activating engagement campaign for pre-acquired community members.
• List goes on once we have a platoon of AI Agents talking with each other....

Talent Everything?

It's a terrible term and I attach a question mark because we probably need to replace it. But it seems to me that the function is be evolving into something that is significantly different from the activities of TA over the past two decades of its existence. Organisations are no longer interested in 'acquisition' - and the all the risks that this incurs - but are looking for the ability to access talent on demand. More than this actually, organisations are interested in outcomes that have usually come from having access to talent but today may accrue by activating and training an AI.

There is probably going to be an internal function which looks at business processes, identifies automation opportunities, redesigns workflow around humans unique capabilities to interpret unstructured, undocumented, multi-modal data, trains AI Agents to work with human colleagues, and ensures the business always has the capacity to achieve its objectives in a dynamic and ever changing environment.

This is a possible future for Talent Acquisition, though I'm pretty sure we won't be calling it that anymore.

Now out of the kitchen, onto the lounge ??

What's Going On?

Big List of Recruiting & HR Events to Attend in 2025

Big List for 2025 is shared every week on this newsletter! Please do me a favour and bookmark this spreadsheet and share it with the people you know in the recruitment, TA and HR fields. We all need to get into more in-person events - essential we strengthen our human bonds as AI eats away at the work we do. I think the human premium is going to key for us - so make sure you get yourself to one of these events

NJA* People & Talent Summit, Thursday 13th March, 2025, Fishburners, Wynyard Station (Sydney)

I'm back in Sydney folks. Thanks to Pam Stevenson, Emer McCann and Anthony Enright for inviting me to come back Down Under. Brand new talk on 'From Talent Acquisition to Talent Everything' - time for the next evolution of the Talent function. Chimpanzees, culture and Ronald Coase will be in this talk. Grab a ticket here - use: SPEAKER20 for discount!

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep296 - Ideal Structure for AI-Enabled TA, Friday 14th March, 12pm PST / 3pm EST / 7pm GMT

I have been looking forward to doing this show for a long time. We know that businesses are being transformed by AI, so what does an ideal structure look like for an AI-enabled TA function? Lets get some big brains together to think this one through - John Vlastelica, Founder (RecruitingToolbox), Kevin Wheeler, Founder (Future of Talent Institute), Jim Miller, VP of People & Talent (Ashby), Syeda Younus, Director Research (Gartner) & Mary Kay Baldino, Head of Talent Acquisition (Morningstar) in the house. Register here

Workable Roundtable Breakfast: Strategies for 2025, The Trampery Old Street, 239 Old Street London EC1V 9EY

Friends, we all need to spend more time in in-person connection! In the world increasingly dominated by AI, our only recourse is go deeper into CI - Community Intelligence. Well done to friends Workable for putting together this breakfast series. Free to attend but you got to apply - if you're in London on the 25 March, get yourself here Use the password: WorkableBreakfast2025

Talent Palooza, March 26th & 27th, Abbotsford Convent, 1 St Helliers Street, Abbotsford, Melbourne, Australia

I'm delighted to be back at TalentPalooza - always one of the most fun events on the calendar. Moderating two panels on the Future of Talent and Future of Employee Generated Content. Two day event at Abbotsford Convent! Get yourself there - tickets here

If you have an event, webinar or podcast going on next week and want it featured on next week's newsletter,?comment below?with the link and event details. Don't forget to at mention me so that I see it

End Notes

Landed in Sydney yesterday and Phase 2 of this trip commences. Delighted to be back in Australia and looking forward to spending time with the recruiter community here. I'm in Sydney from 10th to 16th March, before heading to Melbourne from 16th to 31st. Message me if you around and want to connect ??

Hung