Rebecca Warren hosts a discussion on modernizing talent acquisition with guests Shelia Gray from Hyundai Motor Company and Ken Brotherston from Talent Partners. They explore the shift from traditional recruiting to a more tech-driven, AI-integrated process. Key points include the need to move from siloed hiring practices to a spectrum approach, focusing on candidate experience, and validating candidate skills. They emphasize metrics like quality of hire, candidate experience, and hiring manager satisfaction over traditional metrics like time to fill. The conversation also touches on the importance of self-reflection, celebrating success, and aligning talent strategies with organizational goals.

Outline

Introduction and Housekeeping

• Rebecca Warren welcomes everyone to the Talent Table, hosted from West Palm Beach, and introduces the session’s focus on modernizing talent acquisition.
• Rebecca provides housekeeping instructions, including using widgets, asking questions via Q&A, and accessing resources in the resources section.
• Rebecca introduces the guests, Shelia Gray from Hyundai Motor Company and Ken Brotherston from Talent Partners, and invites them to introduce themselves.
• Rebecca introduces the question of the month, asking guests what skill they would upload to their brain instantly, and shares her own thoughts on photographic memory and perfect pitch.

Discussion on Modernizing Talent Acquisition

• Rebecca transitions the conversation to modernizing talent acquisition, noting the significant changes in the recruitment landscape since pre-COVID times.
• Rebecca highlights the challenges of navigating tech ecosystems, shifting skill demands, unclear expectations, and the impact of AI on talent acquisition.
• Rebecca asks Shelia and Ken about aspects of old recruiting methods they are glad to leave behind, with Ken mentioning the siloed approach to contingent and non-contingent hiring.
• Shelia discusses the shift from viewing the hiring manager as the only customer to considering internal and external candidates and candidate experience.

Impact of AI and Human-Synthetic Capability

• Ken emphasizes the importance of blending human and synthetic capabilities in talent acquisition, noting that organizations must address this to stay relevant.
• Rebecca and Ken discuss the non-optional nature of integrating AI and the potential consequences of ignoring it.
• Shelia talks about the need for talent validation in a world where AI can create resumes and candidates can manipulate assessments.
• The conversation touches on the challenges of AI in talent acquisition, including the need for human touches and the pressure to deliver a quicker, more efficient process.

Challenges with Legacy Models and Tech Integration

• Rebecca and Shelia discuss the limitations of legacy models and the issues that arise when adding AI to a broken process.
• Shelia explains the importance of understanding the underlying process before implementing technology and the challenges of virtual recruiting during COVID.
• Ken shares insights on the dissatisfaction with HR tech stacks and the need for a clear strategy and capability to deliver better outcomes.
• The discussion highlights the difficulty of redesigning processes in large organizations and the need for behavioral transformation.

Skills-Based Hiring and Future-Proofing Talent

• Shelia and Ken discuss the concept of skills-based hiring and the challenges of defining job skills accurately.
• Shelia emphasizes the importance of understanding current and future skills and the need for continuous improvement in job descriptions.
• Ken shares examples of successful skills-based hiring in various industries and the importance of hiring for potential.
• The conversation explores the idea of liquid skills and the need for organizations to identify critical skills and prepare for future talent needs.

Candidate Experience and AI Adoption

• Shelia and Ken discuss the importance of candidate experience and the potential for AI to improve it.
• Shelia shares insights on candidate preferences for AI-driven processes and the need for clear communication and feedback.
• Ken talks about the potential for AI to automate certain roles in talent acquisition and the importance of understanding candidate preferences.
• The discussion touches on the need for trust and transparency in AI-driven processes and the potential for AI to enhance candidate experience.

Metrics and Measuring Success in Talent Acquisition

• Rebecca, Shelia, and Ken discuss the importance of measuring quality of hire and candidate experience.
• Shelia emphasizes the need for metrics that measure the long-term success of hires and the impact of the hiring process on candidates.
• Ken suggests a simple metric of whether a hire is still with the organization after a year as a measure of quality of hire.
• The conversation highlights the need to move beyond traditional metrics like time to fill and cost per hire and focus on strategic partnerships and organizational outcomes.

Final Thoughts and Actionable Advice

• Shelia advises organizations to engage in self-reflection, listen to customer voices, and celebrate successes.
• Ken emphasizes the importance of thinking about talent acquisition through the lens of risk mitigation and profit maximization.
• Both guests share final thoughts on the need for continuous improvement, understanding organizational goals, and leveraging technology effectively.
• Rebecca concludes the session by thanking the guests and participants, encouraging them to implement the discussed strategies and stay tuned for future sessions.

Rebecca Warren 0:02

Hey, hi, and hello, everyone. Welcome to the Talent Table. I am Rebecca Warren, your host, excited to be coming to you—for me, live from West Palm Beach, where I’m finishing up a conference. So you enjoy my wonderful hotel room here. Super excited to be able to chat with our guests and talk about modernizing talent acquisition. Before we get started, I’m going to do a couple of housekeeping things. So if you want to do things, click the widgets at the bottom of your screen. You can poke around and see what happens. If you want to ask things, pop your questions into the Q&A; we’ll answer as many as we can live. And if we miss anything, we’ll try to do a follow-up after the session. Now, if you want to read things, check out the resources section for articles, guides, and other nerdy goodness to get your brain firing on the future of TA. If you want to learn things, keep your eyes and ears open. We’ll be dropping tips, hints, examples, and insights throughout the session. And if you want to register for things, click the link to sign up for next month’s Talent Table. Okay, I think we’ve got the housekeeping things out of the way. Super excited to be able to chat with Ken and Shelia today, our fabulous guests. So I am going to turn it over to them to introduce themselves. And then we have, as you know, the question of the month, which we’ll talk about—something that has really nothing to do with the topic, but super fun to chat about. So I am going to shoot it on over to Shelia. And then Ken, you’re up right after. So Shelia, go ahead and introduce yourself.

Shelia Gray 1:44

Hello. I’m Shelia Gray, and I lead the global talent acquisition function at Hyundai Motor Company. And I’m based on the East Coast, in Cary, North Carolina. Hello.

