Future-Proofing Talent Acquisition: 5 Capabilities I’d Build Right Now

The Talent Acquisition industry is nervous. Teams are shrinking, redundancies are happening, AI is accelerating and some of the work recruiters have traditionally owned is changing fast.

So what do you do about it?

In this episode, Edan Haddock argues that the answer isn’t to protect the traditional TA role. It’s to expand beyond it.

Edan breaks down five capabilities internal Talent professionals should start building now to remain relevant and valuable in Workforce 5.0, from remuneration and salary benchmarking to workforce planning, talent management, data and designing work across humans and technology.

Because the future may not belong to the person who is best at filling vacancies.

It may belong to the person who can help the business decide whether a vacancy should exist in the first place.

Don’t protect your role. Expand your capability.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:52

Hello and welcome back to Eden Haddock Total Talent. I am your host, Eden Haddock, Head of Talent and People Experience at Movember. No guests, no sponsors, no vendor talking points. Just one talent practitioner still on the tools, talking about where I think our profession is going. And today I want to talk directly to my fellow internal talent acquisition professionals. Because I think there's a little bit of nervousness out there at the moment. Actually, let's call it what it is. There is a lot of nervousness. Teams are getting smaller, recruitment volumes have changed. Again, there are restructures happening. And again, there are redundancies happening. AI is getting better incredibly quickly. Technology that used to help recruiters perform individual tasks is increasingly capable of completing entire chunks of the recruitment process. And I think there are people sitting inside internal talent teams looking around and wondering, well, where does this leave me? Is my role going to exist in three years, five years? What happens if recruitment volumes drop? What happens if AI can source? What happens if AI can screen? What happens if AI can schedule, communicate with candidates, write advertisements, create interview guides, and analyze talent pools? What happens to us? So today I don't want to give you some fluffy reassurance that everything's going to be fine. Because I don't know that. And neither does anyone else. What I do believe, though, is there is an enormous opportunity sitting in front of internal talent professionals. But we have to stop defining our capability by recruitment activity. The future isn't necessarily about becoming a better recruiter. It's about becoming a broader talent professional. And that distinction matters. Because as we move into workforce 5.0, where humans and technology increasingly work together, I think the people who will thrive are going to be those who understand the entire talent ecosystem, not just acquisition. So today I want to give you five capabilities I would personally start building right now if I were thinking about future-proofing my career in internal talent. And I really believe we all should. So it's not five AI tools, not five recruitment hacks, but five actual professional capabilities. Number one, learn REM. Learn REM. This is probably going to surprise some people. But if you work in internal talent acquisition and you don't understand remuneration, I think this is one of the biggest opportunities to expand your capability. And I don't mean knowing roughly what a software engineer gets paid. We already do that. Recruiters develop incredible market knowledge. We know when a salary isn't going to land. We know when a hiring manager has unrealistic expectations. We know when the market has moved before sometimes the organization itself knows the market has moved, right? But there is a massive difference between knowing salary and understanding remuneration. Learn how organizations actually determine the value of a role. Learn job evaluation. Learn salary bands. Learn market percentiles. Learn comp ratios. Learn internal equity. Understand fixed remuneration versus total remuneration. Understand short-term incentives, long-term incentives, benefits, allowances. Understand what P25, P50, and P75 actually mean in salary benchmarking. Then go deeper. Learn some of the frameworks organizations use. Understand MERSA IPE. Understand the principles behind the Hay methodology. You don't necessarily need to become a REM specialist. But imagine the difference in the conversation. A hiring manager says, I need to increase the salary because I can't find anyone. Traditional recruitment thinking might be, yep, the market is telling us we're under. But a broader talent professional might say, possibly. But let's don't understand where this role sits against our internal architecture, where we're positioned against the external market. Whether the issue is base salary or total reward. And what changing this package does to internal equity. You see, that's a totally different conversation. You're no longer simply filling the vacancy, you're advising on workforce decisions. And that is where I think our value sits. Our future value. Number two, learn workforce planning. This one is massive. For years, talent acquisition has largely been brought into the conversation when somebody says we need to hire. By that point, an enormous number of decisions have already happened. Someone has decided there is a vacancy. Someone has decided the vacancy needs replacing. Someone has decided it should be permanent. Someone has decided where it should sit. Someone has probably already recycled the previous position description. Ah! Drives me nuts. And then talent gets the requisition. Can you find me someone? I think Workforce 5.0 completely challenges that model. Because the first question increasingly shouldn't be who do we hire? It should be what work needs to be done? Then, what capability does that work require? Do we already have that capability? Could someone internally develop it? Could technology perform part of the work? Could AI augment someone already in the team? Could we redesign the role? Could we use contingent labor? Could we