The War for Talent is over. HR lost.

Even as HR leaders whined about having a seat at the table, they dramatically degraded their employers’ ability to attract skilled workers. They accepted budgets that forced recruiters to handle 10-15 openings at a time, and they held the door open as recruiters were laid off by the hundreds whenever the c-suite felt some heat at the bottom line. The net result according to SHRM, HR’s own professional association, was disastrous: almost 7-out-of-10 companies (69%) say they can’t find the talent they need to get work done.

Today’s situation is even more dire. The War for Talent has shifted to a new front, the War for AI Talent Hegemony, and once again HR is undermining the ability of employers to respond effectively.

Techwolf analyzed a million U.S. entry-level jobs from 2022 to 2025 and found that HR added 194% more AI skill requirements to those positions during that period. At the same time, Second Talent reports that there is currently a global shortfall of over one million AI ready candidates. It doesn’t take a Nobel laureate economist to figure out that such an HR strategy will once again be disastrous for employers.

Even worse, HR seems not to appreciate the importance of talent acquisition in an environment where there aren’t enough appropriately skilled workers to go around. Apparently, HR leaders don’t understand that a company can’t manage the resources it doesn’t have, so they treat TA as an afterthought and focus instead on traditional HR activities. If you have any doubt about that, consider the agenda for SHRM’s so-called Talent Conference. It’s hard to be sure given the titles of some of the sessions, but it appears that just 25% of the sessions have anything at all to do with recruitment. The remaining 75% are devoted to old-fashioned HR management. That’s the leadership equivalent of an ostrich strategy for winning the War for AI Talent Hegemony.

So, what’s to be done?

First, relieve HR. Hand the prosecution of the War for AI Talent Hegemony over to the experts. Get the talent acquisition function out of the HR Department. Make it an independent Department and give its leader a seat at both the c-suite table and the Board of Directors table. AI-ready talent is now a critical business asset and ensuring the enterprise has enough of it must be a Board-level concern.

Second, stop adding unrealistic AI requirements to entry-level (and other) jobs. Even if you’re able to hire someone with AI skills, the pace of the technology’s development is likely to make them obsolescent in six months. Instead, look for candidates with the human judgment and intellectual curiosity that are the hallmarks of a liberal arts education. As Greg Weiner explains in a recent WAPO editorial, those individuals are far more likely to embark on and succeed at a career-long journey of reskilling in sync with the maturation of AI.

And third, make the new TA Department an exemplar of AI integration. Reset the TA team with recruiters who have the professional skills and the same judgment and intellectual curiosity they want in candidates. Then, redesign the TA Department’s tasks, work flows, and data collection systems to optimize the performance of both recruiters and machines. Finally, acquire the AI-powered TA solutions that enable the recruiting team to give their employer an unfair advantage in the War for AI Talent Hegemony.

At this stage (and for the foreseeable future) in the development of AI, humans will work in some capacity with the technology. Being able to recruit AI-ready workers, therefore, isn’t an ancillary activity, but a core component of business success. The only way to give it that priority is to get HR out of the way.

Food for Thought,
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 by both the Defense and Army Science Boards.