HRchat Podcast
Listen to the HRchat Podcast by HR Gazette to get insights and tips from HR leaders, influencers and tech experts. Topics covered include HR Tech, HR, AI, Leadership, Talent, Recruitment, Employee Engagement, Recognition, Wellness, DEI, and Company Culture.
Hosted by Bill Banham, Bob Goodwin, Pauline James, and other HR enthusiasts, the HRchat show publishes interviews with influencers, leaders, analysts, and those in the HR trenches 2-4 times each week.
The show is approaching 1000 episodes and past guests are from organizations including ADP, SAP, Ceridian, IBM, UPS, Deloitte Consulting LLP, Simon Sinek Inc, NASA, Gartner, SHRM, Government of Canada, Hacking HR, McLean & Company, UPS, Microsoft, Shopify, DisruptHR, McKinsey and Co, Virgin Pulse, Salesforce, Make-A-Wish Foundation, and Coca-Cola Beverages Company.
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Podcast Music Credit"Funky One"Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
HRchat Podcast
AI's Impact on Changing Recruitment Landscapes with Jenn Cunningham, Pearson
What does it mean when a Vice President, Global Talent Acquisition declares "recruiting is broken"? Jenn Cunningham of Pearson doesn't just diagnose the problem – she offers a vision for how artificial intelligence can bring the human element back to hiring.
Drawing from her fascinating career journey from McDonald's store manager to leading global talent acquisition at a major education company, Jenn explains that traditional recruitment has been failing candidates, recruiters, and businesses alike. Overengineered processes designed primarily for financial reporting have stripped away the flexibility needed to accommodate human needs and experiences.
The solution? AI tools thoughtfully designed to eliminate friction points and busy work. Pearson's research shows that generative AI could help US workers reclaim a staggering 78 million hours weekly currently spent on administrative tasks. At Pearson, they're already seeing results – their talent acquisition team has decreased by 31% year-over-year as AI handles scheduling, onboarding, and conversion tasks, while recruiters focus on the high-value, relationship-building aspects of their roles that truly add value.
Perhaps most insightfully, Cunningham addresses the paradoxical messaging that creates resistance among recruiters: "AI is coming for your job" versus "AI will make your life easier." Resolving this contradiction is key to successful implementation. For leaders navigating this transition, Cunningham advises focusing on changing attitudes rather than overhauling entire systems, as many AI solutions can integrate with existing platforms.
As we confront a rapidly changing hiring landscape, the skills that remain uniquely valuable are precisely those that AI struggles to replicate: critical thinking, adaptability, and the ability to discern truth from fiction in a world awash with information.
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Welcome to the HR Chat Show, one of the world's most downloaded and shared podcasts designed for HR pros, talent execs, tech enthusiasts and business leaders. For hundreds more episodes and what's new in the world of work, subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit hrgazettecom and visit.
Speaker 2:HRGazettecom. Welcome to another episode of the HR Chat Show. Hello listeners, this is your host today, bill Bannum, and in this episode, we're going to talk about ways that AI is transforming recruitment. And joining me on the show for the first time is Jennifer Cunningham, global VP of Global Talent Acquisition over at Pearson. Jen brings over 20 years of experience in recruiting and HR across diverse industries, starting as a store manager at McDonald's to working her way up to Adidas and now leading at Pearson. Hey, jen, welcome to the show today. How are you doing?
Speaker 3:I'm all good, Bill. Thanks for having me. How are you?
Speaker 2:I am wonderful. The sun is shining. I'm in a very good mood. You've caught me on a great day. Let's have lots of fun here. Beyond my reintroduction just a moment ago, Jen, why don't you start by taking a couple of minutes, telling our listeners a bit about yourself, your career background and what gets you up in the morning?
Speaker 3:OK, happy to. So I'm Jen Cunningham. Preferred Jen versus Jennifer. Okay, happy to, so I'm Jenny Cunningham. Preferred Jenny versus Jennifer, Sadly. As a youngster I spent much time in hospital with severe asthma, and so Jennifer always reminds me of being woken up in the middle of the night with nurses asking me to take nebulizers. So I've kind of had an allergic reaction to Jennifer these days. Based in sunny Manchester in the United Kingdom, Mancunian, born and bred yes, I am a blue, so I'm on the right side of the city, although we haven't been doing particularly great this season.
Speaker 3:I had to own that I've spent most of my life here in Manchester, outside of five years living in Germany in the depths of Bavaria, which is fabulous. What gets me up in the morning is my two boys massive age difference. I have a 10-year-old and a 23-year-old, so a fully grown man. In my house I'm renovating my beautiful Georgian property, so that's where I spend most of my time.