Ken Brotherston 1:57

I’m Ken Brotherston. I’m the founder and CEO of Talent Partners. We’re a global talent insights business, and I’m based on the south coast of England, near a place called Brighton.

Rebecca Warren 2:13

Love it. We’ve got two amazing viewpoints today. So super excited to jump in. But before we do that, let’s do our question of the month. So here we go. If you could upload one skill to your brain instantly, kind of Matrix-style, what would it be and why? I did think about this one for a while, because you have to go through the entire laundry list of all the things that you would want to be able to know or do. I think I’ve whittled it down, but I’d love to hear what you two think. So, Ken or Shelia, what do you think? What would you upload to your brain instantly?

Shelia Gray 2:51

When you said Matrix-style, the first thing that I thought about was having spidey-sense. So, Spider-Man ability. You know, spidey-sense is all-knowing, right? So it’s being able to have a sense of discernment and be able to evaluate situations and sense danger. So my immediate thing was spidey-sense. Because when you said Matrix, normally, I could think of normal competency. But if I said a Matrix, I said spidey-sense.

Rebecca Warren 3:22

Okay, Ken, that might be a hard one to follow. What do you think?

Ken Brotherston 3:26

I’m going to give you two. I’m going to say, personally speaking, playing the piano. If I asked my wife, she would say a better listener. So…

Rebecca Warren 3:39

I think there’s always somebody in our life who probably figures out we could listen a little bit more. Alright? So as I was thinking about it, I came up with two as well. Neither have anything to do with my husband. So the first thing I thought was a photographic memory—so remembering all the things. But then I thought perfect pitch, so kind of that playing the piano… like, I would love to have perfect pitch. So maybe I could have two. Do you think we can all just get two? Okay, if you’re in make-believe land, we can do whatever we want, right? Yes. Okay, fun.

Shelia Gray 4:20

I only got one. I got…

Rebecca Warren 4:21

Spidey-sense covers everything. You got it all. You just did the whole thing. Nobody can copy that. You’re spidey-sense queen. Oh my gosh. Okay, fabulous. Well, I appreciate those answers. I love being able to talk about something a little kind of fun and off-topic. So let’s shift on over to what we’re talking about and how we might modernize. Yeah, what should we be thinking about? So if we think about even five years ago, you know, pre-COVID, our toolkit was pretty straightforward, right? Recruiters managed the reqs, nurtured relationships, hit your numbers, did the funnel. But we are not in that land anymore. So today, we know talent teams are navigating a completely different landscape. Feels like a Category 5 storm of tech ecosystems and shifting skill demands and unclear or maybe overwhelming expectations, and then AI enters the chat, right? So we’ve got automation and we’ve got AI, and we’re deciding: do we layer? Do we rebuild? Do we recreate? And so when you put tech on top of kind of a chaotic process or system, you don’t really get efficiency. You just get a lot of chaos, and you get a highlight of all the things that weren’t already working. So before we dive into some of those pieces of the friction, let’s look at what’s happening. So we talk a lot about how much has changed. But I would love to know what’s one or two things about the old way of recruiting, or maybe even the current way of recruiting… what’s the one thing about the old way of recruiting that you’re actually glad to leave behind? Is there anything that comes to mind that you’d say, “I am okay if we don’t ever do this thing again”?

Ken Brotherston 6:27

The one thing I would say is thinking about contingent and non-contingent hiring in silos. Okay? I understand how it and why it’s grown up the way it has. But if it ever served a purpose, I think that purpose has passed. And so I would leave behind that sort of old-fashioned thinking about contingent and non-contingent in different silos. It needs to be thought of more as a spectrum than as silos. So…

Rebecca Warren 6:59

But how do you… how do you make sure the work gets done, as opposed to paying attention to who’s actually… where the person doing the work comes from? Love it. Okay. Shelia, thoughts on that?

Shelia Gray 7:13

I want to say something that I think has changed, which is viewing the hiring manager as the only customer in the equation. So back in the day, you know, when we thought about recruitment, we only thought about the hiring manager in the organization. That definition of the customer has expanded to internal and external candidates and candidate experience. Because in the old days, no one cared about candidate experience. It was very, let us say, clunky. You know, I’m old enough to have remembered candidates, you know, showing up at job fairs, filling out ads in newspapers, showing up at the front door with a resume. You know, it was very hard for candidates to get into the process, right? We see that with all these barriers. And I feel like candidate experience has become an issue. We even measure candidate experience with the CandE Awards. I’m glad that we left behind us the thought that the hiring manager was the only stakeholder in the process.

Rebecca Warren 8:24

Oh my gosh. I think both of those are great because we’re thinking more broadly, and we’re focusing on the work and the people who are the product of the work, right? Love it. So let’s… so let’s talk about now, when we look at the last five or so years, what do you think is the biggest new expectation being placed on TA leaders that just didn’t exist pre-2020? What do you think is the biggest thing that’s really been a challenge or that has been added that we didn’t have to worry about in the past?

Ken Brotherston 9:04

You know, just building on what you and Shelia said, I think post-pandemic, so many things have been added to the TA agenda. And it’s kind of been just this relentlessly growing menu of things expected from a TA function. But I think the biggest shift that is happening right now, and the most profound shift, is moving… when we talk about moving from “who does the work” to “how work gets done,” it’s how do you blend human and synthetic capability? You know, how do you have human and AI and automation working effectively to deliver whatever the products and services are your organization is trying to deliver? So I think for me—and I’m going to say this quite bluntly, so forgive me—but within TA, if you’re not that person who’s looking at that blend of human and synthetic capability, you’ll be working for that person. Because that is here for organizations now. Every CEO is being asked, how do they use AI in their organizations? And that balance of human and synthetic capability is the biggest shift that we’ve seen in, well, I would say in my career.

Rebecca Warren 10:29

And it’s not optional, right? You don’t get a chance to say, “Oh, we’re just not going to do that,” because it’s here, and it’s here to stay. And as you said, if you don’t pay attention to it, you’re going to report to somebody who does. And…

Ken Brotherston 10:41

Listen, it’s a really, really good point. You can choose to say, “Within our organization, we are not using synthetic talent for this reason,” but you have to have the reason. So it’s not optional to ignore the question. The answer—that’s up to you. I don’t think there’s a predetermined answer, but you absolutely have to ask the question.