use a consultant? Could we borrow capability from another team? Could we automate the work entirely? And only after exploring those questions might we arrive at, yes, we need to recruit. Now that's simplified, but that is workforce planning. And internal talent professionals, we're beautifully positioned to become good at it. Why? Because we already sit at this incredible intersection between the external market and the internal organization. We know what capability exists externally. We know what candidates are asking for. We see emerging job titles. We see skills changing. We see salary movements. We hear what competitors are doing. That information is incredibly valuable. But only if we elevate ourselves from order takers to workforce advisors. So learn workforce planning. Learn demand forecasting. Learn scenario planning. Learn capacity versus capability. Learn how organizations map critical roles. Learn how they assess workforce risk. Learn build, buy, borrow, bot. Whatever framework your organization uses, understand the thinking behind it. Because I genuinely believe one of the biggest evolutions of talent acquisition is going to be moving from how do we fill this role to how should we solve this capability problem? That's a much more valuable question. Number three, get serious about talent management. This is where I think the artificial walls we've built inside HR are going to become increasingly unhelpful. Talent acquisition over here, learning over there, performance over there, succession somewhere else. Organizational development again, somewhere else. But why? The employee doesn't experience themselves in those little HR boxes. The organization doesn't experience talent like that either. If I'm trying to fill a critical role, external recruitment is only one possible answer. There might be someone sitting three desks away who could already do it. There might be someone at 70% readiness who could do it within six months of development. There might be someone identified as high potential who needs exactly this opportunity. There might be someone who is a retention risk because they can't see their next move. And simultaneously, we're spending thousands of dollars trying to find the same capability externally. That just doesn't make sense. So learn talent management. Understand succession planning. Understand performance and potential. Understand nine-box methodology, but also understand its limitations. Learn about critical roles. Learn talent risk. Learn internal mobility. Learn career pathways. Learn skills taxonomies. Understand the difference between someone's current performance and their future potential. Get comfortable talking about bench strength. Ask what happens if a critical person leaves tomorrow. Start thinking about talent pools as including people who already work for the organization, not just candidates sitting in your ATS. Because I think the future talent professional needs to be able to look at a vacancy and see the whole talent system, not just LinkedIn. And here's where it gets really interesting. Once you understand workforce planning, remuneration, and talent management together, suddenly you start seeing connections. The organization doesn't need another recruiter. It needs somebody who can say, We have a capability risk here. Our external market data tells us this skill is becoming more expensive. Our succession data tells us we don't have internal coverage. Our workforce plan says demand will increase over the next two years. So we need to start building this capability now. That is strategic talent. That is an entirely different value proposition. Number four, become fluent in data. Now notice I didn't say become a data analyst. You don't need to be. But you absolutely need to become comfortable with data. Tel and acquisition has historically had a slightly weird relationship with metrics. Time to hire, time to fill, cost per hire, source of hire, offer acceptance. All useful. But if those are the only numbers we can talk about, we're measuring the recruitment machine rather than measuring talent. Start learning the language of business data. Attrition. Regrettable attrition, retention, performance, potential, engagement, productivity, capability gaps, workforce cost, vacancy risk, internal mobility, succession coverage. Learn how those things connect. And most importantly, learn to tell the story behind the numbers. Because executives generally don't care that your time to hire moved from 43 days to 39 days, unless you can explain why that matters. But tell a leader, three of your five most critical roles have no identified successor. The external market for those capabilities has tightened. And average recruitment time is four months. Now, you've got a conversation. That's risk. And businesses understand risk. Get comfortable with dashboards. Get comfortable with Power BI or whatever your organization uses. Understand basic data visualization. Learn how to interrogate data rather than just report it. Ask, so what? What is this number telling us? What decision should we make because of it? What might happen next? Right? That last question becomes really important. Because the next evolution isn't reporting, it's prediction. Can talent start identifying where capability gaps are likely to emerge before somebody raises a requisition? Can engagement data tell us where we might experience attrition? Can succession data tell us where we're exposed? Can recruitment data tell us which capabilities are becoming harder to acquire? That's where talent gets really interesting. Number five. Learn how to design human and technology work together. Haha. Of course, AI had to appear somewhere. But deliberately it's number five. Because I don't think the answer to future proofing yourself is simply learn AI. That advice is too basic. Everybody is going to use AI. Knowing how to write a prompt isn't going to be some incredible competitive advantage forever. The capability I think matters is understanding work design. What should humans do? What should technology do? And how do the two work together? That's Workforce 5.0. Look at your recruitment process. Really look at it. Not from the perspective of where can I