In this special Year-End Wrap-Up of Talent All Stars, host Dave Travers reflects on the conversations that shaped the talent landscape in 2025. Through insights from leaders across healthcare, real estate, retail, technology, aviation, gaming, and more, this episode breaks down the five themes that defined how the best teams hired, developed, and retained talent this year.
Dave revisits the voices behind these insights, including Yvette Hansen (Baylor Scott and White Health), Danielle Kensinger (Cushman and Wakefield), Jim D’Amico (Caliber), Jane Curran (JLL), Claire MacIntyre (Sam’s Club), Sara Tilley (ServiceNow), Mike Aronson (Johnson Controls), Scott Sell (Mercy), Jennifer Christie (DocuSign), Brian Riley (Riot Games), Tiffany Haley (Vanguard), Raul Valentin (ABM), Greg Muccio (Southwest Airlines), John Heyliger (Lockheed Martin), and Cindi Harper (Intel). Each offers a grounded look at the shifts redefining talent acquisition and HR in real time.
Together, these leaders reveal the five biggest takeaways from 2025:
Across these themes, the message is clear. The most successful talent teams in 2025 did more than fill roles. They anticipated needs, shaped strategy, influenced executives with data, and created workplaces where employees could grow faster than the market was changing.
Connect with the guests and check their Talent All-Stars episodes below!
Yvette Hansen:
Talent All-Star Episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTfGfgaWNwQ
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yvettehansen/
Danielle Kensinger:
Talent All-Star Episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqBMhxa1mUc
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielle-kensinger-262bb744/
Jim D’Amico:
Talent All-Star Episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NdXrFH4UUg
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimdamico/
Jane Curran:
Talent All-Star Episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ei5Jpy4ap_Y
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jane-curran-1556715/
Claire MacIntyre:
Talent All-Star Episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q65jlhkNJtg
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/claire-macintyre/
Sara Tilley:
Talent All-Star Episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXr9CepK-As
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahtilley/
Mike Aronson:
Talent All-Star Episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKn6KGKOtLc
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikearonson/
Scott Sell:
Talent All-Star Episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bGYEyoHkP8
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sellscott/
Jennifer Christie:
Talent All-Star Episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blV7sti27Dk
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-christie-5254866/
Brian Riley:
Talent All-Star Episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGRZ1zCh0NA
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rileybrian/
Tiffany Haley:
Talent All-Star Episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cr0NMDvAZuU
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tiffany-haley/
Raul Valentin:
Talent All-Star Episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKWT-PGnT70
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rauljvalentin/
Greg Muccio:
Talent All-Star Episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bguj_CkicI
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-muccio/
John Heyliger:
Talent All-Star Episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=443vOAbS55o
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stem-workforce-transformation-data/
Cindi Harper:
Talent All-Star Episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3EcM9f45pQ
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cindi-harper-75aba0/
Connect with us:
💻 All Episodes: TalentAllStars.com
💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ziprecruiter/
💼 Dave’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davetravers/
📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ziprecruiter
🎵TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ziprecruiter
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[00:00:00] Dave Travers: Hey, it's Dave Travers, the president of ZipRecruiter and host of Talent All-Stars. We deconstruct the day-to-day work of talent professionals at some of the most influential companies in the world. Today's episode is a little bit different. This is our 2025 best of episode, where we highlight five of the biggest lessons that stood out from this year's conversations from automation and adaptability to financial fluency.
These are the topics on the minds of the world's best talent leaders. The first big theme of 2025 is becoming bionic. Time and again, we heard that AI and automation aren't here to replace recruiters. They're here to help them spend more time on the work that really matters, building relationships, understanding the business, and hiring better people faster.
Let's start with Yvette Hansen, director of Talent Acquisition at Baylor Scott and White Health, who explains how one simple change saved her team over 10,000 hours a year.
[00:00:54] Yvette Hansen: We did a time study for recruiters. We tried to figure out how much time is it taking at each step in the process, and we documented that time, but then I sent that time study to two other groups of recruiters and said, Can you validate this for me?
