AI Is Replacing Many of the Skills That We Used to Recruit For. Here Are the Skills That It Will Be Hard for AI to Replace.
In 2009, I stepped into an HR Manager role for a Fortune 500 company, where I spent plenty of time partnering with our Talent Acquisition team. Some of our conversations centered around hiring people for a current opening while also working to understand if they had the capacity to grow into roles of increasing responsibility. Our conversations about productivity and potential went far beyond any list of KSAs you could find on a job description. The essence of those conversations rings especially important for me in this current moment, where the advances in AI are making us question what skills are important for humans to bring to our organizations.
AI disruption is very real in today’s workplace. Hours of document review or legal research done by attorneys? Very effectively done by AI. Years of experience and expertise needed by doctors to read scans and diagnose patients? Very effectively done by AI. Since AI excels in so many areas, it’s becoming hard to distinguish what skills we should be focused on as Talent Acquisition professionals. For me, the essence of the skills we should focus on goes back to those discussions from 2009. The following skills were central to our conversations then and will continue to be unique to talented humans for the foreseeable future.
Human Connection.
I often say that humans make decisions based on emotion, then rationalize those decisions with logic. We have a basic need to seek connection. Candidates who generate a human connection tap into emotional needs that we all have. Even if an AI bot can give you compassionate responses on a screen, AI cannot replace people who forge authentic human connections in real life.
Leadership.
In this context, I define leadership as the ability to get a group of people to buy-in to a shared vision. We humans like our tribes. We love it when a person can make us feel like we’re part of something bigger, part of a tribe that shares a mission to accomplish something meaningful.
Political Savvy.
The ability to understand the shifting wants and needs, both expressed and unexpressed, of a matrix of stakeholders within an organization is a deft human skill. Those who have political savvy and use it for productive purposes are an accelerant for the success of any organization.
Ethics.
The longer I go in my career, the more I understand that a strong moral compass is essential in business. This isn’t about legal or illegal, this is about the significant gray areas that exist in many facets of our work life. Now, I’m not saying interviews should come equipped with philosophy questions, but it is important that we are bringing high-character people into our organizations.
I could mention more skills, but Ethics is a good place to end. Because when fill-in-the-blank huge tech company asks if we should enable Skynet, I want some ethical people in the room to reconsider.
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