add AI? Ask, why does this process exist in this form at all? Take screening. Does a recruiter need to manually read three hundred applications? Probably not. Could technology help? Absolutely. But should technology make the final decision? Maybe not. Where does human judgment create value? Where does empathy matter? Where does context matter? Where does judgment matter? Where does human interaction materially improve the candidate experience? And then ask the opposite. Where are humans currently doing repetitive work that technology could perform faster and more consistently? Scheduling, administration, transcription, basic communications, data entry, market mapping, first drafts, process coordination, potentially elements of screening. The goal shouldn't be protecting tasks because recruiters have historically done them. That's the dangerous approach. If forty percent of my job can be done better by technology, fantastic. Take it. Because I want that forty percent back. I can reinvest it into workforce planning, talent conversations, candidate relationships, hiring manager advisory, succession, market intelligence, work design. That's the opportunity. The people I think will struggle most with AI aren't necessarily those who don't understand the technology. They'll be the people whose professional identity is attached to tasks that technology can increasingly perform. So don't protect the tasks. Elevate the role. The bonus capability commercial acumen. I know I said five, but I'm sneaking one more in. Why not? Because this one underpins everything I've just talked about. Learn the business. And I mean learn it. Learn it properly. How does your organization make money? Or if you're in a purpose-led or not-for-profit organization like me, how does it fund its mission? Where does the money go? What are the biggest costs? What drives growth? What constrains growth? What are your organization's strategic priorities? Who are your customers? Customers? Who are your competitors? What could disrupt the organization? What capabilities create competitive advantage? Because you cannot be a strategic talent professional if you only understand talent. You need to understand the organization deeply. This is probably one of the biggest differences between recruitment and talent advisory. A great recruiter understands the vacancy. A great talent advisor understands why the vacancy matters. And sometimes understands why it doesn't. We need to become comfortable challenging demand. Do you actually need this role? Why is this role permanent? Why is this role at this level? Why is this role in this location? What happens if we don't hire? Could we solve this another way? Those aren't recruitment questions. They're business questions. And I think we're going to need to ask a lot more of them. I really do. So is talent acquisition dying? No, no, no, no, I promise. But I think the narrow definition of talent acquisition probably is. And maybe that's okay. Because I actually think what comes next is more interesting. I understand why people are nervous and I empathize. When you've built a career around something and suddenly technology starts doing part of that something incredibly well, of course that's uncomfortable. It's hard. And redundancies aren't theoretical. They're affecting real people. So I'm certainly not going to sit here and tell everyone to simply embrace change and everything will magically work itself out. But I do think we have agency over the capabilities we choose to build. If you're sitting in internal TA right now wondering what the next few years look like, don't spend all your energy trying to become marginally better at recruiting. Expand. Learn remuneration. Learn workforce planning. Learn talent management. Learn data. Learn work design and human AI augmentation. And learn your business. Because look at what happens when you combine those capabilities. You're no longer the person waiting for a requisition. You're sitting upstream. You're helping the organization determine what capability it needs. You're identifying whether that capability exists internally. You're understanding what that capability costs externally. You're looking at the risk of losing it. You're helping determine whether to build it, buy it, borrow it, or augment it. And yes, sometimes the answer will still be recruit somebody. And when it is, brilliant! We're recruiters. We know how to do that. We do that so well. But recruitment becomes one tool in the toolbox. It stops becoming the entire toolbox. I think Workforce 5.0 creates a choice for our profession. We can fight to protect the traditional boundaries of talent acquisition, or we can knock them down ourselves. Personally, I want the bigger playground. I want talent professionals involved in workforce planning. I want us understanding REM. I want us participating in succession conversations. I want us talking about performance and potential. I want us using workforce data. I want us designing augmented teams. I want us understanding the external talent market better than anyone else in the organization. And then combining that knowledge with what's happening internally. Because that's a bloody powerful capability. So if you're nervous about where talent acquisition is heading, my challenge isn't to ignore that feeling. Use it. Use it. Pick one adjacent capability, just one, and start learning. Go and sit with your M team. Ask them to teach you how they benchmark a role. Join a workforce planning conversation. Ask to observe a succession meeting. Open the People Talent dashboard and actually understand the numbers. Learn how your organization is approaching AI and automation. And start joining the dots. Because the future of talent acquisition isn't about desperately proving to organizations that they still need recruiters, right? It's about becoming so commercially useful that that question becomes irrelevant. Don't protect your role. Expand your capability. And maybe that's the real opportunity sitting inside Workforce 5.0. Thanks for listening. I'm Eden Haddock, and this is Eden Haddock Total Talent. No guests, no sponsors, just conversations about where talent is actually heading. And I'll catch you next week.