What would you change? How is there a step I forgot about that other recruiters forgot about? Or would you take longer because your job family requires this much information or this much time? So you take that time study, and you say, Okay, here's the time study. Are there any steps in this process that I could automate?
We wanted to start a pilot where a candidate applied for a job, and if they answered all of their questions favorably, which we all have questions posted, right? Like, you ask them all these questions, they're known as the basic advertised qualifications, right? Do they have those? And if they meet them, usually the recruiter sends 'em an email, says, Hey, you met our qualifications.
We'd love to talk to you. Let's schedule some time to connect. There's a piece of automation you could add right there. Instead of going back and forth with a candidate or having a coordinator do that, you can add a scheduling link, right? If you have technology, and most everybody does these days, you can add a link, and that will minimize all of the back and forth time. I think we estimated by adding that scheduling link in a single year, we saved over 10,000 hours of back-and-forth time with a candidate that the recruiters got back on their calendars.
[00:02:06] Dave Travers: Next, Danielle Kensinger from Cushman and Wakefield talks about how AI can eliminate dull administrative tasks, freeing up recruiters to focus on the high-value work that drives impact.
[00:02:18] Danielle Kensinger: Our guiding principle from a TA perspective is everything that we can do to maximize human interaction. Take backend or administrative services off of the recruiters, the TA coordinators, and the sourcers. That's our strategy right now. So there are, of course functionalities where an AI bot can interview somebody for you or try to actually communicate with a candidate.
We're not really going there. We want our recruiters to be able to spend as much time with candidates. AI matching of the applicants to see who even fits the basic criteria. Love it. Let's do it. Interview scheduling. Love it. Let's do it. But more of that face-to-face interaction. I'll give you an example. I was at lunch with one of our recruiters.
She was talking to me about her day yesterday, and about this candidate she talked to, and he told her he was gonna interview with another company, and she was like, we can't compete with what they'd be offering him in that role. And she goes, but I asked him, can we like have another call and meet next week?
I was like, Oh, that's great. We're gonna kind of keep talking to him, even though you don't think she'd take the role. She's like, yeah, I really wanna hear what they asked him about the interview, and just keep a relationship going with him. That long-term game, right, that they'll have time to do if AI can take some of those other tasks off of them. So that's what we're really shooting for.
[00:03:36] Dave Travers: Jim D’Amico, VP of Talent Acquisition at Caliber, sees AI is more of an enabler rather than a replacer. Here's what he had to say.
[00:03:45] Jim D'Amico: I think the part of the problem we have, Dave, in the industry as a whole, is that too many people think of AI as the great replacer, and we need to think of AI as the great enabler, right?
And from my days running a desk as a recruiter, the most valuable thing to me is the time I'm actually spending with candidates and with hiring managers. Everything else, although it has value, isn't where the greatest value is. So let's. Free up the time of recruiters to do what we really need them to do and be that enabler.
[00:04:19] Dave Travers: And Jane Curran from JLL thinks that AI, when designed the right way, can make life much easier on hiring managers by speeding up the hiring process and making sure it doesn't drag them away from their work.
[00:04:31] Jane Curran: I think I've gotten a lot smarter in the last, probably three to five years in this space because at first, when I like maybe was early on in leadership roles.
You know, you have all these vendors coming at you so often in recruitment, and if you start to listen to all of 'em, it can get pretty dangerous. So I think I've become a better buyer of technology, and then also reflecting, well, can we build this? Do we need to buy? And then more recently, as some of our vendors have become more relevant.
Well, do I need all these point solutions, or can I stick with an enterprise that can do more? So I think it's just taking your time to listen and understand, but also I wanna be the driver of change. I don't wanna ever have somebody come in and tell me like, you have to disrupt your whole function 'cause it's too big and it isn't innovative.
