HR leaders discuss how AI will transform job applications and hiring

As executives grapple with AI-powered workplace reshaping, Business Insider convened 15 HR and C-suite leaders over breakfast in Davos for a roundtable discussion titled “The Future of the Workforce in the Age of AI,” presented by Indeed.

Throughout the discussion, it became clear that AI is reshaping the bottom rung of the career ladder and changing the way job candidates are evaluated.

In this excerpt, we share how company leaders are rethinking their talent pipelines and weighing which skills are most important in hiring.

Business Insider Aki Ito: What I’m most concerned about is how AI is impacting entry-level young people at this point.

Elizabeth, I want to tell you this because I think there are very few industries that train as many new graduates as management consulting firms do. Of course, you did this because it took a lot of effort to do all the financial modeling and PowerPoint creation. But it also had the added benefit of building a great pipeline for middle management and senior leadership in the future.

With the realization that we may not need as many 22-year-old junior analysts today, how do you balance the short-term need to build the leanest organization possible with the need to maintain a pipeline of future leaders?

Elizabeth Faber, Global Chief People and Purpose Officer, Deloitte: Very carefully. Like many of you here, I spend a lot of my waking hours thinking about it.

Deloitte and many of our peers will continue to be human-led and harness the power of technology. We are a people business, and our professional services organization will continue to be led by people, but very closely aligned with technology. We are very optimistic about the opportunities that AI and emerging technologies bring to workforce growth.

We have to be very careful and very intentional about how we navigate it. We expect new businesses to emerge that offer entirely new opportunities for professionals to join and grow within our company.

Melissa Stolfi, Chief Operating Officer, TCW: I had a very long career at Goldman Sachs and was happy to join their analyst program. Goldman Sachs has a great apprenticeship culture.

There were a lot of skills I learned there as a young analyst. That included PowerPoint presentations, modeling, and sitting in on meetings with older people as a note-taker. The simple, mundane task of being in a room and being able to absorb very high-level, powerful conversations has really benefited me today and in my current role.

I think one of our main interests at TCW is to continue to promote an apprenticeship culture and recruit young people to learn both soft skills and important technical skills in conferences.

In terms of how we’ve approached the analyst class, we’ve reduced the size of the analyst class a little bit to align with the early days of AI. Many of the tasks that analysts were probably doing in relation to modeling and researching companies, we’ve actually employed AI and certain agents to help with that.

The number of employees has already decreased slightly. But we want to build a pipeline to the next generation of managers, so it’s important to maintain some kind of pyramid structure.

Svenja Gudell, Chief Economist at Indeed: It’s really interesting to hear you talk about the talent pipeline. If you’re looking at tech jobs, and this only applies to tech jobs, the requirement for 5+ years of experience for job seekers has increased significantly. One reason for this is that employers can be more selective about the people they currently hire. There’s a lot more that’s available, but also because these are the people who need to oversee the agents and other people who integrate the AI ​​that runs these processes.

So you need an experience element, but if you don’t train the first group that comes in, you’re going to run out of people with five years of experience at some point because you haven’t built a pipeline. We will all run into that problem someday.

However, this is only confirmed by technical data. This does not apply to other fields. In fact, healthcare has reduced the amount of experience required, and we are actually seeing some workforce shortages.

So today’s workforce is very complex in terms of the different sectors that answer the call of AI and how they actually incorporate that technology.

Ito: I want to switch gears and talk about something perhaps more direct. That’s how AI has completely transformed the job search and job application process. AI has made it much easier for job seekers to customize their cover letters and resumes. I hear from HR departments every day how bad the nightmare of being inundated with resumes has become for companies.

Nathalie Scardino, Salesforce President and Chief Human Resources Officer: We receive about 2 million applications a year, but we don’t have the capacity to hire more. About three years ago, we started looking at how AI could enhance the capabilities of recruiters. So we work a lot with Adecco and our partners here at Indeed, and frankly, we also had a very solid case for what AI would not be used for. It was for making hiring decisions.

One of the focuses we established last year was how we value talent. Because AI makes it easier to differentiate yourself as a candidate.

So, to the hiring manager, you change the question and say, “We’re not necessarily looking for all your years of experience. We’re looking for your ability to learn.” Therefore, much of our assessment is based on your adaptability, demonstrating real-life examples of your ability to use different applications and manage relationships. We are a very relationship-oriented company.

Now, the responsibility of recruiters is to assess people’s aptitude for learning. This is the biggest change in recruiting I’ve ever seen. In other words, does a world without job descriptions exist anymore?

For that matter, what is your output? What are your learning abilities? That’s what our recruiting team is looking for.

Becky Frankiewicz, Manpower Group President and Chief Strategy Officer said: We process approximately 10 million resumes and place approximately 3 million candidates annually. So 7 million people are a concern. There are 7 million people looking for non-employable jobs.

The advantage is that it can be done much faster with AI. Another positive is that if we were at this table three years ago, we would have been talking about “AI has bias and AI is taught by humans.” All of this is true, but in a positive way, we can also teach them to be non-judgmental. So a conversation developed.

On the other hand, this idea I mentioned regarding skills has nothing to do with what kind of job you will have in the future. What kind of work you have done and what kind of position you have held is important. The title doesn’t matter. No matter how many years of experience you have. What matters is what you actually contributed compared to the title or role you actually have.

This opens up new opportunities for people to do things they have never done before. I know that technology has evolved to the point where it can help people unlock new potential within themselves that they haven’t yet realized.

It’s a well-known fact, especially for women around the table, that unless you’re 100%, maybe 150% qualified, you won’t apply. Well, in this case there is no need to apply. I’m sure you’ll find it.

Scardino: That’s a shift.