Ep 835: How AI Is Reshaping Work And Hiring

0:00I recently attended Unleash in Paris, and AI and AI agents were everywhere. The conversations I recorded there, though, weren't really about the technology, but how it's changing work and what that does to organisations and the people in them. So what did I learn? Keep listening to find out.

0:23There's been more of scientific discovery, more of technical advancement and material progress in your lifetime than mine, than in all the ages of history.

0:37Hi there, welcome to episode 835 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. I recorded four conversations at the recent Unleash conference in Paris, and there was one theme that came up in all of them. My interviewees argued that AI is starting to redesign work itself, and with it, how organisations are built, how roles are defined, and how people are hired. Most of the people I spoke to build HR technology for a living, so they see further than most employers, but they obviously also have a stake in the future they're describing. So what does this all mean for how companies are run and how they hire?

1:18The first interview is with Mervyn Dinnan, an analyst and author on HR and talent trends, and a regular interviewee on Recruiting Future. We recorded this live on the podcast stage, and I asked him what he was seeing at the event and what the conversations there were missing. Hi Mervyn. Welcome back to the podcast. Hello Matt. Thank you for having me back on the podcast. Well, it's a pleasure. And we are sitting on a stage at Unleash in Paris with cameras, with an audience, with all kinds of things. So slightly more upmarket than the last time we did a podcast where I think we were sitting on a coffee table in a corner somewhere.

1:55So always good to talk to you in many different circumstances. It's an interesting show. It's Unleashed. It's certainly bigger than it was last year. And there are literally, I feel like I'm drowning under AI and being attacked by AI agents. It's just absolutely everywhere. What's your perspectives on what you've what you've seen so far i i kind of half expected it to be like this yeah um because there's so much that is still seems so new there's so much that people experimenting with um different ways of using ai different ways of bringing it into the i suppose the day-to-day operations of different businesses um that is clearly top of mind and there's a lot of people who are here i'm guessing primarily to find out what they should be doing with ai i think you're right there.

2:43I also think that we're not properly having the what's human, what's AI debate. People are sort of holding onto things that they could give to AI, and at the same time, giving things to AI that they should hold onto. And I'm not seeing, I'm seeing a lot of protectionism, a lot of seer, a lot of aggressive sales and marketing on the other side of it. But I think we're lacking that proper debate about actually what does need to be human, what does need to be AI, because I think it's more nuanced than people think and i've not seen this huge amount of discussion that really kind of gets into the detail of that no and i think there's probably two angles on that the first one is people aren't getting too heavily into the detail because they don't maybe fully understand it themselves yeah they don't feel um qualified to talk about it in detail and the other one as I said is almost this wild west of experimentation that's you know it's let's try and use it for this and then if we can use it for something which isn't seriously work related then let's see how we can adapt that to use it for something seriously work related.

3:52Aline Bailey from Smart Recruiters joined me on the same stage straight after I'd spoken to Mervyn. Around this time every year Aline and I compare notes on where recruiting's headed and this year she makes a very big prediction about the future of talent acquisition. Hi, Lynn. Hey, Matt. Good to be talking to you again. I know. I can't believe. I feel like we haven't talked in a while, yet I feel like we talk all the time. It's a very weird... It is, isn't it? The last time we were talking, we were actually in New York filming that film, weren't we? We were. That's what it is. And then I spent hours upon hours editing, So I feel like I've seen your face quite a bit.

4:33There we go. Which is fabulous. It's in a great way. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, it's great to catch up with you. And it's that time of year again. So for the last, I can't remember how many times we've done this, but round about this time of year, we've had a conversation about what do we think the future of recruiting is going to look like. Obviously, lots of things have changed in the last 12 months or so, but where's your head at now? What's on your radar? What do you think has shifted? Where do you think we're heading? Wow. So, Matt, I'm going to be a little controversial yet again. And this is non-sanctioned.

5:09This is a Lynn opinion where we're at. But, you know, a few years ago, before everybody was really even starting, they were just in the infancy of the AI stuff. We were talking about how dramatically it was going to change the role of the recruiter. I think that ship has sailed. We're past there. if your role hasn't shifted or changed, then, you know, maybe you're not watching the tea leaves here. It's gone. I think that we are entering a phase where the idea of an independent talent acquisition organization starts to become less and less viable. And so let me, let me explain what I mean by that.