Speaker 4:Thanks for listening to this episode of the HR Chat Podcast. If you enjoy the audio content we produce, you'll love our articles on the HR Gazette. Learn more at hrgazettecom. And now back to the show.
Speaker 2:Very good. So Jen, not Jennifer, georgian property, two lovely boys. You're blue, um, which probably negates you joining us at disrupt manchester in september because it's at the morson recruitment office and apparently overlooks old trafford, so you might not want to go to that, but if you like to come, you'd be very welcome. Uh, okay, let's get. Let's get into the questions. Um, firstly, what are some of the most exciting or high impact ways that you see AI transforming recruitment from job descriptions to candidate screening and beyond?
Speaker 3:so I think the thing that I find most exciting is that it's all for the taking and the opportunities really for us are endless. If you've ever kind of heard me speak or read any of the articles that I've written, I've said many, many times over, often to the horror of some of my peers in the recruiting industry, that recruiting is broken and has been for a while, and whether we choose to admit that or not, I believe it's a fact. And so now the rise of AI allows us to take a really honest view of what it really looks like and feels like for those involved in recruiting and by that I don't just mean recruiters, I mean the full 360 view and really consider how we bring the people first approach back to recruiting and human resources and make sure that the AI that we're using meets the needs of everybody involved. So again, the recruiter, the candidates, hiring managers, ops, teams that might support you, finance departments, hr, business partners everybody has a specific need or demand on the recruiting and the hiring that we do. I believe that we've fallen down on that in the past by fundamentally overcomplicating our tech stacks and building processes that follow two structured workflows, predominantly for financial reporting needs, but that really don't allow for the ebbs and flows of human nature and the needs and wants for those involved in the process. So, to give you an example, we've recently been developing agents to support us on our scheduling activities and while that isn't specifically exciting a notion, I mean let's be fair it's a fairly obvious application of AI.
Speaker 3:But in building it we really went deep and thought hard about all the friction points for ourselves and humans involved and also the inefficiencies in the process that a well-designed AI solution can alleviate.
Speaker 3:So one example of that was put out, actually, in a recent report by Pearson called the Reclaim the Clock, and it found that generative AI could help US workers reclaim nearly 78 million hours a week, which, when we put that into the context of the busy work that people are doing, is actually pretty scary.
Speaker 3:But when you go beyond just alleviating the pressures for talent, experience, teams and coordinators and the saving of time and money for businesses, we also went and looked at the accessibility options and how we could ensure that we were being fair and open to everybody through the AI that we were building, fundamentally to get ahead of any accessibility needs and make sure that we're setting candidates up for success from the beginning. In addition to that, we're also now looking at audio tools that will help us bring our adverts to life and our postings to life. That will really help bring the candidate into our world and allow them to get a real life view of the role and the requirements, but also that it can factor in any questions and answers that the candidate might have upfront. So two small applications that we're looking at. Again not enormously exciting, but I think when you look at it from the human perspective and not just the time saving and efficiency, it actually then becomes more exciting for me.
Speaker 2:Okay very good. Regular listeners of this show will know that I am not afraid of a shameless plug. So here comes a shameless plug. Uh, please do check out the related episode that I recently did with brian adams over at happy dance, who talks about some of this stuff as well. Okay, continuing through. I have I'm terrible for that. I do that all the time, you know my shameless plugs. Um, okay, so, uh, you're a strong advocate for skills-based hiring. What does it take for an organization to actually make that shift, and how can ai help remove biases baked in traditional hiring processes? You mentioned a moment ago that you guys are trying some pretty impressive new things with ai. A big concern that people always has is who's, who's created the ai and what? What biases are there? You know? Is it a bunch of middle-class white dudes who created the code in the first place and therefore it's got inherent, inherent biases?
Speaker 3:give us your take yeah, I, I am a huge, huge advocate of skills-based hiring and obviously ai, but it's certainly not easy. It's not an easy task at all and I think really what needs to happen is a total shift in attitudes around how we build organizations, the career frameworks and the way in which we approach skilling and upskilling and mobilizing our teams. I think to your point, there's been so much legacy and history around. You know you must have gone to this college or you must have had that degree, or you know come from this particular cohort of skill sets or you know employers that it's really difficult to break. And so I think when you're thinking about skills-based hiring and how AI needs to come into, it really needs to start with simplification, so really breaking down career structures and frameworks.
Speaker 3:And then, once you've done that, breaking down the jobs themselves really to the minutiae kind of task level, you really understanding what tasks and deliverables are within every single role in your organization.