Rebecca Warren 11:03

Love that. Shelia, what do you think?

Shelia Gray 11:06

I think what I’ve seen is talent validation. And what I mean by that is that traditional recruiting, we sourced talent, we had conversations with talent, we reference-checked talent. And now we’re asked to validate. When I say that, it’s a couple of things. One, because AI allowed candidates to create a resume to match a job description, so validating if the candidate really has the skills that they say they have, because it’s now much easier to replicate a job description. Second of all, I have had numerous candidates in several jobs where the person who applied for the job is not the person who showed up. Crazy thing today. That’s a crazy thing. And then doing an assessment, you know, ensuring that whatever assessment we are using that the candidate can’t outmaneuver, right, by using AI to, you know… they’re looking at other screens, or even some candidates, you know, we’ve caught looking at a screen when answering questions. So now the burden is on TA to validate that the candidates are qualified. And in some cases also, because there are fewer, I think there are fewer jobs, but more added to jobs. So they want us to look at potential. So it’s not just hiring for today, but what’s the potential of that candidate long term? Because we only have so many roles now. That’s become a real big one. And the more we see layoffs in the market, replacing by AI, the more they’re requiring us to step up the quality of the candidate.

Rebecca Warren 12:52

I think that’s such an interesting topic, because it used to feel like TA—and I don’t know if this is the right way to think about it—like TA used to kind of own the process. We kind of owned the process. We were the drivers, right? TA was able to say, “This is how it goes. This is where we’re going to contact you.” And the candidates were able to follow the flow. But now it feels like TA… so with synthetic talent, or even just some of the challenges with AI, it feels like TA is kind of on the back foot. Now we’re kind of reactive, right? TA has to be more like a gatekeeper than I think we ever have before, but for completely different reasons. It’s so interesting.

Shelia Gray 13:36

Yeah, we’re catching the ball instead of throwing the ball a lot of times, especially now that you have these things, these talent agents are allowing candidates to apply to multiple jobs, you know. And so what we’re finding in many of our roles is that we’re having an overwhelming number of applicants, which we wouldn’t have, you know, some jobs we had to really source for. Now we’re finding an overabundance of candidates introducing well…

Rebecca Warren 14:06

Okay, so let’s… let’s continue on that train of: Okay, so the way we did hiring worked for the world we were in when it was created. Our world is different. Expectations are different. Things are different. So let’s talk a little bit about why legacy models no longer work, or why they’re breaking. You know, we’ve entered the era—well, and it started, I think, probably around COVID times when we were like, “We need to get the right people in. Let’s add the tools. We’ve got some money. Let’s make it work,” right? So people were just adding tools left and right. And now we’re seeing that just adding another tool or another solution really isn’t a solution. A lot of times it’s starting to cause problems. And we see teams that are struggling with tech fatigue, like, “I don’t even know what to use, so I’m not going to use anything.” Folks are frustrated, and companies are spending an awful lot of money on a lot of tools that aren’t actually serving what they were intended to serve. So let’s talk a little bit about teams trying to layer AI on top of a legacy process or a legacy model—just what you were talking about, Shelia. How do you think this is creating friction when we try to add that synthetic answer, instead of creating the magic that I think we all were promised? Shelia, let’s throw that to you first, because I’d love to hear how you think about that.

Shelia Gray 15:33

Well, I think here’s the deal: just like applicant tracking systems, CRMs, all of these tools that we use, people are trying to make technology be the process. Technology is not the process. Technology leverages the process. So everything can’t be done in technology. So the human touches are things that can’t be done in technology. Now you take that and you add AI to that, and now you’re saying, “Okay, we want to have everything done with technology.” Now let’s look at all these shiny objects. They’re popping up, right? Shiny object. I was sitting with someone a year ago who said that the first time that the recruiter touched the candidates was at the interview stage, not the screening stage, not the first… so they used technology all the way through to that piece. They added it because they said, “It’ll be more efficient for us. It’ll be more efficient for us.” Um, so some of the friction is that we have sold that technology will make us more efficient, and as a result, the expectations of our stakeholders are that when they are buying these expensive tools for us, they will get more return on investment. They will get a quicker process, a more streamlined process, and then they will get the optimal outcome of a successful hire. So they’re putting that pressure on our decision-making because this technology is very expensive. The technology has to leverage a process that works well. If the process doesn’t work well, then the technology is not going to do anything. For example, I was talking to someone this morning, we were talking about volume recruiting, and I said I added a chatbot on the front end of my career website so that we could interact with those volume hiring jobs, those customer service, those manufacturing jobs, which have sometimes very basic questions: What are the hours of the job? All that. So we can more efficiently get them the answers that they needed and also get them on a schedule right away. But first, before I could even think about doing that, I had to figure out what the bottleneck was. What’s the bottleneck? What’s the problem? Why aren’t we getting enough traction or eyeballs on our jobs? And sometimes it’s the basics. So we had to take human… get in a room, whiteboard out our process first, before we look for a technology solution. I think the problem today, especially during COVID, when we immediately went to virtual, is that we immediately said, “We got to use technology, and what can we do to make it quicker?” And we bought these systems, we sold this… and now we’re back in the office. We’re back in the office, so now we gotta make it work. I think the friction is that we don’t know what we’re trying to solve for by adding technology, and we don’t have good practices and processes to layer it on top of.

Rebecca Warren 18:34

Right, right. Yeah, I have so many thoughts on that. Ken, what are you thinking? I’m guessing you have a point of view.

Ken Brotherston 18:41

Uh, yeah. Also as context, I would ask everyone on the call to think if there was ever a time when they were happy with their HR tech stack, and I suspect for the vast majority of you, it would be no. And I remember we had an event about 10 years ago where we had the CHRO from Oracle, who had just bought Taleo, and he said, “Oh, Taleo, where candidates come to die,” right? And so, you know, there have always been grumbles about the HR tech stack. And it goes to the point that’s been made already. You know, if you layer more technology capability onto a process that’s already not functioning well, you just get chaos at scale. You know, you get chaos at a scale that you’ve never seen before. So it’s no surprise that, you know, we’re hearing kind of more complaints than ever about how organizations are using their tech stack. And it’s not unreasonable for a CFO to say, “If I give you a million dollars, I kind of expect you to tell me what the ROI is on that.” That’s a perfectly, you know, legitimate question. So I think there’s that. And again, the point’s already been made, you know, without an underlying kind of strategy of what it is you’re trying to achieve, you’ll never achieve anything good. And then, of course, the other bit is the capability to deliver it. You know, most TA folks don’t really have a background in assessing and deploying technology, and that sort of business transformation is a skill that a lot of people have had to learn, you know, on the job whilst they’re doing the day job. And that’s hard, you know, that’s really hard. But it’s a fundamental part of being able to deliver a better outcome for candidates and for the organization itself.

