Perspectives on Talent | Hiring and AI technology considerations for TA leaders

My name is Jim Holt. I'm a VP of Solutions here at Wilson. And today I'll be talking a little bit about my observations coming out of the Unleashed Conference a couple of weeks back, as well as general tips and tricks for adapting AI into your existing processes and future proofing talent processes moving forward.

I think from the candidate perspective, there is still a lot of skepticism around these tools. I saw multiple demos while I was at Lund Leash and saw multiple, particularly when you think about one way video interviewing tools or tools where the AI will respond back to a question. There were a lot of interactions that ended with a candidate saying, I'll continue the conversation with a real human. The candidate market still craves a lot of that human interaction versus I'll talk to an AI tool, but only in so much as it gets me to a human interaction so that can ask really deep detailed questions or so that can understand really what I'm getting myself into. Kids are called a vibe check. I don't think that's far off. When you talk to a recruiter, you can kind of get the vibe if you've done it enough, whether or not they're selling you a false bill of goods. or if it's a story you've heard from every other company that you've worked with before in a certain industry. And what does that really mean? So I think again, kind of flipping it on its head a little bit, I think candidates need to be prepared to interact with these tools more. I think that talent acquisition as a function has continued to suffer from budget cuts, has continued to suffer from people power cuts. We've also seen where talent acquisition is being better integrated into different parts of the business, learning and development, talent management, sort of a wider HR infrastructure. So it's becoming less, in some cases, becoming less specialized of a function within the wider corporate HR sphere. Certain larger companies, I think, will always kind of have a dedicated talent acquisition department, but there's very, very close collaboration now because of the difficulties of workforce planning and the difficulties of just broader macroeconomic planning that tie back into workforce planning recruiting. There's a closer ecosystem that's being developed now within that HR and talent space. And so if these tools are gonna be used to shortcut some of the workflow or to provide additional bandwidth for the recruiters, candidates, whether you're interviewing for an entry-level position, a high volume hourly position, or even a really specialized NIST position. Like I'm thinking about some of my engineers out there. I'm thinking about some software architect types of roles. Like you may not always get the same level of that white glove concierge level service. Or if you do, some of it may be delivered digitally versus not. And there are some candidate populations that are very much comfortable with that type of a dynamic. there are other candidate populations that are not. Tying back into the candidate experience and what corporate leaders really need to pay attention to, I think there's the real potential here for ageism to come into play. As you think about candidates of a certain age or candidates who, like myself, kind of grew up in that weird space between an analog and a digital environment where we were interacting with things day to day. We're now taking that next great leap from not just sort of a digital existence day to day, utilizing the internet for everything, but utilizing different AI agents or utilizing different interactions with different types of AI assistants, both in our personal and professional lives. Now, while all of that can potentially be great, if you have certain candidate populations, particularly as you think about skilled trades individuals that aren't comfortable in that space, are you potentially turning yourself off to some of those individuals that just go, it's not worth it to me to kind of go through that. Or if I'm really important to them, a human being will pick up the phone and figure out why I didn't complete that digital interview. So a couple of things to think about there, I think. The other non-HR, non-talent acquisition thing to consider is how do your IT and your info security teams feel about a third party platform that is collecting and storing third party data and is potentially using it to train either large language models or to train other behavioral models. There are a lot of organizations, some of them in, again, more or less, not necessarily risk averse, but I guess more risk friendly industries or that are comfortable with a certain degree of risk, that still are not comfortable integrating some of these tools. Some of that could be provider immaturity. So how long is that provider actually going to exist? Will they get gobbled up by a larger HR technology provider? Have their tools integrated into a platform that doesn't jive well with your current technology ecosystem? Or are we thinking about potentially a scenario where again, there's some sort of a large data breach or are we thinking about potentially a lawsuit from an individual or a group of individuals that has a good claim towards discrimination based on certain interactions with the tool or lack of interactions with the tool. So these are all things to think about and consider, not just from an HR perspective, but again, from more of a corporate IT info security potentially legal perspective when thinking about implementing these platforms.

So it's tricky to know where to get started with all of this. Do I go out and do a bunch of demos? Do I make sure I have budget for these types of tools and how to work those into my process? Do I need to step back and do a total process evaluation? The answer to the last part is yes. I would start with thinking about how does our process work today? Who does it touch from a human perspective, both internally and externally? Are my hiring managers ready for this type of a tool? Is our internal culture ready for this type of a tool? Does my internal team even need this type of a tool? Investment in HR and talent technology is well thought out and it's very strategic in terms of how it's used. but making sure you get maximum utilization and value from the tool or the platform. It all goes back to thinking about where in my process do I have a bottleneck and what's the point solution to try and solve that? Or if it's a broader solution, then do I need to look at a broader platform to try to solve that issue? There are certainly organizations that can help. One of the things that we've been offering recently is a free talent acquisition capability matrix assessment. So evaluating where you fall within a talent acquisition capability matrix today, where is it that you want to be in the next three to five years in terms of your capability? And then broadly speaking, what does that mean? Is it much more human centric? Is it much more technology centric? Is it a mix of things? Do you not need to focus on process technologies and instead really think about better defining metrics that speak to the wider business impact of what you're doing from a day to day HR? and talent perspective versus inserting new steps in the process or inserting new tools that take on a certain bid or organize a certain bit of the process. So there are certainly professionals, whether they're third party HR consultants or an organization like ours, that provide you with an objective look at what your process is doing today and where potentially pitfalls exist so that you can move forward with an actual prioritized, categorized plan of action back to the rest of your executive team and say, we may be facing these headwinds in the next 18 to 24 months. Here's our plan to go and tackle them. And by the way, we looked at AI. It's not appropriate for these reasons, or it is appropriate for these reasons.

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