Speaker 3:And then, once you've got a line of sight of that again at the micro level, you can really start to understand where AI can help remove that human burden.
Speaker 3:Once you understand, then, what the AI can take over, you can really start to look at the skills that are needed for the rest of the tasks, the pieces that AI won't take over, and how you can then use again AI to develop those skills within your current existing structures and teams. And when we do that, we can really try and move away from the typical perception of that experience and education into much more the fluid, changing career and job landscape where skills continually evolve and employees have new opportunities that might once have never been available to them. But fundamentally, to succeed in any of those two spaces, we really must rethink learning, skills and career development in a holistic way and to your point about. You know shameless plugs. At Pearson, we believe that we're leading that transformation and that we're uniquely positioned to help skill the world and prepare, you know, individuals and organizations to help adapt and advance and succeed through life and through business.
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Speaker 2:Okay, let's talk a little bit more about some of the points you just raised a moment ago, if you don't mind. We talk a lot on this show. I mean this. Hardly an episode goes by these days we're not talking about ai in some fashion.
Speaker 2:Um, I personally am more pessimistic than many people in terms of what ai is bringing and what it means for for jobs. I mean, just a few weeks ago, as we record this, uh, in the middle of may, you had bill gates saying we're looking at a two-day work week for human beings because of everything being replaced by ai. Um, other other stats not from pearson, from other organizations that I will not mention um suggest that by 2030, 30 of jobs that exist today will not be around in in 2030. These things scare me, um, and also the context here is, in addition to doing the HR stuff, I also run a bunch of AI summits in various places, so I get to listen to lots of experts talking about this, this, and it doesn't make me feel much better often. Anyway, there is a question here somewhere. My question, I guess, is what are those skills, what are those characteristics of human beings that you think will continue to be valuable and continue to be attractive to potential employers as AI continues at pace to replace a lot of tasks.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so again, and not surprisingly, we have actually looked into this in a fair amount of detail and we've also released a couple of reports ourselves that speak directly to this.
Speaker 3:So the first one um is the power skills um, which was more of an employer-led um piece of research which found that the five most sought after skills today by us employers are communication, customer leadership and collaboration Sorry, the fifth one, problem solving and the second one being from the employee view, which is the top two skills that they're actively looking at, growing and prioritising in their own development, are problem solving and decision making.
Speaker 3:And interesting, when I kind of play those stats and those reports back into my own organization, my own team, I can honestly put my hand on my heart and say that what I look for in a recruiter has completely shifted, in that I no longer now need somebody who can compile a strong Boolean search or to be able to write a nice funny, attractive advert, but rather now I have a stronger lean towards finding candidates with really good critical thinking, you know, those people who have the ability to discern and interpret information in a different way.
Speaker 3:Because, let's be honest, when we think about AI, it's pulling from the internet and the phrase that I always use with my team is the internet is full of three things truths, lies and half truths, meaning truths spun through a particular perspective, and or lens that a recruiter now needs to be able to to dig into and really understand. Um, you know the fact from the fiction. Um. The second piece that I think is important, not just for recruiters but more broadly in all enterprises, is adaptability, because, as you just said, the landscape is changing and at pace, and I think a level of curiosity and resilience and desire to lean into the change, for a force of positive versus being scared of it, really is what's going to make the difference for a lot of organisations and individuals when it comes to their own careers.
Speaker 2:Okay, very good. I have the word disrupt in my next question, which is good considering some of the other things I get up to when it comes to overhauling legacy recruitment systems. Jen, where do you see the biggest resistance and what advice would you give to leaders who are nervous about disrupting the way things have always been done?
Speaker 3:so I think for me this is a almost a multi-faceted answer in that when we consider our legacy systems, there's a lot of resistance that because you know, again, it falls into the old school notion of one source of truth. Or, you know, sometimes, as even recruiter's leaders, we don't have control over what legacy systems we use. You know you're either an SAP house or an Oracle house or you know one of the others. So quite often we don't have the budget or the influence or the know-how to move people away from those, or the influence or the know-how to move people away from those. But I think we need to readdress our own thinking that I don't actually believe the legacy systems are the problem, because so much of the AI that's out there now can stick separately. So we need to move away from that notion of one source of truth. There's so many different tools that are just plugins, browser extensions of truth, and you know there's so many different tools that are just plugins. You know crown extension, browser extensions, um, and so for me, when I think about it in its broadest sense, it's actually more around attitude and pace.
Speaker 3:Um and you just mentioned it there in the question before last, about what we've been hearing on ai and taking our jobs and I think, sadly, that is the message that has hit recruiters that you know AI is coming for you, it's going to take your job.