Rebecca Warren 20:45

Yeah, so true. I think you know. And as we think about, and I talk about this too, do we need to blow everything up, right? Is it completely redoing our whole entire process? Is it thinking exponentially different? Or, as you know, Shelia talked about, do we need to go through and do a full value stream mapping of everything—where humans need to be in the process, where… oh, can I see a face… where synthetic talent should be in? Is it figuring out what that value stream is? So Ken, I think you have a perspective on that. I saw you react.

Ken Brotherston 21:27

Yeah, and it’s a really profound question because innovation comes in two stages. The first stage is you do the same things but quicker, right? You know, you write a job ad quicker. You schedule an interview quicker. And the second is you do things differently. You know. And if you look at, you know, the internet is a good example. For the first 10 years, we basically just used it to do the same things but faster. And it wasn’t until the advent of the smartphone that allowed true transformation to happen with, you know, the growth of social media and everything that entails. And we’re seeing the same with AI. You know, all we’re really doing at the moment is using it to do the same things but faster. But organizations now—and they typically tend to be startups or more early-stage businesses—are just starting with a blank sheet of paper, and they’re redesigning a completely different process. That’s really hard for a big business, you know, because you can’t land the plane, redesign it, and take off again. You know, everything is done midair. But you know, that ability to really completely start again is very, very challenging, I find.

Shelia Gray 22:42

It’s very interesting. A lot of our partners, external partners, now start with us with the concept of the art of the possible, right? They come in and they do these workshops with us, and the first thing they want to do is go through your recruiting process, then talk about how their technology can impact their process and make it better. And you can’t blow up everything, but you can eat the elephant one bite at a time and figure out where your pain points are, and you know, be able to do that. The problem is, most organizations only want to put band-aids on the problem. They don’t want to go to root causes. Root causes are uncomfortable. Root causes may require a lot more change management and a lot more adoption, all of that. So most organizations really just want, “What can we do in the short run to fix it for now?” And I said, “We can fix it for now, but if you fix anything that’s faulty, eventually it’s going to cost you more to fix it at the very end.” But yeah, right.

Rebecca Warren 23:44

And you have all those downstream implications. You band-aid this, and it affects that, and so you’re not thinking about all of the other things that get affected if you’re not looking at the total stream, right? All of the other things that are connected to those processes.

Shelia Gray 23:59

And that’s the case. Perfect example. That’s like these ATSs. A lot of these ATSs were built without a good candidate experience on the apply process, so now we have bought overlays on that to make the apply process better. Why? Why can’t they get the hint that we don’t like their apply process?

Rebecca Warren 24:21

I don’t… what? Well, it’s what Ken said, right initially, that “Taleo, where candidates come to die.” Like that, I feel like that’s kind of how we look at a lot of tech. So let’s dig into that a little bit in terms of—and Ken, you mentioned this too—about the silos and that things feel like they’re maybe disconnected, right? So we’ve got TA sometimes living in a silo, L&D in a silo. We got HR in a silo. And then the business needs are maybe not even considered, or maybe somewhere in the middle, or kind of somewhere lost in the flow. So why do you think it’s so difficult for organizations to have a single source of truth when it comes to understanding what people can do—not containing data, but understanding what people can actually do?

Ken Brotherston 25:16

Because people’s paychecks depend on having the silos. I mean, that’s how the organization, you know… if you’re an L&D, you know, you’re an L&D expert, and you’ll take pride in that. And when someone comes along and says, “No, I want to just take that function and completely, you know, disassemble it and reassemble it,” you know, that human impact is really complicated to manage. And you know, if someone’s doing a job that they enjoy and they think they’re good at, and you say, “Well, I’m going to, you know, change everything,” and effectively you’re saying your role is at risk. Where’s the motivation to be part of that process? You know. So what we’re seeing at the moment, as opposed to… yeah, yeah, you know, the technology is so far ahead of what the organization is capable of. Because, you know, what you’re really wrestling with is decades of customs and practices and culture. You know, that’s the… and then when you start overlaying, you know, risk and compliance, particularly with the use of AI, it’s just a recipe for stagnation. You know, it’s a recipe for complexity and nothing happening. And you know, that’s why, when we talk about transformation, it’s not technology transformation, it’s behavioral transformation. You know, that is the thing that will make the difference, and getting people to think differently about their roles and, you know, the part they play within their organization.

Rebecca Warren 27:04

So is it fear, right? Is it the fear of the unknown, of, “If I break out of the silo, I might have to do something different. It might be uncomfortable. It might be weird”? Like, do you think… to me, it feels like it’s a fearful thing. But that also tells us something, right? If people are afraid of that, we need to dig into that and figure out, how do we release that?

Ken Brotherston 27:25

And you know, in an economy… and as I say, I remember the internet and people running into that, and there was such a difference because we were generally doing that on the back of strong economies, right? Both in the US and in the UK. So people didn’t have that fear that if they were displaced or lost a job, they would just go and get another job. So they’d be more willing to take risks. Whereas now, if you look at the attrition rates in most large organizations, they’re at historic lows because people are fearful about moving jobs, which means they’re going to be more fearful about change and taking risks. So the economic backdrop has a lot to answer for in terms of people’s attitudes and willingness to, you know, to take risks and embrace change right now.

