alent acquisition has always been slow. Adoption is slow. Change is slow. Processes are slow. Even as the world rapidly evolved around us, TA remained stuck in sort of the same place for years.
It feels like that’s changed. AI made sure of that.
Now, it really feels like change is the only constant, and you really can’t be moving fast enough. The best organizations are not only using AI in recruiting currently, but they’re also following trends and thinking a year, two years, three years ahead. The reality is that the best talent teams will evolve very quickly, using AI as a foundation to attract better talent, faster.
And if you’re only thinking about today, tomorrow, or even this year, it honestly might not be enough. You might already be falling behind.
One of the things I’m finding when talking to most talent leaders is that they see the benefits of AI, and they are working toward implementation at some level within talent acquisition. But the total focus is almost always on how we will use AI for maximum impact — never is there a thought on how we will use our people with AI for maximum impact. This is a huge miss. You can’t just be thinking about people anywhere, but you also can’t just be thinking about AI. You need to be looking ahead and envisioning a world where you have both humans and AI to do TA work. The question is: Who does what for maximum efficiency?
I’ll give you an example of an organization who did this well: 7-Eleven.
Recently, 7-Eleven went through a massive AI transformation in talent acquisition. After acquiring Speedway, they found themselves with two very different talent tech stacks and two very different recruiting processes. It’s an easy call to go down to one stack. It’s a much harder call to determine which stack and which process. Or better yet, maybe a new tech and new process that fits even better — true transformation. I won’t get into the full details (you can read the case study from my friends over at The Josh Bersin Company here), but essentially, they completely reimagined the structure of their recruiting team to maximize both their talent and their technology. Their result was 40,000 man-hours per week savings. Read that again! Between recruiting and store leaders, they used AI to do roughly 95% of all previous recruiting tasks done by humans. Look, massive organizational change is never easy. But 7-Eleven is proof that there’s so much untapped potential here.
