Predictions in The Talent/People Space for 2023 and Beyond
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Predictions in The Talent/People Space for 2023 and Beyond

‘Tis the season for making predictions! Here are mine, aspirational in parts and rife with North American bias. Winners and losers section at the end. Strong themes of evolution and re-balance and a seismic shift in the role of the Talent/People teams thanks to advances in data analytics. 

As we embrace the insights provided by the new era of people analytics it is important to remember that data is nothing without context. Talent professionals are crucial for understanding the anomalies, imbalances, and biases that are inevitably present and guarding against those as we translate the data into ethical, actionable insights. 

The economy

We just had two boom-bust cycles: the COVID shock of 2020 and subsequent recovery, and 2021’s VC fueled growth followed by this year’s downsizing and looming recession. Those of us who’ve been around for a while are familiar with ups and downs in recruiting, but coming as they did this time, in such rapid succession, has left even the most battle tested among us a little dizzy. The hiring market was competitive and gobs of cash were spent on hiring, building out epic recruiting teams, tooling up with whatever HR Tech tool was promising an edge, and spending out the wazoo on agencies. 

Expect to see: 

  • Increased rigor around Quality of Hire (QoH). Those still hiring need to make every hire count. Those conducting RIFs need to ensure they are keeping the most valuable employees. A new appreciation that people strategy profoundly drives business outcomes. 
  • Tool consolidation. We’ve seen the start of this and it will likely continue on a wild scale as companies reduce costs, reduce the number of vendors teams are managing (13 on average by one count!), and get their data in one place. 
  • An increase in North American companies with substantial headcount in LATAM countries. Companies experimenting with offshoring in LATAM countries over the past few years have found it works. Many of the old bureaucratic hurdles for hiring overseas have been reduced to speed bumps. There’s plenty of bilingual talent available on both sides, and a growing appreciation of the strong tech chops south of the border. Combined with compatible time zones (especially as a bridge to serve European time zones), it just makes sense.  

Continuing arms race of candidate experience (CX)

Although less of a candidate driven market at the moment,  companies will always be proactive about securing the best candidates, so the inexorable CX arms race grinds on. 

Evolution from: 

  • Before: “be nice to the candidate” i.e. don’t ghost them and don’t interview them like it’s an interrogation 
  • Now-ish: “give the candidate things” i.e. provide information about who they are meeting, share maps, send swag 
  • Next up: “give agency to  the candidate in their hiring process” i.e. they get a voice in their reference check process and submit their own perception of their performance. They can choose to submit a video answering a question or a written response, they can opt to send in a code sample showcasing their existing work or create a fresh solution to a code challenge. 

Expect to see: 

  • Non-linear hiring processes, where different parts of the process are completed in an order that best suits the candidate and the needs of the business. Remote work has freed us from the constraints of backending all the expensive in-office parts of the interview. The whole process can be re-imagined. 
  • Blurring of the line between being in the hiring process and not officially being in the hiring process i.e. talent pools vs active candidates. The recruiting process becomes more permeable. Artifacts from the real world start to replace traditional parts of the interview process.  We’ll see creative ways to assess people in talent pools for fit and check off some parts of the recruiting process before the prospect even knows they’re being considered. It’s fairly straightforward to review that conference talk you did and do a deep dive on your github repository. Imagine minding your own business and then finding out you’re 60% of the way through a company’s hiring process. We’ll need new tools to manage this process. 

New frontier of employee engagement/experience

Employer- employee relations have been tested in a number of ways over the past decade: mass layoffs, less than compassionate attitudes during COVID, and employees discovering that it can be tricky to realize the value of stock options for pre-IPO startups.  Meanwhile a renewed interest in unions and the emergence of novel structures like DAOs are an interesting trend to note.

Evolution from:

  • Before: “We are a team” 
  • Now-ish: “We’re a family” 
  • Next up: “We’re  a collective”... maybe? 

Evolution from: 

  • Before: “You’re lucky to have a job”
  • Just now: “Here’s our snack bar and foosball table” 
  • Now-ish: “Bring your whole self to work” 
  • Next up: “Let’s have a real conversation about your skills and where you’re at and help you identify where you want to go next and outline the path to get there. This will provide you actual marketable value that you can keep beyond your time here” 

Expect to see:

  • A more sophisticated understanding, on both sides of the employer - employee relationship, of the expectations around what it means to deliver value.

