Hiring Humans, Not Roles

For decades, organisations have been built around job descriptions, career pathways, salary bands and job architecture. But what happens when work evolves faster than we can redesign the roles themselves?

In this episode, Edan Haddock explores a provocative question for the Workplace 5.0 era. What if the future isn't about hiring into predefined roles at all? As AI becomes part of our teams and human capability becomes the true competitive advantage, do traditional job architecture, remuneration frameworks and career pathways still reflect the way work gets done?

This episode challenges conventional thinking around position design, benchmarking and organisational structure, while exploring a future where organisations hire adaptable humans to solve evolving business problems instead of simply filling a position description.

A thought-provoking look at what the future of work could become.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:51

Welcome back to Eden Haddock Total Talent. I'm your host, Eden Haddock, Head of Talent and People Experience at Movember. As always, no guests, no sponsors, just one talent practitioner still on the tools, trying to make sense of where our profession is heading. Today's episode might be one of the most futuristic conversations I've had on the podcast. And it's not because I'm going to predict the future, but because I want us to challenge something that almost nobody questions right now. Job architecture. The thing we've spent decades perfecting: position descriptions, job families, career levels, salary bands, either the Hay or Mercer IPE methodology, benchmarking, career pathways, promotion frameworks, succession planning. Entire consulting businesses have been built around these concepts. And today I'm going to ask something that probably sounds ridiculous. What if none of it exists twenty years from now? Not because it failed, but because work itself became something completely different. The big assumption. Let's start with an assumption we've all made for decades. We assume that organizations are a collection of jobs. You know, think marketing manager, senior recruiter, human resources business partner, finance analyst, project manager, software engineer. Everything else grows from there. We define the work, we design a role, we benchmark it, we write a position description, we determine salary, not necessarily in that order. And then we recruit somebody to perform it. It's simple, it's logical. It's been the backbone of organizational design for generations. But what if we've accidentally designed organizations around stability? Just as the world becomes permanently dynamic. Work is changing faster than jobs. Think about your own role. Not five years ago, you know six months ago. Has your job changed? Probably. Are you using AI? Almost certainly. Have new responsibilities appeared that weren't in your position description? Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 4:24

Have old tasks disappeared? Probably.

SPEAKER_01 4:29

Now, imagine multiplying that by every role in an organization every six months forever. Suddenly position descriptions become historical documents, not future ones. They're snapshots, not blueprints.

SPEAKER_00 4:57

And by the time HR has rewritten them, the work has already changed again. We don't hire for tasks anymore.

SPEAKER_01 5:11

Traditionally, we hired because somebody knew how to perform specific tasks. But today, many of those tasks can already be automated. Tomorrow, even more. So what exactly are we hiring? Knowledge? Less than before. Experience, well still valuable, but perhaps less predictive. Skills I mean important, but increasingly temporary. Maybe we're actually hiring something much deeper. Judgment, curiosity, learning agility, ethics, creativity, influence, decision making, adaptability, the things that technology enhances rather than replaces. Now that's a very different hiring philosophy. So what then happens to job architecture? This is where it gets really interesting. Most job architecture systems ask questions like: how complex is the role? How much accountability? How much decision making? How many direct reports? How much financial responsibility? How much knowledge? Those frameworks have served organizations incredibly well, whether it's Hay, whether it's Mercer IPE, and many others, and I'm certainly not criticizing them. They've created consistency, fairness, governance, internal equity. But those systems assume something. They assume that work is relatively stable. What if work isn't stable anymore? How do you benchmark something that's changing every quarter? So the end of career ladders. Let's think about career pathways. Graduate, advisor, senior advisor, lead, manager, senior manager, head of director, VP, or whatever that may look like. It's neat, it's logical, it's comforting. But is it actually how careers are evolving? Increasingly, people move sideways across disciplines, into projects, into temporary assignments, into AI-enabled work, into consulting, into communities, into portfolios. Career progression may stop looking like climbing a ladder. It may look more like exploring a city. Sometimes you move north, sometimes east, sometimes underground, and sometimes you leave one neighborhood completely.

