The consensus on AI as regards the workforce, particularly at entry and early-career levels, is that it will reduce employment. But does this reflect reality? Some HR leaders believe that organizations should take a new, more positive approach. By using AI as the basis for a different model of recruitment and retention, rather than simply an opportunity to reduce workforce costs, organizations could both preserve jobs and improve performance.
Josh Bersin, founder of The Josh Bersin Company, a research and advisory company that specializes in corporate learning, talent management and HR, is a proponent of this argument. The increasingly hysterical warnings of an AI-driven job cull are unjustified, he believes. Rather, HR professionals should worry about their organizations being left behind by peers who have adjusted their talent strategies more effectively to an AI-driven world.
“Too many CHROs are still working their way through the same old talent acquisition cycles,” Bersin warns. “All they’re doing is filling the seats that the business tells them need filling.”
Bersin has an optimistic take on the impact of AI. While new technologies increasingly enable organizations to automate the kind of work typically allocated to early-career employees, this, he argues, will change the nature of many jobs, rather than eradicating them.
“Entry-level employees are going to be undertaking more sophisticated tasks and they’re actually better-placed to do that work,” Bersin argues. “Many companies tell me that it’s their youngest employees who are teaching them how to make the best use of new tools.”
In any case, Bersin argues, organizations can’t afford to just ignore a generation’s worth of new talent. “Employers need a pipeline and what most organizations will tell you is that, in developed companies, the supply of talent is drying up,” he says.
The expectation that AI will shrink headcount numbers overall is misplaced, Bersin believes. The short-term goal of technology implementation for many organizations is to do a similar or greater volume of work with fewer people. But Bersin suggests that CHROs should steer strategy toward more ambitious top- and bottom-line gains. To succeed in these ambitions, organizations will need to keep recruiting the talent to manage AI. “CEOs will expect to hire people at a higher productivity rate, but they’re still going to hire people,” he suggests.
“Bersin has a vision of HR teams that collaborate more closely than ever before with other teams across the business.”
HR teams, Bersin argues, must abandon traditional models of talent acquisition. “The linear model, where, say, you hire twice as many sales advisers if you want to sell twice as many products, is no longer going to work,” he says. “Instead, HR must support the business in building talent density. [It must] secure the right capabilities in each business area, rather than simply adding more and more people.”
This may seem like an obviously sensible strategy, but many organizations are failing to employ it. One recent study undertaken by The Josh Bersin Company in conjunction with talent specialist AMS found that fewer than one-third of HR executives undertake strategic workforce planning. Rather, they’re stuck in a recurring cycle of hiring sprees and lay-offs. The more traction AI gains, the less closely this pattern is aligned with real business needs.
To break the cycle, HR will need to help organizations look at recruitment in a different way, Bersin adds. “Employers are just beginning to learn that, if they organize themselves into smaller units and think about automation and hiring simultaneously, they will get better results,” he says. “But that requires a different HR talent process.”
Bersin has a vision of HR teams that collaborate more closely than ever before with other teams across the business. They will embed themselves in departments and teams so that they’re able to make strategic recommendations around organizational design and workflow. In this world, HR and business leaders work together to understand the likely impact of AI and other technologies on recruitment in terms of numbers and skillsets required.
“There’s an old-fashioned idea that the main role of HR is to keep the workforce happy,” Bersin says. “Increasingly, HR’s role is to drive workforce productivity: to understand the interplay between technology and human employees, and to help managers develop organizational designs accordingly.”
That invention also naturally depends on employees having the confidence and skills to start exploring.
AI won’t only change how – and whom – organizations recruit but also working culture. Advances such as generative AI (GenAI) will democratize technology, enabling more widespread creativity. The organizations that get the most out of AI won’t take a top-down approach, with the IT function doling out new applications as it deems fit. Rather, the most transformative use cases are likely to come from employees themselves: individual workers and teams with expertise in a particular area of the business who play around with AI to find ways of doing their jobs better.
“HR has to support that frontline creative process,” says Bersin. “It will require a cultural shift to empower people to play with these tools, including rewarding managers for facilitating exploratory invention within their teams.”
That invention also naturally depends on employees having the confidence and skills to start exploring. This reinforces the case for more strategic recruitment. While learning and development initiatives can make progress in upskilling the whole workforce, new recruits, who have grown up amid the evolution of AI, will often bring a higher level of technological literacy.
The impact of failing to hire sufficient fresh talent may go beyond disrupting the pipeline of future leaders. It may also deprive the organization of early adopters and super-users who will enable it to take full advantage of new technologies.
Time is running short to make that leap.
In this new world, organizations will expect CHROs to make some significant adjustments. Their first task may be to persuade their organizations to look beyond the alluring potential of AI to reduce workforce costs. Pursuing automation with that mindset carries a number of dangers, the greatest of which could be missing the bigger opportunities to drive increased revenue and business growth.
But once they’ve made that case, CHROs must position themselves to help their organizations grasp those opportunities. The HR executive as business partner is hardly a new concept, but research findings such as those reported above suggest it has yet to translate into a more strategic approach to talent management.
Time is running short to make that leap. The big AI winners won’t be the organizations that take the axe to recruitment most ferociously. Rather, success will come from understanding how AI can help each employee work most effectively, creating more value than ever before.
“The challenge for HR leaders and their teams is going to be whether they can think more like frontline business leaders, moving beyond the recent focus on engagement and wellbeing,” Bersin concludes. “They’re going to need to get their hands dirty to find out what’s really going on in the organization. They must throw themselves into the conversation around productivity and work design.”
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