Change Is Hard. Will AI Make It Easier in TA?

One of the hardest — if not the hardest — part of a senior TA leader’s job has nothing to do with recruiting. At least not directly. 

The hardest part? 

Getting our own teams to do new stuff — getting recruiters to fully leverage that new CRM or sourcing tool, getting interviewers to use the new values-based interview guides, and getting hiring managers to adopt the “hiring is a team sport” mindset and engage their networks to help us get that hard-to-recruit senior talent. 

That’s actually quite hard to do at scale.

I just returned from a couple days in Seattle with 50 VP- and senior director–level TA leaders at our part-training, part-conference Recruiting Leadership Lab 50 event, where I was not surprised to hear that one of our biggest leadership challenges in a world of AI and automation is not around the tech but around getting our own teams — our recruiters — to adopt new role expectations, adopt new processes, leverage new tools, show up differently to hiring managers, and generally let go of things we’ve been doing for 20-plus years.

Getting basic productivity tools in place — and getting them used — was relatively easy. Online scheduling tools and e-signature offer-letter tools, for example, have been adopted already by most TA teams. 

But this new generation of tools — sourcing, assessing, interviewing, candidate comms and Q&A chatbots, strategy meeting and interview conversation auto-summarizing, interview diagnostic and intelligence tools, etc. — may have a much bigger impact on the role of the recruiter. Especially if those tools aren’t just augmenting (making our recruiters more productive), but automating. 

Completely replacing something a recruiter used to do manually with some kind of robot that’ll automate a step, or remove the recruiter completely from a step (hello, hiring manager self-service), will be a major shift for our teams.

There’s a 100% chance we’ll still need many talent advisor recruiters, especially if your target candidate personas need that human touch to guide them through a significant career decision. A segmented strategy that is based on candidate needs will be key for all TA leaders going forward.

But some recruiting roles will either go away or start to look unrecognizable based on the tech that exists today — tech that will only get better and cheaper every year (but that will face substantive legal challenges at times).

And change is hard. 

Especially if someone is telling you — a recruiter with 10-plus years of experience — that a tool can do what you’ve developed expertise in and that it can do it better, faster, and cheaper than you can. Or at least, cheaper and not any worse. Which may be how the CFO looks at it when deciding whether to fund all existing recruiter headcount for next year.

So, AI may create a bunch of change management issues, and some of that change will definitely suck for some recruiters and almost all TA leaders who are trying to drive adoption.

How will AI make change management easier?

I’ve been talking to vendors in this space quite a bit over the past two years. The hourly hiring space is experiencing the most automation right now. Many of the biggest employers — who hire 100,000 or more hourly workers per year — have already implemented a mostly automated, 24x7 hiring tool, or are already seeking bids from tech suppliers. 

One big employer I spoke with on a panel at an HR tech conference this year hired 300,000 people with no humans involved until post-offer-accept. Another TA leader I spoke with last week replaced over 300 recruiters with automation for hourly roles. This is happening.

So, what’s the connection to change management?

Picture a TA leader who’s got a massive recruiting team and interviewing team that are hiring tens of thousands of people per year. And in an effort to improve speed or conversion or compliance or costs, they want to implement a new change.

Today, that’s pretty hard, unless the org is in massive pain around hiring  — individuals like to do things their own way.

For example, we worked with a few very large companies who spent big money on new interview guides, only to find out no one was using them. We also worked with more than a few firms who purchased new expensive tech, implemented, and one to two years later are still struggling to get more than 20% of their users using anywhere close to the full feature set they purchased.

With an integrated technology platform that’s doing most of the sourcing and attraction work, most of the candidate screening and Q&A work, most of the scheduling and feedback-capturing work, and most of the candidate dispositioning, offer presentation, and background check initiation work, change could be as simple as a configuration tweak in one system.