5:49Right. People joke with me that I'm always killing off things, right? First year as a recruiter, now it's the whole of talent acquisition. But I kind of am. And it's not that I don't think that specialty or value is there, is understanding how to connect people to talent. But I think we finally have the technology now to be able to look at this in a much more holistic way. And this idea of an independent talent acquisition organization that is focused primarily, solely, on external sourcing and recruitment workflow management and et cetera, it becomes less interesting for organizations who are now trying to look at it, not just at what is this external headcount job description I need to fill, but are now asking questions like, where is my business?

6:39What am I going to need in three to six months? Is it internal talent? Okay, great. So then maybe we say we add internal mobility to it. But now we're also saying, or is it an agent that I need to do a particular component or task? I think that's one level that's going to shift the dynamic here. So it's not necessarily, you know, I'm going to route this through an external headcount. I'm going to route it through internal. That's going to be much more holistic. And in order for that to operate, you can't do that in a silo as an organization. It's not very deeply embedded in the talent and HRVP organization.

7:14but I actually think you have to be much more embedded in the business organization, which many recruiting firms are, right? Teams are, but they haven't necessarily been fully embedded. I think the next step to this, however, is going to be past there, not just kind of who I'm going to hire, how I'm going to fill these roles with. The idea that I'm going to fill a job, one role, one set of skills or one sort of capabilities, one set of behaviors, that's going to do this thing and that's what they're going to get hired for and have a career for 20 years. We know that that's not realistic anymore.

7:52As people have more insight into not just the prescribed, inferred interest of what they're going to need for tomorrow's workforce, businesses are also changing as dynamically. So that means when I'm bringing somebody into into my company, I'm not bringing them into a role so much anymore in the future. And when I say the future, probably not 18 months, maybe it's, or maybe it will be, who knows? But I'm really bringing somebody into my company, maybe permanently, maybe temporarily, with the assumption that they're going to do a series of projects or work as demand requires it. That changes dramatically, this idea of talent acquisition, how we operate it, how we sit with it.

8:38So at a minimum, yes, your workflows and processes are going to change because the demands of the business are going to change. But in a maybe more controversial take, I think the idea of this independent talent acquisition business group within kind of HR, the business starts to dissipate. Yeah, I think it's interesting the all the silos that we've kind of put up in talent and HR, it's almost you can almost see them sort of merging and collapsing in real time. It's a fascinating time. We've been talking about the future for a long time and making these kind of predictions, and they've always been very much along the right track.

9:16I'm telling you, we've won every time, Matt. I think history is on our side here. But out of all of that, though, what's kind of surprised you the most? What's come at you from left field or what hasn't happened quite the way you would expect it to have? So I think, and again, because I work with a lot of different size companies, I don't think I was fully prepared for the amount of variation and disparate impact that these changes are having across kind of companies and company size, dynamics, et cetera. So I think I should be clear that most of the time that when I'm talking now, I'm probably talking about larger multinationals who are really looking at this from a kind of much broader perspective.

10:08Yeah. The individual who's running a talent acquisition organization inside a tire manufacturer in the Midwest, right, in the U.S., is probably not seeing things all that dramatically different. Yeah. And can't quite understand where all of this is. Like they may, they're listening to your podcast maybe, or they're, they're trying, they're listening and they're, they're not seeing those same effects. Yeah. I think I anticipated that that, um, variation would start to shrink much quicker than it has. Um, and in fact, I don't, not, I not only don't see it shrinking quicker, I actually seen it getting much more divergent and I don't necessarily know how solution providers or how even those who are helping support these organizations think through it.

10:54um, navigate that, that much difference. That chasm is getting wider and wider and wider. I think that's interesting because there's, I think there's a thing about AI in particular, that actually, if you're a smaller business, it's kind of easier to adopt. You've got kind of more agility there, but I suppose that there is a big piece around knowing what it can do and having it sort of packaged in the right way for you. So maybe that will, maybe that will change every time. Who knows? It could get there. And by the way, I mean, I think it will. But this is, I think this is a microcosm of a larger workforce economic challenge that we're seeing.

