What's Next in Talent - 2024

There is one conference that I insist on attending each year and that's Talent Connect by LinkedIn. It's always a good show, and given the products take up the most space in HR budgets - its logical to stay on top of their roadmap. However, the main reason I attend is to listen to high caliber thought leaders. What's keeping them up at night? How did they solve that big problem? Are we all in the same boat here? What tools are they using?

My take aways this year include:

1. Skills based Talent journeys are the direction everyone seems to be heading. The concept seems simple enough - move away from the traditional resume review and focus instead on the persons skills and capabilities, create opportunities as a zig-zag versus a ladder, connect these skills to business outcomes and close those gaps versus the antiquated hierarchy. I heard someone refer to this as a 'portfolio' instead of a profile and how this ties back to an Internal Marketplace. If all works the way they expect - this leads to agility, engagement, a more diverse workforce, and efficiencies. The trick to enable this is brilliant execution. More than just process and systems that sufficiently gather skills inventory (in motion!) you also need to change minds and hearts. In a multi generational workforce where your key leaders are very comfortable in tradition, and not enough of us in the #2 spots, it can be an uphill battle. I'm part of a larger company that is marching this way - and I'm very interested to see if the outcomes do indeed create more equity - which is my passion.
2. AI is taking our jobs! Just kidding, but not really. the robots are here and the best approach to this is to harness the beast versus hide our heads in the sand. LinkedIn talked about refreshing their LI recruiter tool with specific generative AI tools. No longer do we have to type (or in my case steal) lengthy Boolean strings to find those diamonds in the rough, we can simply type 'find an engineer with five to ten years of cloud experience in a cybersecurity company currently living in the US' and voila! Can you do this today with the filter function - you absolutely can but this seems like a good feature to encourage our hiring teams to more directly seek out their talent if you are lucky enough to have the Enterprise version of LinkedIn. The other feature they unveiled was an AI messaging mechanism a la ChatGPT. That's right everyone, we can now bombard these slippery engineers without even lifting a finger to type. I have to be honest, I audibly groaned in the audience but you CAN review it and customize/correct it before it gets deployed - lets be clear (they said) they are not going to automate the message deployment so you do really need to hit a button. I'm not a fan of this, but maybe its the GenX in me that feels this is exactly where human needs to be? I have hundreds of candidates that have told me my notes are why they even bothered to hear me out on the opportunity. All of these bells and whistles aside, there is something at the core here that all people leaders should lean into - AI will change how we work. It will shine a VERY bright light on those people who are doing transactional tasks that can and should be automated. If you harness this ability now - you will set your company up for great success. Also note, GenZ (now a growing part of our workforces) will expect this from you. They are not interested in filing paperwork!
3. The rise of the Talent Officer. LinkedIn and many other companies talked a lot about the shift to combining forces of Talent Acquisition, Learning and Development and Talent Management which leads to bigger and streamlined impact for our employees. Ideally, if this goes right, the benefit of 'learning back' helps us hire better talent and if we are bringing people in the front door in a more connected way, it leads to success and engagement. This person finds the r?d tr?d (Red Thread), and creates context throughout the path, which in turn makes it easy to follow and simple to navigate. I can speak from experience here as this is my role today - it sounds great, but it can be difficult to wield in some companies. The people in this role need to weave together the employee journey map and identify the synergies and gaps, which should align to where the business is going (not where it is today). In five years, what does the workforce look like on this path - are they strong in the skills on our product roadmap? If not, where are we weak - how do we build the muscle? Companies that operate with separation in the COEs are not only missing an opportunity to learn and grow but could be operating in a lopsided way. When these functions operate in proximity, we can quickly pivot hiring strategy, create the right libraries for learning (help leaders prioritize learning!), and have more intentional talent review processes in place to prepare - resulting in cost efficiencies with organic pipelines to solve for future state.

I'm looking forward to seeing these things more prevalent in the coming year but more importantly, the outcomes from these shifts. Change is here! Did you attend Talent Connect? What did you take away? What did I miss?