Episode 263: How TA Can Thrive in the Age of AI with James Sale, Global Group Head of Talent Acquisition

Hello there, welcome back to Talent and Growth. Today I'm joined by James Sale. I met James a couple of years ago at a roundtable hosted by our friends at Seek HR. James and I struck up a conversation about AI and recruitment and we've been talking about AI in recruitment ever since.

I think this is James's second episode on Talent and Growth, so great to have him back. And we're talking about really the future of talent acquisition. We're talking about the opportunities AI offers recruiters, the dangers of it. I've certainly been thinking a lot about the laziness that AI is causing.

and actually I can see personally a bit of an aversion to AI from candidates, from consultants, from salespeople, from clients. I think that people may be getting a bit sick of it in some form. Not to say I don't love it and it's made my life a lot easier, but I do think there is a bit of a pushback to it right now. We're talking about some tools like BrightHire, MetaView, of course, our friends there, and how really with AI and the impact it is having on the things that we should be using it for, it certainly means that talent acquisition needs to evolve into broader roles, including workforce planning, internal mobility, employer branding.

So ultimately, we're answering that question of how can you future-proof your TA career? So I hope you enjoyed this episode. Always a pleasure to sit down with James. He is a legend.

Here we go. James why do you think people are still anxious about AI in recruitment and what's the reality do you think? I think there's a lot going on at the moment there's a lot of click baiting and scaremongering by the media which does create a level of panic we've seen it throughout other kind of situations, the pandemic, stuff like that as well. But it's creating a level of panic that suggesting that AI is going to take all of our jobs.

It's hard to scroll through any social media platform without seeing something related to AI now at the moment and the impact on the job market. So when you take all of that into consideration, and then on top of that, you want to maybe pile on the fact that we're lacking a bit of economic stability and all the crazy things going on in the understandably people are feeling anxious it's only normal in reality like when we're coming back to ai ai is just the next evolution of technology new things can be scary and there are a lot of unknowns with air it is also advancing at a faster rate than we've seen in the past with technological change but it's also offering a lot of opportunity and i think if you become an early adopter and you really embrace change then you'll see the benefits it can add and you'll see the opportunities available to you it's not going to replace our jobs tomorrow our jobs will evolve and with the impact of technology again this is nothing new but also these tools will take time to evolve and if anyone's kind of used them they are really useful but they are 100% not perfect even basic requests when you think about kind of recruitment you ask you to go and create a job stack even by adding certain prompts that talk about tone or you give it an existing job spec in your organization you ingest that to mimic the tone you still need to proofread it you still need to make edits you still need to make it feel like you so if you're not putting something out there that feels really generic and ai written that no one isn't going to resonate or feel genuine to anyone yeah i agree i think um yeah there's certainly things that AI is not up to scratch with for example not recruitment related but there's some great uh well apparently some great editing AI editing tools on this platform for Riverside and I've tried to use them and they're just rubbish and I've outsourced it now so a human being is going to do it for me I know it's going to be better um I think what's also interesting I think that AI there's obviously there are some jobs that are reducing and hiring because of AI but those who are there's a paradox though because those people who are still working with AI they're working less i don't really know anyone who's working less because of ai everyone's everyone's definitely finding themselves being able to be more efficient and more productive and you know 5x and 10x what they're doing but there's no kind of i'll take an extra day off a week because of ai you know there's none of that is there i'm sure you're not finding that either no and i think you need to be careful with ai as well like you need to adopt it you definitely need to kind of uh understand it and test kind of things out.

But I think it's also good. You've got to be careful not to be lazy. I think there's going to be a lot of people that are getting lazy, like throwing an email, for example, into AI, asking it to provide a response and just using it to do a lot of those kind of repetitive tasks And I think that can be a bit worrying Yeah I think as well I mean thinking about what I want to hear from you in a minute about I guess what you feel are the opportunities for using AI and recruitment But I see that the use of emails as outreach, be it for candidates or if you're on a sales team, business development, I see that just people just getting sick of it because so much of it is written by AI and the response rate is hard anyway.