11:31The variation between businesses who are looking forward, bringing technology in, adapting the way in which they operate is dramatically different from kind of the normal shop. And We used to break it up by calling it things like this is enterprise and small, medium businesses operate this way, etc. I don't think it's as clean cut as that. It really is. Are you operating in this kind of forward talent direction? Are you operating this transactional direction? And in between, nothing shall meet. Because the tools are set up to support you in both ways. You're either going to pick one or the other and off you go.

12:12Here's a final question for you. What's the thing that you've seen with this technology that's really made you stop and think this is going to change everything? So I've been very, very skeptical about whether or not we could deploy or leverage AI effectively, ethically and compliantly. Yeah. To allow us to understand people at a unique enough level and a business at a unique enough level to actually solve this workforce planning problem. Yeah. I think we're getting there. I think we're going to be there relatively soon. I know as a company, that's definitely a direction that we're moving in. I mean, SAP just announced its intent to inquire TechWoof.

12:53And the purpose behind that is very, very clear. The technology now exists. And if we can deploy it correctly, we could finally solve this problem, which would make me super happy. If I don't have to listen to anybody or myself sit in another conference room and debate with one product owner or one business group owner to another about what a project manager's skills actually are. I think that for all those people who hate that, I think we're very going to be very quickly past that, faster than anybody can imagine. Let's hope so. Yeah. Alim, thank you for talking to me. Fabulous. Thank you so much, Matt.

13:27I appreciate it. Support for this podcast comes from Pebble. I know that many of you listening are hiring internationally and you'll be all too familiar with the wall of paperwork, rules and approvals, and you know just how much this red tape can slow things down. That's what Pebble is designed to fix. Pebble makes global hiring simple through embedded compliance and AI-driven workflows. The Pebble platform takes the delays and guesswork out of going global, so you can move fast without adding risk. The bottom line is that anywhere is possible with Pebble. With global hiring simplified, founders and HR leaders can spend their time on focusing on what and where comes next for their business.

14:14Pebble has a special offer for recruiting future listeners. Pebble is normally$399 a month per employee, although a no-brainer for what you get. But right now, there is a limited time offer on their site that makes it even easier to get started. Go to hipebble.ai before it's gone. That's h-i-p-e-b-l dot a-i. Terms and conditions apply. Alin's prediction was about the future of the talent acquisition function. Ronnie Zahavi's prediction is about the whole organisation. He's the co-founder and CEO of HiBob, and he believes that AI will force every organisation to rethink how work gets done. In our conversation, he explains why, what it means to put an agent in an org chart, and how he expects companies to be structured as a result.

15:08Hi, Ronnie. Good to be talking to you again. Hi. Good to see you again. Quickly introduce yourself for everyone who's listening. Tell us who you are and what you do. So I'm the co-founder and CEO of HiBob. HiBob was founded about 11 years ago. we focus on serving customers at the mid-size to sub-enterprise we provide the full HCM stack. I remember last time we spoke you had some really interesting perspectives into what AI is doing to work there's a temptation to sort of look at AI as something that's just making what we do already more efficient but it's becoming obvious it's much more than that what kind of vision do you have for it where do you think it's where do you think it's going that's the i don't know multi trillion billion yes dollar question matt um so i think there are several assumptions that um um it's way easier for us to answer today versus um a year ago the first one ar is here to stay there's no doubt about it i think this The following assumption is that humans and agents will work side by side.

16:27And someone, a persona or a system or department, will have to orchestrate humans and digital workers all together. but to me the main change in my perspective about AI I think it's the fact that AI forces every organization to redesign or to rethink about how work gets done so it's not only about the technological disruption it's a given I think it's more about the impact and the expectations that a modern organization will have to consider when it comes to AI. And I think to get to answer this question, I see basically four dimensions. The first one is the tech disruption. There's no question about the impact.

17:36but it's not enough. You have to have other elements supporting the change. So the first one, so out of the four, the tech disruption is one. The next one is the psychological and the behavioral change. Let's assume that you really want to push the EA agenda and you're convincing your employees to use it, But all of a sudden, they realize that their job can be done in seconds, a mission that they used to do in days. So they are seriously thinking about, am I cutting the branch I'm sitting on? Will I be irrelevant and AI will be able to displace me? So the psychological change, the behavioral change is mandatory.