Shelia Gray 28:17

You know, I feel like risk-taking is something that, you know, it’s interesting. I’ve not seen it in many cultures even called out—risk-taking—and especially in the TA function. So if you think about it, it’s like the US Mail: it’s coming. It’s coming. It’s coming. It’s coming. If we stop and take a look at some of our things, the fear is that we will bottleneck the process, and so people would rather have what they currently have than take the risk to get something different. It really does take another organization, or several organizations, to do something well in our space for others to adopt it. I mean, I just remember when LinkedIn came into play. I went to a conference, LinkedIn had a little teeny booth. They started off as an alternative to Facebook in the business sector. They hadn’t really even thought about the power of LinkedIn, right, as a job tool or whatever. And they came to an EMA conference—I was in Boston—and we said, “Oh my gosh, you could use this for recruiting, you know, if we think about it.” And we were thinking about employee referral at the time. “Gosh, think about how we use it for employee [referrals]…” And then the guy at the booth was like, “Oh, you think so?” We’re like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” But nobody did it until somebody… somebody went and did it. And then now LinkedIn is one of our major sources. Okay? Nobody took it as a risk. Nobody took it as a risk. So it takes a while in our space for people to believe things are there. I just remember when employment branding came on scene. I was at a conference, and somebody—it was Yum! Brands—had a person in TA that did employment branding. We’re like, “What’s employment branding?” And they were like, “Product brand and your employment brand. And most of you are probably in all of your advertising selling the product to attract the employees, and it’s a different demographic.” We’re like, “Oh my gosh.” And then now most of us have an employment branding function or work associated with it. But it took several companies to do it, to see the return on investment. We are slow to take a risk in a train that is moving. If the train is stopped, we will do something, but we’re not risk-takers if the train is moving. Interesting.

Rebecca Warren 30:38

So there’s a lot of things that are coming at us externally, and then we have internal challenges, and then we have AI, right? So we’re kind of at this inflection point of, how do we do all of these things? And certainly, that fear factors in there. So we need to make sure that we’re thinking about trust and transparency inside of our organizations. What are we doing? Why are we doing it? How are things happening? Making sure that folks feel part of the process. Because that’s where I think the fear comes from, is like, we don’t know if somebody’s doing something in our best interest, and so we’re going to hesitate, or we’re going to be afraid of it. So if we think about understanding the way that we look at our talent inside of our organization, right? So if we say we don’t necessarily have a single source of truth when it comes to understanding what people can do, what would shift if organizations moved to a skills-first lens? So what you talked about—potential, right? Looking at the way a candidate could contribute, instead of just looking at a job title or a linear career path. What are you all thinking about when we talk about skills-first or skills-forward, or understanding the potential of your workforce to take that fear factor out and to put in that trust and transparency with hiring managers, with, you know, across the different departments?

Shelia Gray 32:09

There’s a lot of work there, so they’ve been trying… I mean, for the last five years, we’ve been tossing around this thing about skills-based hiring, right? But the reality is, it starts with understanding what the skills required for a job are, right? And that’s really one of those things that comes out of the hiring manager and compensation. Because compensation writes that job template. We do the job posting to get seen, but they write that job template because that’s how they grade a job, determine the compensation for it, determine the scope of work. And managers are not doing a very good job of defining the skill requirements for the job. So that’s why downstream we have a hard time. What happens is the person who leaves the job should be validated. So if you hired Susan 10 years ago, I’m sure her job has grown from her original job description. I’m sure it has, but comp only has that 10-year-old job description to go back to, to pull out. And what should happen is that our jobs should be graded, looked at for today’s skills, today’s marketability, all that stuff on a regular basis. But it doesn’t. That piece of the cycle doesn’t happen. That’s why this, you know, the thought about skills-based hiring has never really taken off, because it starts before TA. It starts over in a function that is not… that hasn’t done that work yet. That’s why I like when I put an assessment sometimes into an organization, because when I go to put an assessment in, if the assessment is based on a function or job of, say, sales, before they’ll put that assessment in, if it’s skills-based, they want to validate. They want to meet with the interviewer or assess the people currently doing the job, talk to the hiring managers who are doing it, figure it out so it’s better linked. But until that happens, that concept of skills-based hiring has never taken off. It just hasn’t. We all talk about it.

Rebecca Warren 34:16

Well, we do talk a lot about it. A lot. We talk about it a lot in a lot of different contexts. So Ken, you work with a lot of different folks, companies. What are you thinking and hearing about skills-based hiring? Is it a thing? Can it work?

Ken Brotherston 34:33

It does work. I mean, it does work. If you look at big organizations that, you know, bring… Professional Services is a good example. If you look at the big accounting firms, you know, they bring in lots of graduates at the kind of bottom of the pyramid—they used to, anyway—and they weren’t brought in to work for an individual hiring manager. They’re brought in for their potential, and they develop the skills, and then those with the right skills stay with the organization and progress through. You see that in, for example, big oil companies, where people get deployed all over. You see it in the military. You see it in healthcare systems. So we’ve been doing kind of skills-based hiring in lots of different areas for some time and doing it quite effectively. I think it’s when you try to kind of expand it, that’s when you start to run into challenges. Because as Shelia says, you know, often the hiring manager doesn’t really know what skills make the role successful. You know, if you take a doctor… you take two doctors with exactly the same qualifications and experience. What separates the best doctor from a poor doctor is things like empathy, you know, their ability to listen carefully and to not make assumptions. None of these skills are medical skills, you know. And it’s quite hard to kind of infer and measure those, but they are absolutely the skills that make the difference between a good physician and a poor physician. On a more practical level, you know, right now, with a world where there are more candidates for roles than there have been recently, trying to get line managers to embrace hiring for skills is not worth the effort. They’re just not going to buy it if they know they can get five people that can do the job tomorrow. So I think it’s looking for opportunities to deploy a skills-based approach for where there are critical skill shortages, or where you’re doing hiring at scale. One of my favorite examples: Rolls-Royce, the big aero engine maker. If you think about a jet engine, it’s got these really delicate fan blades, and they need to be polished. And they found that nail technicians—as in, you know, fingernail technicians—oh, for sure, had the right skills to come in and be fan blade technicians. So that was a great example of a skills transference that, you know, most people wouldn’t have figured out. So there are real opportunities for it, but it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution, right?