And I think it's getting harder. personally I've started doing voice notes to everybody because then they know it's a human being and it's coming from and it's more it's not just like using clay to personalize whatever you know information you found about them or whatever and it's just gone into the machine it's someone taking the time to spend a minute to send them a personal voice note so I find that there's definitely no reliance on it I think it's definitely a laziness with it and I think it's going to just see some shifts in the way people communicate in certain ways do you think so as well yeah i think that you're right a lot of companies are trying to adopt and use ai to automate a lot of repetitive tasks especially when it comes to outreach sales whatever shape and form you want to call it and people's inboxes are exploding you mount stuff going in your junk mount stuff kind of being able to kind of filter through to your inbox now and you're right people just don't see it as very kind of genuine um you can play around with it you can kind of adapt the tone you can uh a b test and all those kind of things and ai allows you to kind of get to uh that kind of much quicker um but it's not going to replace that that real human element like a really tailored email um based on your relationship or your understanding or let's say for example someone reached out to me after this if they've actually watched the podcast and they picked up something that resonated with them and they dropped that into a message that's going to probably resonate more with me rather than ai maybe just saying james saw the podcast did with paul church thought it was great all about ai blah blah blah um it if it's becoming it feels kind of generic um yeah you're unlikely to get as much of a response but i do think it is still really really useful in other ways around those kind of outreach people aspects so we'll probably talk about this a little bit later but um engaging with candidates is hard now for some of the reasons we've just talked about i mean people are getting emails emails left right and center it's like well how and then tools that they're using whether it's their work inboxes and the firewalls behind that or personal inboxes that are trying to protect them as well it's actually harder to kind of get to these candidates now um or engage them and these are people that maybe have reached out to you in the last kind of three six nine twelve months so i do think there are some good ai tools that can either support with kind of candidate outreach outreach and campaigns whether it's getting candidate contact information so you can target them in different channels or platforms or it's by sourcing talent through different kind of platforms that are hidden behind paywalls because you can integrate your kind of LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, whatever, through kind of your personal LinkedIn accounts.

But you've got to have those kind of recruiter accounts, or you've got to have a GitHub account or whatever to have access to that data. If not, those LMs just don't have access to all of that really valuable data sitting behind those paywalls, those platforms. so it is really interesting how it's evolving So let's talk about I guess because I'm a sucker for a toolkit in terms of what people are actually doing and using how they're using AI, despite what I've just been saying, I love AI I love it every day lots of things, what are some of the things that your team and you are using daily in terms of the specific technology and what for So where I think AI is going to really come into its own and add value to teams is it's And it will continue to evolve and develop and become more accurate.

But it will take away a lot of the repetitive tasks that recruiters are landed with. So whether that's screening, scheduling, transcribing interviews or populating scorecards and feedback forms, supporting this kind of research, potentially mapping. We're using a lot for kind of assessments and making sure they're really robust. but a lot of these aren't invaluable and they all need to recommend make sure you've got a human check-in and focus of error or even just for the subject matter expertise you as a recruiter or you as a specialist within your kind of industry your field but this is going to free up a lot of time for TA teams to spend to ensure a best in class interview experience whether that's for the candidate and ensure they've had a positive experience or it's around the actual kind of robustness of the process and that quality of hire In addition, it's going to be able to allow them to work on more projects to elevate the maturity of the TA department.

So let's talk specifics. One tool that we using that I love is a tool called BrightHire BrightHire plugs into our ATS We got a fantastic ATS in Greenhouse but it fully integrates with the ATS So Brighthire in its in essence transcribes your kind of interviews. So it will record the interview, whether it's kind of, you've got a face-to-face interview and you've just got something that will allow it to kind of record in a session, or it's via Teams or whatever other kind of platform.

The benefit, where it goes a little bit further than that is it transcribes the interview, but it will pre-populate and summarize those answers back into the scorecard. So whether you're a recruiter and you're engaging with a candidate and you've maybe got a recruiter screen or telephone screen kind of number of questions, rather than having to kind of populate those answers and stuff like that, it's automatically transcribing that. Same with the interviewer. So it allows the interviewers to make sure they're fully engaged with the candidate and spending time with the candidate.

Again, that feels a bit more genuine. You're creating kind of a relationship with this candidate. It's going to feel a bit stop-start if you're looking up at questions or you're typing away, having to paraphrase. That also can then lead to error in kind of what you typed up.

Some things might get missed. With a tool like this, it doesn't get missed. So you've got great accuracy. It still needs to be proofread, as I said, by the interviewer.

And you still need to then populate your emoji response or numeric response in terms of how you score them on said kind of question. But the amount of time it saves is fantastic. But it also allows them from a TA team, kind of going further, is it allows a bit of an audit trail. So as a TA lead or a head of, you can then spot check kind of your quality of the interviews or the quality of your interviewers within your business.

So when you're thinking about further training, hiring tips, hiring training, interview training, whatever you want to call it, you can go back and be like, okay, look, do you know what? We need to be doing more focus on unconscious bias training. but no we need to be doing more focused around their competency interviewing you know do they understand how to do a competency-based question do they understand the importance of situational but like all of those kind of things so it it's great in so many kind of instances um that a human just wouldn't be able to do and you don't really want to have to transcribe interviews no absolutely not um yeah i mean right high sounds great not played a bit myself i'm a big found a meta view in terms of the detail it gives you and I guess the data scraping it gives you as well.