Speaker 3:And so now, all of a sudden, we're trying to pivot that language because it, you know, suits us to some degree, that we want recruiters using the AI because we can get them to be more effective and efficient. But yet, in the same time, all they're hearing is, if I get better at this and I use this ai, my job will go away. And so you know, those two messages it's going to take your job and it's going to make your life easier are a conflict. And now it's an uphill battle for anybody trying to disrupt their teams with ai to get them to only hear that first message and be curious and lean into it and get on board. That for me, I think, is going to be the biggest challenge. Um, and that's the piece that really needs to help, uh, to shift, for us to really make the difference in recruiting.
Speaker 2:I'd be keen to hear, uh, your experiences Pearson. Have you seen the team that handles recruiting for Pearson decline in numbers because AI is replacing a bunch of those roles? Are you actually seeing the same sorts of numbers of staff performing those duties? Or maybe you've even increased numbers because you're being way more productive by being augmented by the AI? What's the experience over there?
Speaker 3:yeah, so. So my team has reduced by 31 percent uh year on year, from march last year to march this year, and that's predominantly, however, in more of our tech experience team I'm not sorry, not tech experience our talent experience team, and so you know the scheduling, the onboarding, the conversion, so again that real transactional kind of task level that we've eliminated through the agents that we've deployed. Conversely, actually, our recruiters are busier than ever, so it is a really busy time for us. You know. Obviously our business, like every other business, is leaning into AI. I think that the attitude of the recruiters is definitely getting on board, particularly those in the tech space. So my tech recruiters and my product recruiters are very excited about everything that we're going on and they're the first to to get in and play with things.
Speaker 3:Um, some of the you know some of the other teams are a little bit slower on the uptake, but I think you know, as we start to launch things like prompt libraries and, you know, little communities that we've got going internally on our sharepoint site where they can see and hear from other recruiters in in the team how they're deploying um ai and how it is actually helping them to do a better job and to do the stuff that they really want to do. I think recruiters for such a long time talk about the reason that they do the job is because they love to connect with people and they like to add value, but yet so much of the job is admin and not face not face to face with people. Um, I'm continually reiterating the message of this is a value driver for you guys. Like you've always asked for a seat at the table, get this stuff off your plate. Be more effective in the way that you do it and then you can do the work that really adds the value.
Speaker 2:You can be the influencer and the partner that you truly want to be to to the business just a quick follow-up to that um and I am conscious we've got to wrap up in a couple of minutes with ai replacing so many of those more mundane tasks that that recruiting professionals, the professionals were doing previously. Is that affecting commission? Our commission is going down because um part of the commission is not just landing a candidate, it's doing all that other stuff. Or are we seeing those remaining about the same?
Speaker 3:so we don't. We don't pay commissions for our recruiters. They're all on base salaries. Um, we, my chro and I have kind of bounced the idea around previously about doing that, given that we're, you know, a high performing culture. And this is just my humble opinion by the way, this is not a person view necessarily. I actually think having commissions on in-house teams drives the wrong behavior, because then it comes about the financial versus the dedication to the delivery of the business mission. And for me I would always rather recruit. To say to a hiring manager give me one more week, don't hire that person, I know I can find you someone better. That's the kind of recruiter I want in my team versus I just want to get this right, close and get off my plate. So I honestly couldn't answer the commission piece because my team are not aligned there. I know that there's a lot of fairly big agencies in the UK right now closing, so maybe that's an indication and just finally for today, jen, how can our listeners connect with you?
Speaker 2:so maybe that's linkedin you and I already connected, by the way. Thank you very much. Uh, maybe it's email address. Maybe you're super cool and all over tiktok and places. And, of course, how can they learn more about?
Speaker 3:pearson. So I um, I'm on linkedin as as you would expect, so that would be the best place to find me and I'm not don't consider myself an influencer, I'm not really big in the in the social space, and Pearsonjobs is where you can come and learn more about us and who we are and what we do, and hopefully find yourself an outside of the table one day excellent and as always, of course, listeners.
Speaker 2:The links will be in the show notes if your pencil broke when you're trying to write down all that information. Jen, that just leaves me to say for today thank you very much for being my guest on this episode of the hr chat show thank you so much for having me. I've really enjoyed our chat good, and then I'm going to bother you about doing more in the future and listeners as always. Until next time, happy working.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening to the HR Chat Show. If you enjoyed this episode, why not subscribe and listen to some of the hundreds of episodes published by HR Gazette and remember for what's new in the world of work. Subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit hrgazettecom.
