UNLEASH America podcast: Talking about the future

Recruiting Future podcast host and UNLEASH America stage moderator Matt Alder had a busy time this year at CAESAR’S FORUM.

When he wasn’t bringing his talent market knowledge to the stages at the show, he was capturing the thoughts of delegates, vendors and speakers alike at the SAP podcast stand in the expo. His podcast focuses on all things talent acquisition and management related, and on this episode he gets time with analysts Sarah White and Mervyn Dinnen, Guild’s recruitinbg lead Crissy McConnell, and TA consultant John Vlastelica.

And, it’s his chat with Vlastelica that we pull out here, as they take a look at how TA teams have changed over time, hopefully for the better. You can, of course, listen to the full episode beneath the transcript. We join the conversation as John has some choice words about onboarding policies…

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John Vlastelica: A lot of executives are asking us questions, and asking us to help solve things that frankly, you’re not going to solve just by making more external hires; you have to have influence over a point of view on all these other things.

If your onboarding sucks (most companies onboarding sucks), that actually has an upstream impact on how you’re going to build your target candidate profile, like, ‘I might need more hit the ground running, if I don’t have good onboarding and training. Once the person starts I need someone that’s got all 10 out of 10.

But if I if I’m more flexible on that, or if I have better onboarding, better training, better way to integrate people and develop people, I can actually widen the aperture a bit and maybe consider talent that the hiring manager hasn’t considered.

Maybe we can go from hit the ground running to hit the ground learning.

Matt Alder: Right, that’s a real shift. Do you think the silos are breaking down in HR and talent, because I’m getting that kind of impression. Because, I had a very similar panel, which brought together TA and Talent Management. And it was a very joined up conversation, are we seeing that within employers?

JV: Yeah, I was joking that it’s like ‘we’re getting the band back together’. I’m old now but in the late 90s, in particular, when I was in the epicenter, of ‘dot com’, and Amazon leading tech recruiting, we were like, we don’t even belong in HR, we should be in sales and marketing. And as conferences like Sourcecon, and other things were coming out, that really began to be this focus in the 2000s, away from being even part of HR. And now, I would say it is fascinating. I won’t name all the names, but I can’t tell you how many clients we have, or friends I have that are VP of TA, AND internal mobility AND onboarding, AND DEI…’and, and, and’…one person is like, the recruiting AND retention here. So I mean, that’s all of the stuff.

MA: And what’s what’s driving it, is it data, is it technology? Is it the market? Is it a combination of all of those or something else?

JV: I get to talk to executives for a living, right. Business executives, as part of focus groups and work we do. They don’t think about HR siloed like we do; they expect if you want to be a talent advisor partner to them, they expect you to be thinking about internal talent, they expect you to be thinking holistically. If onboarding sucks, what impact does that have?

They expect us to bring insights, and certainly our tools are getting more integrated. A lot of tools still suck, but some tools are getting integrated. But it’s not the tools and technology driving it. It’s that the talent problems are just more complicated.

And, you know, I would say this varies by country. I was in a session with about 30 TA leaders yesterday. And I said, show of hands, how many of you recruit just the United States? How would you describe the US culture around developing people? And everyone’s like, thumbs down. Like, when you’re obsolete, we’re just going to hire someone else to replace you from the outside.

And, how many of you recruited in Europe or parts of Asia? And so someone’s like, in Netherlands, we develop our people as part of our culture of development, and one of my panelists worked for the French company, same thing. You don’t just kick people out and then hire different one.

But that’s a little bit of the culture, historically, what I’m seeing and some of it’s driven by pain from the pandemic and all the challenge of hiring, but what I’m seeing is companies are like, ‘we have to have a strategy for internal talent now, because there’s just not enough talent’. So it’s being driven by pain. Like, ‘we HAVE to do that’. And that’s okay. Because sometimes good things come out of that. But in the United States, I see a real shift starting to happen that’s bringing the band back together.

MA: You can’t have any kind of conversation here or anywhere in TA at the moment without talking about generative AI. What’s your take on it? What direction is it taking us as an industry?

JV: I’ve seen not designed to be scary videos, that just freak me out; they really make me wonder, what is the role of the professional going to be that has anything to do with knowledge and content? Like I just feel like if that’s the thing you’re standing on, that’s going to be very unstable for you in the next few years.

I’m very excited, but the thing I am most nervous about, [and I’ve] had lots of conversations here about this with vendors and colleagues and analysts, is verifying identity.

How are we going to know that that avatar that looks just like me, that is speaking words that has cloned my voice is me and not someone else?

And deepfake videos have been around for a while, which are scary, but you can tell they’re deepfake videos, and I was over talking to the vendor that won the startup competition, HourOne, and he was showing me avatars and they are good, man. I mean, he’s like, I could clone you in two hours. And he was confident and not like salesy. Like ‘I can actually do it’. I mean, I’m a geek at heart – I love technology. So I’m both thrilled and then I’m terrified at the same time, right?

MA: There are literally 1000s of hours of me talking on the internet, on YouTube. We’re gonna get cloned. This might be a cloned interview. No one’s gonna know…

You can listen to the full episode of Recruiting Future here, or beneath.

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A massive thank you to SAP SuccessFactors for powering the podcast booth at UNLEASH America 2023. Visit the SAP SuccessFactors hub to listen to more audio content from the show and find out more about their HR solutions too.