Rebecca Warren 37:32

I know some of the things that we talk about and think about when folks ask us about “how do we think about a skills-based process,” whatever power-driven… whatever words we’re using, it is exactly what you said, and Shelia taking what you said as well, right? The idea of “we need to identify critical skills.” So are there positions where, if someone would leave tomorrow, it would absolutely cause harm to the business, right? So either figuring out what those critical skills are that we need to make sure we have in the organization—not just today, but preparing for tomorrow. We also talk to some organizations where we look at it from a power skill, liquid skills… right now, I think that’s the new term that we’ve been hearing is “liquid skills,” right? What are those skills, as we talk about that, that bring the human side, that think about the agility, the business acumen, the things that everyone in the organization needs as a layer? And so some folks are thinking about it… we’re going to bring in… we’ve got 10 core liquid skills that are important to anyone in our organizations. Maybe they’re tied to values, maybe they’re tied to competencies. But what does that look like across the organization? Or what critical skills do we need to think about now for those positions if somebody were to leave today that would cause harm to the business? So there’s a couple of ways to look at it. It just depends on, I think, where your organization is at. But I think regardless of what we call it, we need to make sure that we have that understanding of not just what someone can do today, but what they have the potential for and what they’re interested in. Asking the question and understanding what people in the organization are interested in doing. Because we make the assumption—I talk about this: my resume is a list of things I never want to do again because I’ve already done them. So what else is out there for me? And I am an example of that transference of skills, right? Talent acquisition came over to Eightfold in customer success. First hire in customer success. Didn’t have any idea about tech or about CS, figured it out, and now moved over into thought leadership and Talent Center training… Center Transformation. So understanding what those underlying skills [are] and what somebody wants to do, I think, is really important. So I’m not sure… you know, that sounds like, you know, an easy answer, but I think it’s something that organizations need to think about: how do you make sure that you’re understanding what your people do today and where they want to go tomorrow?

Shelia Gray 40:01

I’m going to put another layer on that, and what I’m going to say is: now that I’ve seen many organizations talking about replacing our jobs with AI, I think candidates and people today need to think about the skills that they possess, or need to possess, that AI can’t. Right? Because if AI can replace a customer service representative over the phone, right, you don’t need a customer service representative. They can answer all your questions, then you do the right thing. Now, what they can’t do is they can’t empathize with your situation, where customers are… right? There’s things that they can’t do. So I think that we… for people that are in the talent market, you got to think about your skills and the relevancy in your skills in a market that is rapidly thinking, how relevant will your skills be tomorrow? Because I do think organizations are trying to become more cost-effective and efficient, and some of our skills are going away. Like, you know, you wouldn’t have thought… I’m going to say 20 years ago, not 10, but 20 years ago, that there’d be driverless cars, that there’d be peopleless cars out there driving, that people would get into a car when there’s not a person and allow them to drive you somewhere. Why does that occur now? Why would people do it? Yeah, why would people do that? People will do it because it’s cheaper, it’s quicker, whatever. That’s why we will do that. And so when we do that, you gotta think about it: that was a driver. Sometimes those were jobs that retirees took, right? When people came to the US who were trying to transition into our economy, who had to take a job before they could get their language skills or their professional skills… we’re replacing that job now. The job’s gone. So I think that today’s market says your value-based skills have got to be the skills that cannot be replaced.

Rebecca Warren 41:58

So let me throw this out there too. Oh, go ahead. Ken, well…

Ken Brotherston 42:03

I was just going to say, and this might be the point you were going to come on to, Shelia. You were saying about driverless cars are cheaper. They’re not. They’re actually more expensive. And economically, that doesn’t make sense, because you don’t have a driver, which is an expensive part of, you know, a cab ride. People will pay more not to have a human in the car. And that is a really interesting question. When you think about talent acquisition, you know, we talk about the kind of “human in the process” and “human-first” and things like that. And again, I’m not saying which way you should go, but you have to ask the question of your candidates, for example: which do you prefer to interact with? You know, an automated AI process or a human process? Because in a world where people are using AI for coaching and counseling—and they are—you know, if they’re using it for that, they’re probably okay using it for a recruiting process.

Shelia Gray 43:09

It’s interesting you say that because I was in an exercise where we talked about AI adoption. We had people break into different roles, right? So the organization was going to put adoption AI in. So from the recruiter role, what does it mean? From the candidate role? Candidates—and I saw this in another organization that said that they did this study—candidates do not care if it’s us, a person, or AI, if they get feedback, move through the process quickly, or get hired. They don’t care. They don’t care. And in some cases, people feel that AI is probably less biased. Less biased than a person. So, you know, I’ve said to my teams, and I’ve said it, you know, in public forums, that I think that there are jobs in TA that could be AI over time. When I think about certain jobs, in the coordinator roles, in the sourcer roles, there could be AI over time. So we’ve got to think about our skill level and what we add to the equation. But yeah, when it came to candidates, candidates don’t care. They don’t care.

Ken Brotherston 44:17

We did an exercise last year. We did it in Australia and the UK and America, where we took a TA function, we broke it into 40 constituent parts that make up a typical TA function, and then we said to roomfuls of TA people, “Categorize each of these components into A, B, and C, where A is uniquely human, B is augmentation, and C is it can be AI.” And the results were consistent across the world, where 70 to 80% of those functions could either be fully or partially automated. And so then we said, “Okay, that’s what you’re telling us. What are you going to do? What does this mean for your, you know, for your function and for your careers?” And someone in Australia, very cleverly, then asked AI that question, and it came up with some really good, really good answers about what they ought to be doing. Yeah. But yeah, Shelia, you’re right. I mean, you’re going to see a large proportion of traditional TA functions get automated quite soon.

Shelia Gray 45:29

Yeah, I’ve seen avatars now doing interviews, and they’re interesting. An avatar doing an interview.