18:33And it will take time. And it's the company's obligation to make sure that they focus on it. The following one, which I believe is the strongest impact, is the way that businesses have been operating. So, you know, this is the blueprint of how B2B works. the relationship between vendors and customers, the procurement process, pricing, packaging, measuring the impact, how you run demos. So I don't see organization abandoning the best practices that were basically the map and the compass for companies how to run businesses. You know, you had ERP for finance and CRM for sales. So the impact will be on the personal level, but also at the organization level.

19:43And the fourth one is governments. They will draw the line on what you'll be allowed to do and what not. it's still in the early discussions, but I guess they will be pulled in to help put the right guardrails on how to run it. So I think redesigning the way work gets done, that's the number one agenda for any modern organization. I think it's interesting. When I come to events like this, people talk about AI, They talk about companies that have agents as AI employees. They will work alongside humans. And we kind of describe a vision of the world that everyone kind of nods and says, you know, this is what we talk about at HR conferences.

20:38What does that look like in practice now, though? Because obviously, this is starting to have an impact in companies. It's not just a theory that we're talking about anymore. Where are we with that sort of agentic employee? Is it something that you have in your business? What does it look like in practice? It becomes more and more popular than before. And it's a normal ended. Nobody can stop it. So maybe a year ago, if a company would decide to add an agent to an org chart and give it a name, everybody will look and say seriously? Are we going too far with this idea? I think today and we see it it becomes more and more popular so for example at the beginning agents were named after trees and the new trend that we see they all get human names and you see them on all charts so they become a part of the organization and think about what does it take to onboard an agent, to govern the agent to review the performance to associate the agent to the humans who build it so there's an entire new area that must be developed and then operate it to allow customers to have humans and agents work side by side.

22:25I always ask people about the future. What do you think the future is going to look like with all of this in a couple of years' time? And in a lot of cases, people are just speculating. But I like asking it to people who run software companies because you're building this stuff. So what does the future look like in two years' time? Where do you think we're going with this? I think in the short term, a lot of confusion and uncertainty. Like, what does it mean? It's hard to answer. But then in the long term, I think it will have a huge impact on everything, you know, in our life. You know, medicine and healthcare, the collaboration and social media that we use.

23:07But when it comes to work, I think it will be interesting to see how organizations will be redesigned and structured. I'll give an example. I think the era of large enterprise is over. You don't need so much people to run your company because it's all about the hybrid between humans and agents. So if, I don't know, Salesforce has 75 ,000 employees, if they have to rebuild it from scratch, most likely they will need 10 % of the amount of people. Why? Because agents can do a great job, you know, side by side with humans. so if I look at the future you know from my I would say very narrow lens as a player in this industry I believe that we'll see so many things changing from juniors and you know the inexperienced employees think about the way you run budgets how you balance between salaries and token spending, how you inject the right culture code to agents and basically guide them.

24:38That's the way humans behave in our company and we expect agents to have the same DNA. So everything in our life will change and then specifically when it comes to work, I totally believe that if we have this conversation in two years or a year from now, we'll have so many things to discuss that we can't even imagine what they can be. Roddy, thank you very much for talking to me. Thank you. Predictions like these leave employers with a practical problem. If the work keeps changing, the role that someone's hired for may not exist in that form for long. So what are you assessing them against during the hiring process?

25:25Dilip Broch is the co-founder and CEO of Glimpse, a company that assesses people on what they're capable of rather than what they've done. She explains how that works and talks through the type of insights that the system's giving to employers. I'm Dilip Broch and I'm co-founder and CEO of Glimpse. glimpse is a startup and what we do is we model success we model organizational success how does that work so we use science neuroscience basically and combine that cognitive neuroscience with machine learning to generate a new type of signal so everyone's talking about ai and how ai only works if you have the right signal so we're generating a new kind of scientific signal that helps measure how people actually perform, not what they say about themselves, but how they actually perform.

26:19This sounds absolutely fascinating. I'm not sure we've got time to go into the absolute detail of it, but I'm sort of desperate to know a little bit more about that. So you've sort of got traditional assessment tools and the science that sits behind there. You're talking about neuroscience. What's different about it? What does it tell me that a traditional assessment wouldn't tell me? So most assessments tell you what someone knows or what they've done. Our assessment focuses on what they're capable of. So in a world that changes so fast and all the skills, everyone says skills, right? They have a very short shelf life.