I'm like, no, we're gonna disrupt, and we're gonna be innovative. Because that's where I wanna be in the room where it happens. So, like we do have a centralized AI team. I do know who they are. We do talk on a regular basis. I have an amazing tech partner, and I would say together with her, we're charting the future and deciding.
Who to partner with to build, buy, or borrow. What are we gonna do with our tech stack? So I just feel really lucky to be in an organization that it's a people business, right? We provide commercial real estate to owners and occupiers through technology, but also through people. So it's just constantly learning.
Like I'm listening to podcasts like yours, listening to other podcasts, and reading. I have my own network. When you're kind of like, Hmm, is this real or not real? Sometimes, if you listen to too many pitches, vendor pitches, you can get lost in like, we need this, and we need this. And then all of a sudden, you reflect bac,k and you're like, that's not even a thing yet.
You know that's, they're not selling you something that's even been proven. So I just think I've gotten a lot smarter and then realized how important it is if it is something that has legs and we should invest in writing a really strong business case, being very commercial. No one's just going to give me investment dollars.
Be like, oh, that sounds interesting. Sure. How much do you need to do that? No. I mean, I'm proving myself every day, every hour, what have you delivered? How have you delivered? How did that investment pan out? And then through goodbyes and bad buys along the last couple of years, if it didn't work well, then I switch, and I reinvest what I did.
Write a business case for a new business case for something that is more contemporary, more relevant, and what we need.
[00:06:48] Dave Travers: And finally, Claire McIntyre, SVP and Chief People Officer at Sam's Club, sums up the mindset behind all of this experimentation over fear.
[00:06:57] Claire MacIntyre: AI's not actually gonna take your job, but somebody that's using AI really well, probably will.
And if we start to reframe it a little bit to think about it and another formal intelligence, like it's like having a PhD intern sitting beside you all day every day doing what you ask it to do. Or what you ask them to do. If we can reframe this thinking on that, I think that we'll start to embrace it a little bit differently.
And if we think about how do we use AI to create capacity, how do we use AI frankly, so that we get a bit smarter? And a phrase I've been playing a little bit about with my own leadership team is we need to see ourselves as bionic. If we think about ourselves as a bit of a bionic superpower. And just start to try and experiment.
I think we'll find a different orientation towards technology and changes.
[00:07:48] Dave Travers: Our second key takeaway this year is all about potential, not just past experience. The roles we're hiring for today might not even exist three years from now, and the roles that will need in three years, probably don't exist today.
That's why the best recruiters are learning to evaluate adaptability. Curiosity and learning agility just as much as experience. Here's Sarah Tilly from ServiceNow on how she gets candidates to show real examples of adaptability.
[00:08:14] Sarah Tilley: Get them to articulate very real situations that demonstrate their adaptability and adaptability.
To me, there's a lot that goes into that, so that means. They're resilient, right? They get over stuff, and they pivot quickly. They're curious, and they use that information to adapt, have them articulate and press, and probe to really sort of get a sense of how adaptable they are, because I think that that is the.
The number one thing that you want, especially in this moment in time when AI is transforming everything, and I think you really do look for examples, situations, and accomplishments that required adaptability.
[00:08:55] Dave Travers: Next, Danielle returns to explain why hiring for skills, not resumes is becoming essential in a world of rapid change.
[00:09:02] Danielle Kensinger: I think one of the biggest struggles that we're gonna face, again, as the labor shortage comes through. You're looking for the person who's worked in this specific job and had this specific career path, and you're missing out on a whole group of people who likely have the skills that you're looking for, their experiences.
Maybe we're just a little bit different, and we're working to try to make that shift here. Skills-based interviewing, hiring, rather than focusing so much on the experiences.
[00:09:31] Dave Travers: And to close this section, here's Mike Aronson from Johnson Controls who connects curiosity and adaptability to future readiness.
[00:09:39] Mike Aronson: We have to humanize all of what we're doing, make it real to the candidates, and it's not a matter of check the boxes, you meet what I want, but we need to know what they want too. So at the end of the day, we're at the forefront of hiring and helping managers Underst. Positioning the job is as important as executing the job, right?