Rebecca Warren 45:36

Yeah, we have an AI Interview product, and we find people love it—all levels. I was actually surprised, because my first thought was, “Okay, this can be good for, like, mid-level on down, just for high volume, and maybe for mid-level career.” We find executive hiring… it’s wonderful. And actually, folks that are at that level, they love it because they can get that first thought out. They can do it whenever they want to. It was actually really surprising. And I will say, like, when I think about it, I could care less if there was an actual bank. I don’t ever want to go into a bank. I want to be able to access my money on my phone. I want to be able to go into an ATM. I want stuff to show up. I don’t ever want to talk to a person standing in line at a bank. It just, like, sucks my soul right out through my feet. I’m like, I don’t want to do it. So there’s a lot of pieces in the process, right, in the TA process, where we’re like, “I would rather just at 3 AM when I wake up and say, ‘I have a question about this job that I’m interviewing for,’ and emailing the recruiter doesn’t make any sense. I would love to be able to talk to a bot and just say, ‘Help me understand,’ with the understanding that that is going to be held confidential,” right? It’s not going to be like… because I think that’s part of the reason why people get scared, of like, “I don’t want to ask this recruiter this question because they’re going to think I’m greedy or selfish or lazy or whatever,” right, whatever question we ask about comp and benefits. And, you know, people get really wiggy about it. Like, we also have to be able to say that we’re going to trust. When we do that, it’s not going to say, “Hey, guess what? Sally Recruiter, your candidate messaged me at 3 AM and had 17 questions about compensation, which we’re going to then interpret that that means that they, you know, are very focused on money.” So I think there has to be that sense of trust and transparency with however we decide to use that automation or that augmentation.

Ken Brotherston 47:27

And then, Rebecca, you make a really important point about the assumptions around who’s comfortable with this. Because I remember, say, going back to the internet as people started to use that. And I was part of a business—it was called Futurestep—and we launched this internet recruiting business, and senior people… so basically, young people were very happy with it. Senior people were also really happy using it. And it tended to be sort of groups in the middle that were slightly more reticent. So the idea that it’s only going to be younger folks that embrace this technology, I think I’d be very careful about making that assumption. Yeah, yeah.

Rebecca Warren 48:13

So I’m going to throw one thing in here that just came in from someone who’s listening, and then I want to switch and talk about metrics, because I think it’s really important, and I have a clear point of view on how we should be measuring all the things. But the question, I thought, is really good. When we talk about automation and we talk about, hey, an AI recruiter, the comment came in saying, “Hey, I was in a career transition last year. I had a virtual recruiter call me about five minutes after I applied. They asked me if I could answer a few questions, and I said, ‘Sure.’ And then the first question was a behavioral-based interview question: ‘Tell me about a time when…’ They were like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m not ready for that,’ and hung up,” right? I also think we need to make sure that we give people that space. I know in our AI Interviewer, we do say, like, “Is now a good time?” And if it’s not a good time, like, “Hey, can we call you back?” You know, we have our model trained to make sure that if somebody is like, “The house is on fire, I have to go,” they’re like, “Take care of you. We’re going to go, you know, do our own thing.” So I think that’s a really good point too. Is that we have to make sure that if we are using technology—which I am a huge fan of, of AI—that we also build in things saying, “Hey, is now a good time?” Needs to say clearly, what does that actually mean? Does that mean, “Hey, I’m looking at 15 minutes of questions,” or “I would love to ask just some basic questions so I can schedule another meeting after”? Because I don’t know that I would be prepared to answer, like, intense behavioral-based interview questions off the cuff after I just apply. So I don’t know, Ken, if you have a point of view on that. And then I want to switch to metrics.

Ken Brotherston 49:47

Well, I think you have to have a model where the candidate can say, “Can you just explain what this process is going to be?” you know? And the AI says, “Yeah, I’m going to ask you these questions. And here’s why. Here’s why I’m asking you these questions. This is what I’m looking for.” I remember my son, when he went through a graduate hiring program, and he was asked to basically blow up a balloon but not burst it. And he came back, he said, “What’s that got to do with selling soap powder?” Because it was a consumer good. So they hadn’t made the connection. So it was a risk appetite question, right, that they were asking him, but you know, he just didn’t understand that connection. So I think, you know, explaining the process, explaining what you’re going to ask, and explaining why you’re going to ask it—that shouldn’t be that difficult for an AI model to be able to answer those questions.

Rebecca Warren 50:41

And just saying, “Hey, do you have a few minutes?” I think my first question would be, “For what now?” So you need that model to be able to say, like, “Hey, here’s what I’d like to know. Is now a good time? Or should we schedule some time?” So I think that’s fair, like understanding all of the pieces. Okay, if we’re good, I would love to switch to talk about metrics and understanding, what are we measuring and why? Right? So we joke about this, like, for decades, we’ve worshiped at the altar of “time to fill.” And Shelia, that is absolutely… you mentioned when ATSs came on the scene. And first of all, we thought that ATSs were going to, like, wreck TA’s world and life was over, and then we realized that wasn’t the case—job boards, LinkedIn, all of the things. But when we talk about the metrics that we have in place that we measure for TA, they were created to justify the spend on an ATS because we had to sell it to our organizations on why we needed a container for the data, making sure we didn’t have two recruiters calling the same person, all of those things. So our metrics were based on: look at how many candidates we have in the process. Look at how we’re moving them through, right? What is time to fill, cost per hire, all of those things. So if we are worshiping at the altar of time to fill, I think we’re missing an awful lot of things, right? We need to move from filling seats to strategic partnerships. But we also have to understand that a lot of those metrics, which we say show efficiency or effectiveness, are really reinforcing that siloed behavior that you talked about, Ken. So if we say time to fill is a legacy metric, and I think it should not be what it is, what should be the North Star for a modern TA team this year and beyond? What should we be looking at, and how can we measure it going forward, if time to fill or “butts in seats” or all of those other things are going to be heading to the wayside?

Shelia Gray 52:48

For me, I think that there are three metrics. One is quality of hire. So quality of hire—the person that you hire, how long do they stay in the organization? Or do they get promoted in the organization? And what’s their first performance rating? Looking at the quality of hire makes it all worthwhile. Because if I fill one job six times, and I’ve done that in high volume… filled like one job three times in a year, right? Time to fill is short. Quality of hire was not. Quality of hire was not acceptable. But nobody measures that. And to me, that’s the one metric. No one looks at the voluntary attrition of candidates and all that. The second thing I would measure is the candidate experience through the whole process and the onboarding. So to me, TA affects it up through the first three months. So I want to know about the process, how you felt about the process. Would you recommend us to someone else? And was the job that we hired you for the job you got? And you don’t know that until after you’ve been in for about three months. That’s the second one. The third point is, I would measure something very similar for the hiring manager. Let me tell you why their weight is something different. Hiring managers’ job in 30 days can give me a negative rating because they probably think it should be quicker. I’ve had jobs that we’ve taken over a year to fill because they’re niche roles, and the manager was just as happy. So time to fill is never important to the manager. It’s usually around their experience of going through the process…

Speaker 1 54:27

How much communication, the…

Shelia Gray 54:30

The communication, the quality of the candidates that got brought to them. They care about those pieces of it, and then having that successful hire. So those are the three measures that I think say that it works. The tool is what they’re trying to measure. Is the tool good? The tool is not the process. The tool just leverages. Should be the most: how many of the people that we currently brought into the organization showed up on a succession plan in a niche role that was critical? How many critical hires left us within… or what we call regrettable losses… left us in the first year? Those are the things that I think matter the most.