• Did you find out that that one eligibility screen-out question was having disparate impact? (Almost) instantly remove it from your process tomorrow, with no mass comms and buy-in needed from 100 or 1,000 different recruiters or interviewers.
• Did you find that conversion dropped by 10% in the interview-to-offer process when you waited to mention detailed shift info for those hourly worker roles? Instantly move that earlier in the candidate comms process.
• Did you find that hiring managers weren’t digging deep enough into candidate motivation-match to the real-world job during their live interviews? Automate that, and make it part of the chatbot Q&A with the candidate pre-interview.
• Did you find that interviewers were only asking skill questions and not behavior questions, leading to some performance issues posthire? Have the tool auto-generate interview guides and questions based on the most important behaviors, with clear guidance to hiring managers that their feedback on candidates must include an evaluation of soft skills, not just hard skills.
• Did you find that interviewers were taking too long to write up interview feedback that a live human recruiter could use to move to an offer or decline disposition with a candidate? Have the tool chase the interviewer for feedback, and let them share their feedback in a mobile app, using their voice, with prompts to make sure the recruiter got the feedback they needed to move ahead with candidates.

Will the tech guarantee 100% better responsiveness or 100% better quality hires, with little to no change management? Of course not. Change management is still a full-contact sport, and stakeholders still need to be engaged and influenced. 

But how much easier will TA leaders have it when they can tune their tech based on diagnosed root issues and almost instantly deploy it — at scale — without spending months trying to get their own teams to adopt the change?

Of course, all of this change needs to be tested and piloted before full deployment. Sometimes, small changes in a process have a big impact and can create major false negatives (missing out on good hires) or have a disparate impact. So, any TA leader making a big change — especially if it even remotely touches the assessment process — will need to work closely with their legal team first.

But for smaller changes that can immediately boost candidate experience, improve speed (less chasing, quicker response times), and reduce costs, wow, our jobs in TA leadership just got a lot easier.

Quick final example: Rachel Allen — head of TA for 7-Eleven, where she hires over 100,000 people per year — was able to implement new tech and processes that reduced time to hire from 10 days to under three days. So, a big speed improvement for hourly hiring. But the benefits didn’t just impact the TTF metrics. It turns out, speed and quality are connected. By cutting a full week of back and forth from the process, stores were able to hire talent that would have been missed — simply because the target candidates they hire into those hourly roles couldn’t afford, literally, to wait. Nine or 10 days after contact, many candidates had already accepted and started other jobs. But by moving to three days or less, they got more speed, which allowed them to access and hire more qualified, high-quality candidates.

Final thoughts: Recruiters and recruiting leaders will all benefit from automation tools

Change is hard. 

AI and automation are disrupting some of our TA functions already. And there’s more to come. 

I see — already — that the role of the recruiter will benefit from incredible automation tools, relieving many from the administrative stuff they dislike and freeing them up to focus on the high-touch recruiting work with both candidates and hiring managers that they love doing. 

I also see TA leaders benefiting from incredible tuning capabilities that may allow for (relatively) fast deployment of new best practices. Our tech stacks will allow us to diagnose root issues — with real data, not just stories — and then change things at scale, all with less effort than in the past. 

Of course, TA leaders will still need to be amazing at getting buy-in for many of the biggest changes, but the little tweaks that can deliver more speed, quality, and better candidate experience should get 42 times easier.

John Vlastelica is a former corporate recruiting leader turned consultant. He and his team at Recruiting Toolbox are hired by world-class companies to train hiring managers and recruiters, coach and train TA leaders, and help raise the bar on who they hire and how they hire. If you’re seeking more best practices, check out the free resources for recruiters at TalentAdvisor.com and for recruiting leaders at RecruitingLeadership.com. And if you’re a head of TA from a large company, check out www.RLL50.com for info on our special workshop just for senior recruiting leaders. Additionally, if you’re going to attend LinkedIn Talent Connect in Phoenix in late October 2024, check out John’s two workshops for heads of TA on how AI will impact the size and makeup of our TA orgs.

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