Nobody wants to hear, this is what I was supposed to do, but when I got here, this is not what I'm doing. And so connecting those dots and being kind of on the leading edge there is really talent acquisitions job, and I think it's so critical today because we are, if we haven't already fully shifted, we're making the shift from an experiential-based, I saw it on the resume, so I know they can do it here to.
They have skills, and now I need to translate those skills into kind of the future of work because in many cases, people are doing jobs that have never existed. And so if you're gonna interview for somebody for a job that you know is relatively new in this digital AI revolution. There's nothing to look back on to say, well, they did it here, so I think they could do it there.
And so we are perfectly positioned to have those conversations and influence managers and really shape the culture and environments that the candidates work to become employees.
[00:10:57] Dave Travers: In lesson number three, the best recruiting teams don't just fill roles. They help grow the people they already have inside the organization.
TA is no longer just about attraction; it's about retention, development, and creating what our guests called talent density, ensuring every hire makes the team stronger. Here's Scott Sell from Mercy on why retention and recruitment are two sides of the exact same coin.
[00:11:20] Scott Sell: Today's retention issue is tomorrow's recruitment issue, and the fact is we have to get to the bottom in terms of why are we losing these individuals, and we take accountability on that from the recruitment side.
Right. Is there, you know, again, are we providing full clarity on what this position is? Tendency for recruiters is part of what we need to do is persuade people, right? I mean, we're not the only organization in town, so we wanna be persuasive, but we also have to be realistic, and we have to be honest. So sometimes it's digging in to say, Hey, are we providing a true vision of what life is like working in this area.
So, I think to your question, you know, in terms of what do you do from the retention standpoint, it starts with having the right leader. Because you know, again, every data point, every article you read out there will say. People don't leave companies, they leave their leaders.
Lot of truth to that, right? I've always said, right or wrong, we spend more time in the workplace than we do at home. And that's just the reality of it. So you wanna make sure you're with people that truly you respect. It is relationship built on honesty, integrity. All of those things. So I think having the right leader in place is important.
But I mean, we, you know, again, we're going through some challenging times, and we know that, you know, the talent market continues to shrink, right? For every five people that are retiring today, there are only two and a half, three entering the workforce. So even if you were naive enough to say, Hey, we're just gonna hunker down and kind of operate the way we are today, that's not gonna work.
So, we have to really, once we get somebody in the door here, if they're culturally connected to who Mercy is and they feel the calling, we have an obligation to help them grow their career here within Mercy. And we've done a really good job with that, uh, over the last couple of years.
[00:13:07] Dave Travers: Meanwhile, Jennifer Christie, Chief People Officer at DocuSign told me that internal mobility isn't just a retention tool. It's a tool for companies to adapt to changing markets.
[00:13:17] Jennifer Christie: I would say one of the things that I'm talking to my TA organization about is ramping up our ability to make internal moves and fill roles internally because there's not gonna be this wide group of talent out there that has deep experience in AI and this type of AI.
I mean, you're gonna have pockets of it, but across all roles, across all functions. You're gonna have to be hiring more for aptitude and ability to learn, and those types of things. But the more that we can lean into the employees that we already have and upskill them and redeploy them across the organization, we'll move faster, and we'll be able to retain them and give them career paths a lot faster than sussing through all these resumes that the jobs and the roles people have don't make any sense.
Don't really tell us if they're gonna be good at this AI stuff, but the people that are in our house. Now that we know that we can evaluate, that's where we need to spend our time. So our ability to fill roles internally. Finally, getting to answer your question, measuring our ability to fill roles internally, I think, is gonna be a differentiator for us.
[00:14:25] Dave Travers: And finally, Brian Riley, VP of Global TA at Riot Games, shares talent density has become a guiding principle for their hiring philosophy.
[00:14:34] Brian Riley: There's a big emphasis at Riot right now on something, we call it talent density, right? We've had years of high-volume hiring, right? And I think we've had a lot of really high-quality hires come through that.