Rebecca Warren 55:16

I love that. I’m taking all these notes, so I’m writing them down. I think that’s great. I think that’s really smart when you think about the impact, instead of thinking about just the numbers of how long it took to get somebody in there. Ken, what do you think?

Ken Brotherston 55:32

I would say a simplified version of what Shelia said. I mean, this is something I’ve been thinking about for years, and the challenge that you have in measuring quality of hire is when you start layering in: have they been promoted? Did they get a score of X on a review? Did they get a pay rise? Whatever… becomes really difficult to measure. I would have a really simple test that says, “Are they still here in a year?” That’s it. It’s not perfect, but it’s really easy to measure. It’s consistent. And it basically says, “We’ve not fired them and they’ve not fired us.” So they may not be the best-performing person, but they’re good enough. Okay? And I think too often organizations let “great” be the enemy of “good.” Not every role… in fact, relatively few roles do you need to hire great people. You need to hire people who are good enough, you know. And that doesn’t mean lowering the bar. It means you set the bar here, and if they get over the bar, that’s fine. They don’t need to clear the bar by 10 feet. There’s no evidence that says if someone clears the bar by six inches and someone clears the bar by 10 feet, that that’s a better… and Google did some interesting work on this, where they looked at over five years people who had performed in their organization and what their grade point average was. And they have a minimum… I think they had a minimum of 3.5. So you had to have a GPA of 3.5 to get in. Their highest-performing people over five years had a GPA of something like 3.9, so they’d only just cleared the bar, right? They didn’t understand why those people were… were they more driven? Did they have other skills they weren’t measuring? But the data was really clear that people who had only just scraped in turned out to be their best-performing people. So I would say quality of hire is really important, but don’t try and overcomplicate the measurement. And also, just be really clear about when a role is “you need someone who’s good enough” and not someone who needs to be absolutely excellent. And be really clear, yeah, you know, if you’re hiring someone for Starbucks, they need to be a good enough barista. They don’t need to be the best barista in the state. You know, they just need to be kind of good enough for you to be happy, them to be happy, and the customer to be happy. So I think being clear-eyed about that is really important.

Rebecca Warren 58:17

I love it. Okay, I have 18,000 more questions, and I can’t ask any of them, so we have one minute left. I’m going to ask both of you to share with me your one final parting piece of advice for our audience. So what’s one actionable change that you each think an organization can make pretty quickly—tomorrow or, you know, in the next month or so—to start aligning their strategy and tools more effectively? So I’m not sure who wants to go first, but what’s your one thing, advice that you want to leave people with?

Shelia Gray 58:56

I think that I don’t think that TA does enough of, I’m going to say, self-reflection, right? Because we get caught up in the work of the work. And I think that the voices of our customers are important. And I believe where possible, continuous improvement should always be going on. And I think one of the things that people could do is take that moment to find out what things they can hear the voice of their customers on. And there are so many ways. I mean, you know where you take your car into the shop and they send you a survey after, or there’s a post-survey when you’re buying something, or you get off the phone with a customer service agent and they ask you, “Do you mind staying on for a 10-second survey?” Why? Because I think those things matter in service roles, and I think people forget sometimes. I always think of TA as sort of like a salesperson. We’re trying to sell an opportunity, trying to sell a dream, and we’re working with you to try to get you to buy the dream or whatever. And if we’re in that kind of role, we need to hear. Ken talked about his Matrix skill would be listening. And I think we don’t listen enough. And so I would say the first thing you want to do, before you blow anything up, change anything, is just spend a little time in understanding if you do have problems and what the magnitude of those things are, and celebrating success. We don’t celebrate success enough, and I think that’s why people are so burned out and all of that, because we don’t pat them on the back. When finding that unicorn, you know, that unicorn job that took so long to find, we don’t celebrate. And I always tell managers all the time that “thank you” doesn’t cost anything. So I would say, celebrate success.

Rebecca Warren 1:00:55

So good. Love it. Alright. Ken, what’s your final words?

Ken Brotherston 1:01:02

Thank you for that last point, because as someone who runs the TIARA Talent Acquisition Awards, which will be opening for entries in a few months’ time, then celebrating success is really important. And we’d love you to celebrate success by getting recognition through the TIARA Talent Acquisition Awards, so forgive me for that plug. This might again be slightly controversial. I think talent acquisition is such a hugely important function within an organization. You know, it really is. It’s always been important. It’s never been more important. But I think particularly now, remembering that private organizations exist to generate a profit and to generate shareholder value, and thinking about everything you do through that lens is really important. And you know, boards, when they talk about humanization and human-first and things like that, they say that, they don’t mean it. They’re about risk mitigation and profit maximization. That’s just what private organizations are there for. And if you think about it through that lens, and how you can do that in a human way—don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean dehumanize the process—but the fundamental job is to mitigate risk and maximize profit in as human a way as possible. And I think if you think of the work you do in that way, hopefully, you’ll deliver as much value as you can.

Rebecca Warren 1:02:43

Alright, so wrapping that up: hearing, paying attention to organizational goals and outcomes, celebrating successes, and thinking and listening as much as you can. Love it. What a great session. Y’all. Thanks so much for joining. Appreciate you hanging on for an extra minute or two, because we didn’t want to miss those nuggets at the end. So this is the Talent Table saying peace out for our episode. Looking forward to seeing you next month. Alright, take care.

Ken Brotherston 1:03:08

Thank you. Thank you. Bye.