So let's talk about what talent acquisition actually looks like in terms of the role and the function and what we can see it evolving into. I guess, do you see TA evolving into something broader, like focusing more on work planning or internal mobility? I don't know, where do you see TA going? I think that's quite subjective down to the industry the organization that you're in that provides those kind of opportunities and the setup of your overall kind of talent team but TA is evolving and HR teams are evolving in general or talent teams are evolving in general you're seeing a lot more kind of hybrid roles where TA are approaching on kind of broader talent roles they're going into kind of other aspects around kind of L&D for what I'm seeing in my business is yeah TA is playing a much bigger part because it's not around just kind of bums on seats you're getting involved in or you should be getting involved in everything from employer branding and then that is that marketing is that TA like it's kind of a bit of a partnership it's then you've got things like kind of training whether it's interview training employer advocacy training like there's tons of different programs that you could be getting involved in to elevate the business or the TA department.

You touched on workforce planning. It's definitely something that TA should be involved in. Like, you know, whether you're talking about using talent insights tools that start to kind of play into that around what are our competitors growing? Who are our kind of competitors?

How does that break down by region, by specialism? Like in terms of our planning, what are we doing from a permanent perspective? of all of those skills maps that we need to kind of do around kind of one of those growing skills with those producing skills where's the highest demand where are we thinking about from a cost perspective about growing our teams moving forward where is there high quality talent at a lower kind of cost it's not getting talent cheap but it's it's about maintaining a high quality bar but being cost conscious within your organization to support the growth of that business it's thinking about the contingent workforce like where are you where are you spending your kind of freelance kind of budget how is that impacting your overall business where can we cut down on that either by thinking about okay we've had a contractor in this part of business for 18 months do we need a permanent role for that person and actually when you do that you probably going to save at least 50 on that that higher on a permanent headcount versus the freelance account There is so much that TA can be getting involved in you touched on internal mobility 100 ta teams ta partners should be depending on how you set up you know real experts within the verticals they look after whether that's from a geography perspective or that's from a department or specialism and having a good understanding of where the hypo talent lies and and where we're kind of creating those opportunities which again plays a little bit more in part of that workforce plan to be.

So yeah, TA is evolving and this is where AI can play a strong role in, as I say, taking away a lot of those repetitive tasks that are kind of real-time drains to allow you to do more of this impact kind of work. What do you see, how do you define a high-performing talent acquisition team in 2025? Yeah, that's a good question. I think there's a lot of metrics you can kind of throw around this.

I mean, like there's the standard ones, your kind of roles filled, percentage directs, cost per hire, time to fill. You can create kind of NPS scores around both your stakeholder satisfaction, your candidate experience. You can look at employee branding around kind of how the growth of the brand is both on platforms whether it's glassdoor it's linkedin both the followers engage with your content there's a there's a lot of metrics that there's a quality of hire like there's a lot of metrics that that you can look at i think it really depends on where you're you're currently sitting on that maturity curve as a as a ta team like trying to overachieve at the very beginning isn't going to make sense because i think you're going to try and with good intention to do big things, but doing too much too soon, I think is going to kick you.

And it's always around, for me, I always try and just start with, okay, well, what are the basics that we need to get in place? My team here, for building a TA department, it's fairly new. They've had a great kind of HR and talent team in place in the past, but they've been HR generalists, so they've been trying to do everything. Now we've actually got a specialist team.

we want to build the right kind of foundations that's going to allow us to to deliver um and future proof our kind of uh our team in the future but um but yeah coming back to your question i think there are a number of kind of uh metrics that it's going to depend on where you are in that maturity curve and what do you think if you if someone's listening right now and they are scared about ai and i think that you know i do believe that you have to be aware of what ai can replace and what you're doing each day and if ai if ai can replace the mo if ai can replace most the things you spend your day doing and yes you can be replaced so you've got to think about how you can kind of i guess step up and level up a little bit but if you are someone listening and you want a future proof your ta career what's your one piece of advice around that i think it comes back to what i said earlier i think you really need to be an early adopter don't be scared of something new like forgetting kind of ai you start a new role that can be a bit scary you start a new role a new geography that you move industries like it's all new and it can be feel a little bit daunting ai is is nothing different it's it feels daunting because it maybe feels like the unknown the more i think you embrace it the more you understand it and there are tons of courses you can do like there are free courses by nvidia by google you name it out there that will kind of help you to kind of understand the basics or or kind of further develop your maturity model like you know go from just understanding how to write great prompts to understanding how to write kind of chatbots like but you need to understand what this is and how to utilize it because it is a fantastic tool um that can free up your time to do the value add and ultimately like again coming back to other metrics you were talking about like a good ta team you need to be commercially savvy it's not necessarily just about bums on seat but it's it's about finding the best talent you can for your business but also being really commercially astute around how you're you're supporting the business's growth whether that's through like okay you hired a great salesperson like how much has this hypo talent generated for for the business or how much you saved in the business versus using recruitment agencies.

There are different metrics to kind of measure this, but it's all about kind of adding value in AI. It's something that will allow you to kind of add value through a lot of those kind of projects. Love it. James, thank you as always for being a part of Talent & Grow.

Well, thanks for inviting me. Always lovely to catch up, Paul. Thank you for locking on to Talent and Growth today. As always, if you could hit follow, subscribe.

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