A New Era in Talent Acquisition

The author is Marilyn Pearson Hendricks, Managing Partner and co-founder, of The WorkTech Advisory Group, Inc. Talent acquisition professionals know that the traditional model is broken. Due to short-sighted practices and transactional relationships, the ecosystem is in turmoil. Recruiting staff have been laid off in record numbers, and we’re only just starting to see the light at the end of the tech wreck tunnel.

Anyone working in talent acquisition knows the traditional model is broken. The event was a beautiful blueprint for the community: industry leaders, practitioners and solutions providers from TA, HR, and tech gathered together to build and strengthen relationships. 

We reflected on the landscape and collectively concluded that to avoid making the same mistakes – which have seen mass layoffs and TA teams decimated – we need to work smarter and more sustainably. Generative AI: Learn as Much as You Can, as Fast as You Can. It’s Too Important to Ignore!

It’s a fantastic tool that enables efficiencies, frees up time for professionals to work on more valuable tasks and provides unparalleled systems of intelligence. It has the potential to underpin next-level operations like strategic pipelining, capacity planning, and skills-based hiring that will advance the TA function and organizations away from reactive recruitment models toward sustainable paradigms.

At the same time, we have an ethical and moral responsibility to develop ourselves and our roles into ones that are tech-enabled, not AI-led. Skills-Based Hiring: Use This as the Roadmap to our Future. It’s a term buzzing about the ecosystem that promises to overhaul the approach to recruiting.

It’s a form of organizational innovation that balances business needs with workforce capabilities and capacity and matches it to the overall talent supply. We need it because the traditional model isn’t working. Moving toward a model that prioritizes capabilities and capacities over traditional assessment criteria like qualifications and experience opens the door to several advantages.

At Supernova 2023, Seth Williams, former director and global head of recruiting channels at Google, spoke passionately about harnessing the power of hidden talent with skills-based hiring at the core. As Seth proffers, if we start to look at people as more than a role and stop matching them to often overly exclusionary job descriptions, we can start opening up the world of work to typically marginalized, under and unemployed groups.

Not only does this create an inclusive recruiting culture, but it also goes a long way toward solving talent shortages over the long term. Organizational frameworks built around skills-based recruiting can only work if we collectively change mindsets.

We should aspire to be holistic and strategic people partners to propel the function beyond short-sighted goals and use skills-based hiring as our roadmap. Candidate Experience: Break Away from the Past and Evolve Just as skills-based hiring can liberate people from the confines of the job, we need to break free of the traditional recruitment process shackles.

But it shouldn’t be the be-all and end-all – offering good candidate experiences has to be an ongoing precondition. The recruitment process is the first contact and first impression any hire has with a potential workplace.

At Supernova 2023, talent acquisition stalwart Larry Kelly, co-founder and director of Attract Wonder, urged us all to take the opportunity to be creative in the recruitment process and inspire candidates to want to engage more and progress through the funnel.

Using candidate feedback as evidence, we should work with and educate leaders on the possibility of creating new experiences. Innovative candidate experiences are key to building and maintaining relationships between recruiters and candidates.

We must break away from the past to reimagine these relationships as more than a simple exchange because, if we’re to move forward and avoid past mistakes, the model has to change to one that’s more empathetic – our ways of thinking and working need to reflect the modern world and today’s talent demands.

To learn lessons from the recent talent acquisition crisis, we must reflect on the actions that led us there. We’re already starting to see new mindsets and frameworks evolving and creating and implementing innovative technologies.

A way that encompasses skills-based hiring and candidate experience. A way that leads to us becoming trusted business partners engaged in smarter, more sustainable and streamlined practices.

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