I think in high-volume periods. We also see at times like areas where it's like, ah, like we could've done this interview better. And so. Right now, the emphasis is very much on, let's make sure every hire we make into the organization makes riot better. And so as a matter of talent density, really creating, if you think about just creating dense patches of really talented people within the organization, I think that's the biggest one.
And so my response really, and. We've attempted to quantify this several times. We're still working through the final product is on sort of assessing our quality of hire. What are the key indicators of quality of hire, and what does our work look like relative to that? And that doesn't all lie in the hands of talent acquisition, but talent acquisition certainly plays a big role in bringing those people to the alter.
Getting them into the organization and ensuring we've assessed as thoroughly as possible to ensure that they're gonna be successful at Riot. So I'd say, like the quality of higher metric in particular, I think would be a very important and meaningful metric for us to share with someone like our CEO right now.
[00:15:40] Dave Travers: The fourth takeaway this year is all about language, the language of business. If you want executives to take HR and TA seriously, you have to talk in terms they understand: profit, margins, cost of vacancy, and revenue per employee. Tiffany Haley from Vanguard shares her team's North Star Metric, ensuring that no critical work is delayed because the talent wasn't in place.
[00:16:02] Tiffany Haley: We're kind of in an exciting time around here, and heading into 2025 and six and beyond are gonna be awesome years to be a vanguard. But you really need to know what the business is trying to do, and you need to be watching. Their success and that needs to be as much, or maybe even more so, a measure of your teams.
Like if they are succeeding, that means their talent is performing. We should see ourselves as integral to that. So I would say, you know, you want to be able to converse with your business leaders in a way that says, okay, I know you're looking to increase this by this much this year. I think it's gonna take the deployment of these skills.
Some we don't have, some that we don't have yet, some that we do, but we need to accelerate. We had that kind of conversation for once. That's one. I said, be versed in that business so it can inform. What you're doing in the talent space. From an actual TA perspective, though, I'd want leaders to understand like what we're after is having no critical work be delayed because the talent wasn't here on time or because the wrong person was there.
And so we have that as a north star in TA when we're talking to the business to say, not like how many fills do we have? What work has begun, what strategic projects are right on schedule, and what's waiting. You know, because something big out there is supposed to happen as soon as this person's in place.
So my team's accountable making sure that's not a day late and it's the right person, right? So I think when we're talking to the business, we want them to understand, we see it not in our dashboard, but we see it on their work getting going with the right person in the seat, and that person being successful.
Then we think too, once we have helped them match their roles with these persons, we're hoping six months, 12 months later, neither that candidate or that hiring manager have any buyer's remorse. 'cause that's a credit to our assessment process and the, the, the way we successfully pitched the reality of working at Vanguard, the reality of the opportunity we have to offer you and the reality of what our culture is like and, and you know, kind of the fabric of this place.
That's to make sure the candidate is satisfied, but then on making sure we screen for the skills. We don't want these interviews to just be chitchat, like we want to relate to folks, but we know we have a job to find out if the skills are there, and so if we've done our job, there's no buyer's remorse on either side, so I want leaders to know that.
Then, when we look back over a year, people that joined the company. How are both parties feeling about that? And then also I hope that the business can understand that we're getting more and more efficient at how we do that. Um, 'cause again, delay is bad for everybody, and quality is very important. So we wanna be able, if asked, to describe how we've become a more efficient shop to serve them.
And I think if you can have that dialogue with leaders, you don't have to get too far in the weeds of how we do it and all, but I think at high levels are some of the things that we'd be proud to talk about.
[00:18:36] Dave Travers: One of my favorite episodes this year was with Raul Valentine from ABM, wherein he spoke of his own career and how he was able to rise to the position of CHRO. Here's what he had to say.
[00:18:47] Raul Valentin: My first job outta college was actually in operations. I worked for a retailer, then I did a rotation into like personnel. I'll date myself. Before it was hr, and in that rotation, what I found was I was moving very quickly, and I was being promoted and I was, people were like saying, Hey, we love working with you.