Never ending quest for optimal productivity

The tension between companies striving to get more productivity out of people and employees pushing for better pay and conditions is as old as time. We’ve seen that, while popular with employees, remote work remains controversial. There’s persistent skepticism over whether employees are working as much as they claim.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that productivity tools are on the rise. As accusations of “quiet quitting” grew, so too did the backlash against what was seen by many employees as an unreasonable expectation of “always on” work culture. All this and pay transparency hasn’t even fully entered the chat yet. We know pay transparency is coming in some way for job seekers with new legislation from CA and NY. There's also been an uptick on access to salary benchmarking for HR teams. 

Expect to see:

  • Increased uptake in productivity tools that address the needs of managers to track progress toward goals. However these tools must also address the aforementioned evolution in employee experience and provide career growth frameworks in a collaborative way. Productivity meets career development. 
  • Pay adjustments/corrections and less capricious approaches to pay and raises going forward. This is a direct result of increased pay transparency and the new availability of  insights into employee performance.  Equity remains opaque. 

Onboarding

Onboarding traditionally takes place in the no-man’s land between offer acceptance and the first few weeks of a new hire’s start. The 3 main goals of onboarding are: 

  1. For a new hire to learn about their role, their new team, and for the company to decrease the time it takes for them to start delivering value.
  2. For the company to learn about the new hire to improve employee experience and set them up for success
  3. To make sure various admin tasks are completed e.g. getting the new hire a laptop, adding them to payroll, etc. 

With those goals in mind, expect to see:

  • Onboarding in the spotlight. Access to augmented QoH and ROI data that spans the whole employee lifecycle shows that effective onboarding increases retention, improves employee experience, speeds up time to ROI, and improves performance. If we take the example of a sales person, decreasing their time to the first deal from 3 months to 2 means they have bookings in 10 months instead of 9: an increase of >10%. If great onboarding makes them just 10% more productive in each month that sales person increased their bookings by over 20% in their first year. Incremental optimization makes an outsized difference over time. 
  • Onboarding is going to mushroom. A new understanding of the value of onboarding means it will be applied more expansively. We can and should start steps 1 and 2 at the very start of the hiring process and be consistent and repeat those messages throughout the entire candidate-employee lifecycle. 
  • Onboarding will be ongoing, reappearing in small doses throughout the employee lifecycle and especially after events like a promotion or a leave of absence. 
  • The evolution in onboarding capabilities and internal training programs coupled with improved understanding of Quality of Hire (QoH). This will super charge internal mobility.

Recruiters/Talent People

After a period of incredible growth and a recruiter shortage we’re now seeing companies who are conducting RIFs letting go of recruiting talent, sometimes whole teams. This is a very risky move. When the rebuild happens it will be expensive, time-consuming, and competitive to recreate that team, potentially setting hiring plans back months. Resourceful companies know that recruiters are swiss army knives. Those transferable skills can be redeployed in other departments, in roles like SDR, sales, customer support, project management, marketing, customer success, and of course HR. 

Evolution from:

  • Before: "We know how many hires we made this year and if we want more hires next year, the recruiters need to work harder."
  • Now-ish: "We are good at looking at recruiting pipeline data and making adjustments to improve efficiency and reduce costs. We have some ideas on our recruiting capacity and a more sophisticated understanding of managing that. We assume the hires we made are doing well, but there's no great feedback loop to really know."
  • Next up: "Advanced analytics tools give data insights across the whole candidate-employee lifecycle. We now know which steps in our hiring process are predictive of employee performance and which ones aren't. We're building in quality and predictability into our processes."

Expect to see:

  • A price for sacrificing the recruiting team at the first sign of trouble. Burned recruiters will be more choosy about their next company when the pendulum swings back the other way.  They will ask how the team was impacted during RIFs and will opt for the companies that stuck by their recruiters. 
  • A step change in the actual recruiter role. Data revelations have unlocked the Exec team’s understanding of the impact on business outcomes this team can have when they are tooled up and staffed appropriately. Going forward recruiters need a greater skill level in data analytics and project management to actually deliver this value.
  • KPIs will be more rigorous, tightly managed, and span the entire candidate-employee lifecycle. The KPIs have a clear impact on business outcomes.

