Traditional recruitment is out, talent retention and mobility are in

As AI has forced an overhaul of long-standing hiring and workforce planning practices, one management expert has shared how organisations can stay afloat.

Much like the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, AI has taken its toll on every aspect of work – but despite its significant and likely long-term disruption to recruitment, workflow, and employment, Gartner advisory director Jonathan Tabah believes it will find its place, albeit with some changes.

“I do think organisations have spent probably the last 12 months in a state of shell shock, even though we all sort of knew it was coming. And now I think we’re getting over that shell shock and beginning to adapt,” Tabah said.

According to Tabah, a significant consideration when assessing the impact of AI is that it does not operate within a vacuum, making it difficult to assess causality. However, one of the most identifiable phenomena is impacting early career professionals who, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, may be facing a 30 per cent corporate unemployment rate by 2029.

“We are automating a lot of our administrative and operational tasks. Historically, those tasks were given to junior employees who are still learning their ways and building their skills and their knowledge,” Tabah said.

“As we automate those away, that takes a lot of that opportunity away.”

Compounding the issue, global macroeconomic disruption is causing hiring restrictions and, in some cases, hiring freezes, which is making it more difficult for entry-level talent to enter the marketplace. While this may suggest we are currently in an employer’s market, Tabah noted that it is unlikely to remain consistently so.

He said: “Historically, when we see an employee’s market or a labour market or an employer’s market, it’s often across the board in many ways. But because this is creating a crunch for very specific capabilities …the reality is most of the time the talent that organisations do need are the ones that are highly sought after”.

“You can say overall it’s an employer’s market, but no-one’s feeling that when they’re trying to pick up the new emerging talent who can satisfy their emerging capability needs at the same time.”

Tabah agreed that this has also changed the nature of recruitment from traditional, job-centric workforce planning to less reactive and more future-focussed hiring that prioritises critical capabilities. As a result, succession planning has also shifted from reactive to proactive, strategic hiring and elevation.

In this way, organisations are discovering “that they can’t just hire broadly from the marketplace and hope to find what they need … they have to be very deliberate and thoughtful about how they equip the organisation with those critical capabilities”.

While many organisations know how to do critical role analyses, identify critical capabilities, and build pipelines for critical roles, Tabah explained that organisations don’t know how to do it at scale, nor for the entire workforce, rather than just the C-suite.

He identified that workforce planning and talent management are converging at such a rapid pace that the issue is no longer a scale problem, but one of specificity.

“Workforce planning can’t just be headcount anymore. It can’t just be looking for how many more of these people do we need. It has to be doing much more business strategy-aligned analyses into what are the critical capabilities that are going to deliver our future strategy.”

“Where do those capabilities need to live? How are we going to equip the organisation with them? And how are we going to build a deliberate and meaningful pipeline”?

“I think internal mobility is going to be a differentiator of high-performing workforces.”

“We have to more rapidly ramp people up into complex judgment-driven tasks … our learning and development offerings can’t just be about general industry knowledge or general organisational knowledge”.

“It has to actually be much more strategic in nature and much more focused on equipping employees with the right judgement on how to identify whether or not the output that they’re working with is going to expose the organisation to some risk”.

Broadly speaking, Tabah encouraged hiring managers and organisations to be more mindful about the critical roles, how they are evolving, and enact clearer, more deliberate internal pipelines. In this way, he said that learning and development cannot be focused on the company and culture, but on its strategy.

“We have to be identifying top talent at the beginning of the enterprise … and putting in place mechanisms so that we retain them”.

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