SPEAKER_00 8:56

The destination isn't higher, it's broader. The human operating system.

SPEAKER_01 9:06

Here's a thought experiment. Imagine we stop defining people by their jobs. Instead, we define people by their capability profile. Almost like an operating system. Imagine your employee profile isn't talent acquisition manager. Instead, it says exceptional relationship builder, strategic thinker, commercially minded, strong facilitator, advanced AI collaborator, global stakeholder manager, systems optimization, executive communication.

SPEAKER_00 9:54

Suddenly, you aren't a job. You're a capability platform.

SPEAKER_01 10:04

Projects simply connect to you. The organization doesn't ask who fits this job. It asks whose capability profile best solves this challenge. That's a radically different future. What about remuneration? This is where reward professionals might start yelling at the podcast. You know, Eden, somebody still has to decide what people get paid. Absolutely. I'm not suggesting REM disappears. But I'm asking whether the inputs change. Today we often pay for role. Tomorrow, perhaps we pay for capability, contribution, impact, scarcity, adaptability, the ability to solve increasingly complex problems. Maybe salary becomes far more dynamic. Maybe capability passports become more valuable than position descriptions. Maybe learning velocity becomes a REM factor. Again, I'm not predicting this. I'm just simply asking, could it happen? Now do we even write position descriptions? Here's the biggest question of all. Will organizations even write position descriptions? Or will they write mission statements? Imagine receiving a job advertisement that says our business problem is we need someone capable of. The first twelve months will likely evolve. The role will evolve every quarter. The technology will change. The priorities will change. The work will change. We're looking for somebody excited by that. Now honestly, wouldn't that feel more authentic? Because that's already reality.

SPEAKER_00 12:40

We just haven't admitted it yet. So do we hire humans, not roles?

SPEAKER_01 12:52

Thinking about it, this idea has really fascinated me. Perhaps the future isn't we have an opening or we have a vacancy. Perhaps it's simply we've found an incredible human. The organization then creates work around capability rather than forcing capability into predefined work. So this all sounds incredibly futuristic. But think about elite sporting clubs. They don't always recruit because a position opened. Sometimes they simply recruit extraordinary talent, then redesign the team around them. You know, musicians and bands have done this for decades. So think businesses may eventually do the same. What should talent leaders do today? So where does this leave us? I don't think we throw job architecture away, far from it. We still need governance, equity, fair rem, compliance, career conversations? Structure matters. But perhaps we begin asking different questions. Instead of what job is this? We ask what problem exists. Instead of what experience do they need, we ask what human capability creates the greatest value. Instead of what does this role do? Ask what could this role become? That's a very workplace 5.0 mindset. I don't know whether position descriptions disappear. I don't know whether Mercer or Hay evolve into something completely new. I don't know whether job architecture survives exactly as we know it. But I do know this. The pace of technology, the change in technology, it is accelerating. An organizational design has historically moved slowly. So those two trajectories will eventually collide. When they do, I think talent professionals will find themselves helping design something much bigger than we do today. We'll be designing how humans and technology work together. Not departments, not reporting lines, not position descriptions, but entire ecosystems. Maybe the future organization won't be built from jobs. Maybe it'll be built from capability. Maybe career pathways won't be vertical. They'll be multidimensional. Maybe position descriptions become living documents, or maybe they disappear altogether. Or maybe the biggest competitive advantage won't be the organization with the best job architecture. It'll be the organization brave enough to imagine life beyond one. So thanks for listening to another episode of Eden Haddock Total Talent. If this episode challenged the way you think about work, even a little bit, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Please connect with me on LinkedIn, join the conversation in the podcast community, and if you're enjoying these episodes, please follow the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and share it with someone who's helped shaping the future of work. Until next time, keep challenging assumptions because the future probably won't arrive in the shape we expect.