DEIB

This one is troublesome to me. Of late we’ve heard less about this important function. DEIB, which should be baked into the core of everything the Talent/People team are doing, went through a huge period of growth over the past few years. Companies spent lots on tools and services and the topic gained top billing at conferences. More recently however, DEIB seems to have slipped in people’s consciousness again. As Talent/People people we have a serious responsibility to not be swayed by trends here and to uphold and amplify any progress made in our orgs. 

Expect to see:

  • DEIB getting more solidly baked into core processes vs being a bolt-on function. This group must have a seat at the table when selecting, implementing, and interpreting analytics tools. 

Who Wins and Who Loses?

Taking the L

  • Companies suffering from “RIFer’s remorse”. As companies review the choices they made and realize that in too many cases they let the wrong people go. They might well find it harder to ramp their teams back up if they cut too deeply into their recruiting function or their employer brand took a hit. 
  • Teams that miss the boat on getting their full data picture. They will continue to fly blind and miss out on insights that could be game changing for their business outcomes. 
  • Teams that get over-excited about finally having data and forget that it needs sanity checking, a ton of contextualizing, cross referencing, and regular testing to ensure it’s free from bias. We’re in the early days here. 
  • Companies that don’t invest in Manager support and training. Inexperienced Managers will struggle to perform at the hands-on level needed to grow and develop their team members and will create time-consuming and expensive headaches for HR teams. 
  • Candidates who don’t have publicly discoverable and assessable examples of their skills, as they may be passed over in favor of candidates who do. 
  • The wall between Talent Acquisition and HR. These teams will unite, empowered by a new generation of analytics tools that support story-telling through the entire candidate-through-employee lifecycle. 
  • Parasitic tools and services that aren’t providing true ROI to the business. The new wave of transparency in the value being delivered will mean curtains for tools and services that aren’t delivering. 

Winner’s Circle

  • Exec suite are runners up. With all this data available they can plan with more confidence. They are beyond delighted. 
  • Companies that have some existing bilingual/international advantage for capitalizing on LATAM talent pool and new ease of hiring there. 
  • Candidates, who will get a better experience through the hiring process. They’ll have a more personalized and meaningful journey for the processes they are actively engaged in, and will get to fast track in cases where they have been pre-assessed, possibly even without their knowledge. 
  • L & D programs. Between a greater understanding of the importance of onboarding and the value derived from internal mobility and training programs this team is about to get its day in the sun. 
  • Employees who are motivated to develop and learn can now receive the structured support they need to grow and the recognition in their comp that they deserve when they do. 
  • Talent/People people come out on top. With improvements in data transparency leading to better decisions and better business outcomes the Talent/People space can finally provide clear evidence of its strategic value. These are the people who make sure that the data is interpreted in the correct context. 


I took a lot of notes and I feel a lot more prepared for what is likely to come. Thank you for this article!

Awesome read, Jo Avent! Love the thinking around the non-linear hiring process

Dan Snyder

Talent Acquisition Leader | Recruiter | Advisor

1y

Thanks for sharing. There is a lot I agree with here. Pretty rocky times right now but I’m excited to see what 2023 will bring. I believe the usage of Talent analytics and CX tools will see an uptick as we continue to find ways to optimize for efficiency and experience.

Mark “Doobles” Deubel

Tech Recruiting leader & ex-Engineer ➤ Recruitment Advocate ➤ Podcaster ➤ Speaker ➤ scaling enthusiast.

1y

Really liked the read! There has been a lot of change over the last year(s) and we will even see more change, but knowing our landscape, most companies do not move fast (enough) to catch up with what is needed, let alone lead the way. Recruitment will get more human again. It’s something I’ve been pushing for as well, but it’s clear that it will take time. I do feel that when there is an abundance of recruiters available (vs the need we had before), that there is a bigger focus on ‘how’ a recruiter recruits. Still, 90% of the interviews we, as professionals, do with recruiters are very standard and not great predictors imho, so it’s time we change how we recruit the recruiter and make sure we are hiring talent, not smooth talkers. QOH will be more important than ever and finally.. data insights. Recruiting teams have tons of data, often not utilised due to a lack of understanding and tooling. The standard tools (ATS) often have a limited reporting function, but often we can pull way more data from them then we think with tools like Kibana, Grafana and more. Pulling the data is one, understanding the data is second, using the data is where often the challenge lies as data needs context, a narrative, it needs storytelling.

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