In my last column, I pushed back on the gloom-and-doom sayers and argued that job boards, talent technology companies and AI-powered TA solutions are on the cusp of a Golden Age in Recruitment Technology. I also said, however, that getting from cusp to consolidation – from the potential to the full promise and power of that age – would require solution providers to grapple with and successfully overcome a number of challenges.
What are those challenges? Here are three of the most important.
All businesses – at least the successful ones – evolve. That’s particularly true for job boards. The value proposition for the first generation of these sites – online classified advertising – is losing its agency with employers. Therefore, these sites must evolve into Next Generation Employment sites (NGEs).
The changes involved will be idiosyncratic to each company, of course, but they might include:
• Evolving through partnerships and technology development to a full-stack hiring resources platform that serves employers from branding and career site development through onboarding. Take a look at Kariyer.net in Turkey for a good example of what’s possible.
• Evolving through carefully curated resources to a platform that extends individual support well beyond job search to career-self-management and community engagement. Take a look at HigherEdJobs.com for one way of achieving this transformation.
There’s a small but accelerating trend among employers to move to a new paradigm in staffing. They lay off full-time employees and accomplish the work those individuals previously performed with fractional or gig workers and AI agents. For example, Rich Wilson, the CEO of Gigged.ai, has predicted that by the end of 2027, many organizations will staff with 40% full-time employees, 40% fractional/gig workers and 20% AI agents.
What does that shift mean for an industry where the business model is largely built on helping employers hire an ever-growing number of full-time employees? Some will argue for standing pat, but hoping the trend will die out is not a strategy with a high probability of success. Others believe that only significant change will work, but that’s never easy and will involve considerable risk. To help clarify the issue, I recently hosted a TAtech Live panel of industry leaders. You can listen to a recording here.
We have moved from the information to the intelligence era in the blink of an eye. Most experts date the shift from the introduction of ChatGPT in 2023. Research in artificial intelligence predates that moment by a long shot, of course, but the arrival of that generative AI chatbot marks the beginning of the technology’s democratization – its usage by more than the scientific community. The adoption has grown even more widespread since then, and yet, there is still much we don’t know about what AI can do and how it does it.
I’ve written two books about the technology, but I’m not a technologist. I couldn’t code a LLM if my life depended on it. Rather, I’m a student of its societal, cultural and organizational impact, and I can assert with absolute certainty that we have only begun to scratch the surface in our understanding of what it will do to and for the workforce and workplace. The TA solutions industry must be at the forefront of that exploration, and it must be frank, honest and transparent in sharing what it finds with employers.
We’ll be covering these and other challenges at TAtech Europe, coming up in Amsterdam on September 8-9. Join us, but get your tickets before June 15 so you can cash in on the $150 per ticket Early Bird Discount savings.
Thanks for Reading,
Peter
Peter Weddle is the Founder & CEO of TAtech: The Network for Talent Technology Solutions. The author or editor of over two dozen books, he has also been a columnist for The Wall Street Journal and chaired major human-machine and leadership studies for select Federal Boards.