It was because I was speaking the language of the business, not the language of hr, and I didn't know any better. I felt like, well, of course this is what I was, but when they were having problems in a store or with an employee, I had the perspective of what that was like, 'cause I was a manager. I was on the floor.
I was dealing with this, and that served me well throughout the rest of my career, I would say. Then, once in HR, for me at least, it was about getting experiences, and early on I had no idea I would. What I wanted to be when I grew up type thing. You know, probably a few years ago, I was still saying, what am I gonna be when I grow up?
I liked what I was doing. I was always open or curious about different opportunities within HR. So whether it was a generalist job or a recruiting job, or being given other opportunities, global expansion jobs, going to work on m and as, I've pretty much said yes to everything. That was sometimes offered in most cases.
There were a couple of times I said no, and what I learned when I said no was. I was really narrow in my thinking when I saw other people take the job that I said, oh, that's not a job for me. That seems like a very narrow, I'd see someone take the job and make it something much more than I thought it could be, and I was, wow.
I'm limiting myself. Like someone's asking me about an opportunity, and I'm saying no for the all the wrong reasons. So that taught me to say yes. Um, and then take that perspective of being curious, learning, and again, always remembering to learn the business. Like, what am I trying to solve for which we're a support function?
And I do believe support's not a dirty word, like it's the business is the business. The more I know the business, the better I can support the business and partner with the business and gain their respect.
[00:20:30] Dave Travers: And Greg Muccio from Southwest Airlines rounds it out with a smart look at the cost of vacancy and how faster, better hiring directly drives business value.
[00:20:40] Greg Muccio: We've been working on a thing we started at the end of last year, but that really kicked it off at the beginning of this year. Left of rec. So it's sort of our rallying cry, right? And it's just about to get all of our, or as much as our activity left of rec, but the two big outputs from that are a reduction in the cost of vacancy, right?
So it's just, it's a different, it's another way of saying the speed of hire, but when you begin to change it and work with the business to go, Hey, if we were able to fill your roles. 20% faster than what we normally do. Is there a value in that at all? And there's not a single one that's not gonna say yes and then help you with that metric.
And the other one is quality of hire, right? And like real quality of hire. You know, how fast do they hit the ground running? How ready? How into, you know, how excited are they to start? To me, you referenced Disney. I would imagine that my family, we were Monster Disney fans, and so I would imagine that people that work there, especially on that first day or whatever, is just that excitement that's there.
And so I think those are the two really big things. And, I always joke when somebody is like, why are those the two? And I'm like, well, I've been doing this, you know, recruiting thing for 20, 29 years now. I'm still waiting for a hiring leader to tell me we're going too fast for them and we're sending them too many good people.
That's not happened. I'm not counting on it. So until that does, that obviously is something that really strikes a balance. But I think for the audience that's listing, when you start really talking and shifting that conversation around the cost of vacancy and what that can mean, depending on your organization, depending on the role that you start speaking in a different level of terminology
A different level to that suite of individuals that is like, okay, wait a minute. You were kind of a warm and fuzzy group, and we weren't really sure, but wait a minute, you are showing me, 'cause we realize that this person creates a value every day that they're in this, where they're sales, or it's operational or whatever, that they have this value.
And I now understand that by getting them there sooner. We've reduced that, and then it has a financial bottom line to the company. And I just, I like that. And trying to shift that because I think it just. Really helps show the value of what TA can do for any organization.
[00:23:08] Dave Travers: Our fifth and final insight might be the most important for the year ahead.
Stop waiting to take orders. Talent acquisition has to lead, not just respond. That means forecasting future needs, understanding where skill gaps exist, and building pipelines before the business even asks. Here's John Heyliger from Lockheed Martin on why workforce planning has become his top priority.
[00:23:29] John Heyliger: How do you allow for candidates and employees to see their future?
Here's where I want to go. What skills do I need? How do we set up learning systems, credentialing how we post jobs and opportunities in a way that they can see that as a part of the career path they wanna pursue. On the other side, you have leaders that have talent. You have programs that need skills.
