What 2024 Holds for Talent Acquisition Leaders
Talent acquisition leaders anticipate substantial and continuous change in their function throughout 2024, with skills-based recruitment, employer brand, and refining employee value proposition topping the list of priorities.
Broadening the implementation of generative AI (GenAI) is expected to increase speed and efficiency and decrease costs in the long-term but will clearly require both significant focus and dedicated upskilling of the TA function.
The top-four priorities for 2024 listed by members of the Institute for Corporate Productivity’s (i4cp) Talent Acquisition Board are:
1. Balancing the use of AI with human touchpoints to optimize candidate experience, reduce selection bias, and speed processes.
2. Aligning to skills-based recruitment and development.
3. Increasing collaboration with talent leaders and HR business to enhance employer brand and strengthen connections between employee value proposition and employee experience.
4. Enhancing and expanding intern and early career programs to build more performance-ready and cost-effective talent pipelines.
Because the TA function is often an early adopter of new technology in many organizations, AI (and as GenAI evolves at breakneck speed), talent acquisition leaders will be called upon to advise their organizations on AI strategy and implementation.
Talent acquisition leaders reported to i4cp that they are currently using GenAI for:
- Generating streamlined, targeted job descriptions
- Drafting recruitment communications
- Connecting candidates to chatbots that help them find roles
- Dynamic skill-to-role matching
- Suggesting interview questions and assessing for potential bias
- Analyzing social media activity for messaging resonance
- Making recommendations for responsive job advertisement copy and placement
- Drafting offer letters
What’s ahead in 2024 and beyond? In organizations that have the technology, AI is expected to fully manage the candidate cycle at some point and improve on tasks such as suggesting SEO terms to enhance visibility, resume screening, managing initial interactions with applicants, support skills assessments, etc.
Early career hiring strategies will be overhauled, and proactive hiring strategies will become more common. Also referred to as “designate hiring” programs, these initiatives hire for key skills without an open role for immediate placement, and allow timeframes ranging from 60 to 180 days for a new hie to become familiar with the organization and its culture before a role is open or defined. This enables organizations to acquire and engage with key talent before the competition does.
TA leaders are spending more time on analytics; as this continues, they will be essential to effective workforce planning. People analytics data promises to provide deeper insights into sources of key hires and the skillsets that enabled top performance.
Talent acquisition leaders need actionable plans in 2024 to stay ahead of the competition, and those plans require investment of time and resources into developing and enhancing pivotal strategies to attract and engage the best talent. This goes hand-in-hand with the development of new tools, resources, and programs, which should involve partnership with total rewards, DE&I, and HRBPs to analyze and deliver on what’s best for the organization’s workforce both now and looking ahead.