26:54What we care about is not what someone has predicted their performance in the past, but how will they perform in the future when the roles haven't been built yet? So things like ability to deal with change, ability to deal with stress, ability to deal with cognitive overload. How do you measure these things, but not based on what someone says about themselves or what others say about them, but based on how they actually do. So we basically have a 45 minute set of very short online games, tasks, we call them. And they have nothing to do with questions. It's not asked to rate yourself on a scale of one to seven, how good you are at whatever.

27:33It gives you these tasks and allows you to do them. It doesn't really matter how you do because what happens behind the scenes is we create what we call critical moments, interventions that increase the level of frustration or increase the level of whatever. And we check to see how your game changes. And those are the markers that we generate. And we use those to model. If you're using it for hiring, it's part of your hiring process. So companies that work with us that use it for hiring, have it somewhere on pretty close to the top of funnel because it's so quick. And basically say, this is part of our hiring process.

28:05please do this. You can do it at home. Companies that use us to, for example, predict leadership potential, then do it as part of their leadership pipeline process. And, you know, so depending on where the decision happens. What problem is it that you think you solve for organizations? Well, we solve the challenge that, well, it's very important to figure out what you know and what you've done. A lot of the decisions are made ultimately by a combination of that and your sense of the person. You use different words, right? Your gut feeling about them. How well will they fit into my team? How well will they work with us?

28:40And it's all things that are not very defensible. They're not very measurable today. And what we want to do is provide a measurable, objective, unbiased metric around that. And that is what our science has been able to do. My co-founder is a professor of cognitive psychology. That's what he's researched for years. And that is where the core of that part of our IP comes in. And the other part is the machine learning algorithms that we've developed to be able to model those markers. And what kind of results are you seeing? What have you been able to sort of deliver for employers? We've seen really interesting results in different sectors.

29:20So, for example, we're working with an organization that has a really long training program for a high stakes role. It takes years for that program to complete. And they're leveraging us as the first part of their screening process because they don't want to invest three years of training in people who don't have likelihood to succeed. And we've been able to divide all their candidates into six different categories based on their likelihood to successfully complete the program three years out. And the bottom category, they don't even continue the screening with them. and everyone else, they're just tracking it.

30:01And we've been working with them for many, many years, and we can see that. And another organization is about, we've been able to show that based on the way we divide at the very beginning of the program, we can see people's learning agility, their ability to learn new things, how that differentiates. And we're able to translate it into one group being able to learn at a certain speed and the other group being able to learn five times as fast in terms of how well they complete different tasks. And that gives us some basic capability to help with concepts like AI adaptability. Thank you very much for talking to me.

30:44It was lovely to talk to you as well. Thank you. The last word goes to Mervyn. At the end of our conversation on stage, I asked him what he thought the big narrative in HR would be over the next 12 months. what do you think might be the sort of the big narrative of 2027 what's going to be the the big sort of hr talking point in the next 12 months i would like to think it's humanity um and you've heard me say before about kind of you know keeping humanity in an ai world um i think it's the the experience that people get yeah i think will still be important if If organizations want to attract people and retain people, it still comes down to the basics of what kind of place are you to work?

31:35What kind of freedom, not freedom, but I mean, what kind of boundaries do you place on people? Are you an organization people are proud to say they work for? Do they feel that they're achieving their best work and their best results with you? um are there structures within your organization that actually are almost working against people who maybe want to do things or want to try new things i think these kind of conversations will be ongoing and at most most of what i've heard on the stage you you can it's not worded like that but you can boil it down to those things are we an organization supports people Are we an organisation people that are proud to work for, where they can achieve their best work, where they can enjoy their work?

32:25And are we able to help people accelerate their careers? Thanks to all my guests and a huge thank you to everyone at Unleash for hosting me at the show. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can search all the past episodes at RecruitingFuture.com. on that site you can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter recruiting future feast and get the inside track on everything that's coming up on the show thanks very much for listening i'll be back next time and i hope you'll join me

33:07this is my show

33:15Bye.