How can they see the full supply of talent? Internal, external, know that when they're gonna have a need. Coming up through forecasted talent demand that they can, they know that those skills are gonna exist, or they can take action to develop or recruit those. It's this whole marketplace concept. So it's not just talent acquisitions, talent development, it's total rewards.
It's all those things. And it's kind of leads me to a key pivot. We know in HR we need to make is not just how do we fill a job or how do we develop this person. It's a systemic HR or what we also refer to as integrated talent solutions. So it's not just like I said, I have a job to fill. I'm gonna go fill it.
Let's look at the, you know, the broader talent supply and demand issue. And we use cyber as a big skill. We, you know, we look in security, it engineering, so we actually have an integrated, what we call a product team or a talent solution team. What we're looking at structures to attract them. What talent demand are we gonna need?
Does the external market supply those, or do we need to make sure we double down internally to upskill, remove them? So it's taking the transformation, common processes, core technology, leveraging AI into this talent marketplace concept so we can deliver a model and HR to support the business in that, that integrated talent solution concept.
[00:25:07] Dave Travers: Next, Mike Aronson from Johnson Controls explains how TA can move from tactical order taking to true strategic partnership.
[00:25:15] Mike Aronson: Spend the time having a more meaningful conversation about the talent market, pulling market data. Let's review some resumes on the launch call in the intake session and calibrate on the job description showing up rather than being an order taker, be more strategic, be more valuable, and say, this is what you can expect and this is what the market dictates, and this is what I need from you, and this is what I'll get back to you, and those sorts of things.
So rather than us sitting back and saying, you got a new requisition, what do you need? We should be saying, all right, here's how this is gonna go. I mean, kind of back to tactics versus strategy, right? Here's the plan versus what is the plan. And so for us, it's making those connections, making the technologies easier, making the processes more transparent and simple.
To show that we're ready because that's gonna continue to happen, right? We're gonna continue to bring on new and evaluate new tools and technologies.
[00:26:08] Dave Travers: And finally, Cindy Harper from Intel Shares how bringing data to the conversation transforms how HR and business leaders collaborate
[00:26:16] Cindi Harper: Reports that kind of show, here's the makeup of your organization today.
And so when you say that business leader X, like what exactly do you see evolving? Did you know you have X number of software engineers, yet you say you need to grow that. What is the actual skill within that software engineering population? Or are we not optimizing the talent you have today, and it becomes a much deeper conversation that you're adding value, bringing that to the table?
Or did you not? You know what? These are your hotspots. I hear you say these things, but the data actually shows these might be your hotspots. You're losing technologists in this area; you're losing technicians in this area or this location faster than you are here? You didn't call that out. Is that not a problem?
And I think that starts the conversation, and you're an equal partner at the table. You're not just asking, I almost like, yeah, yeah. I'm, I'm overwhelmed. The leader's typically overwhelmed. They got so much on their plates, so coming with nothing and just starting like, what do you need, Dave? Instead of saying, Hey Dave, I've analyzed your organization and let's talk about this a little bit.
I see some of these as hotspots. Uh, I wanna make sure I have a good pipeline built for you. When you have that, do you see that the same way?
[00:27:30] Dave Travers: So to recap, here are the five biggest takeaways from this year's talent. All Stars conversations embrace AI and automation to maximize human interaction, shift hiring, and focus on adaptability, curiosity, and future skills. Third, make internal mobility and development core parts of your TA strategy. Fourth, measure your success in business terms, not just HR metrics.
And five, move from reactive hiring to proactive workforce planning. We'll link to each episode mentioned in the show notes so you can dig deeper into each conversation. That wraps up an incredible year on Talent All-Stars. Thank you for listening, subscribing, rating the show, and sharing it with your teams.
And as always, if you find these conversations valuable, please rate and review Talent All-Stars on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It really helps more people discover the show. Thanks for watching or listening, and we'll see you right back here next year.