The Future of Hiring: Navigating Skills and Tech Adoption on a Budget

Technology innovation is a help and a hindrance

I feel like we’re probably all masters of doing a lot with a little, and then having to defend that.

On the one hand, technological advancements are putting more sophisticated and intuitive tools in the hands of HR and talent acquisition leaders.

These platforms and systems allow them to make smarter decisions when it comes to recruitment, as well as garner deeper insights into the impact of specific hires.

But this works both ways and candidates now have access to a library of tools to help them find work.

“The biggest thing that keeps me up at night is generative AI and how easily accessible it is,” commented one participant.

“I look at some of the emerging technologies on the consumer side, like Lazy Apply, where you can construct a prompt around the job spec and a resume to write the perfect application. That’s going to become a significant issue for us.”

The question then for these leaders is how to address technology “contextualized to our businesses”.

Part of this approach, another roundtable participant noted, was the need to strike a balance between “too much tech and not enough human interaction.”

AI will undoubtedly be deployed going forward to “screen potential candidates and not inadvertently overlook folks that have gained experience through different industry experience.”

Growing focus on prioritizing variable costs

Additional layers of technology-based validation will go some way to solve this problem, but there is also the consideration of cost.

New systems don’t come for free and with HR and TA leaders being told to do more with less, addressing technology innovation may require more creative approaches.

This is even more prevalent now given cost of hiring is increasing, according to some of the roundtable speakers.

“Our volumes are going down but because of that we’re having the opposite effect of our cost per hire going up,” they said.

“I’ve always kept a little bit of money aside for what I call R&D in our space; how do we play a little bit, because what’s worked in the past isn’t always what’s going to work in the future.”

One approach has been to turn the cost of sourcing candidates into a variable cost, based on a per-hire basis. However, with hiring volume going down, fixed costs are now “having more of an impact.”

Another discussion participant stated they are now getting “ruthless with our prioritization”, moving away from things that would be “staples in a past life” to more variable costs that are easier to manage.

“Things like LinkedIn, for example, where you have recruiter seats and those quality-of-life things. There’s so much you can do from a free or ‘freemium’ perspective.”

Elsewhere on the topic of budget frugality, one roundtable speaker highlighted the importance of nurturing a “strong candidate pool deep in the funnel” that can be tapped when needed.

Having the initial conversation with the talent acquisition side is just one part of this equation, they explained, the other being “pushing the business to start thinking about how they might want to think about their staffing in the future.”

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