Marty McFly’s preview of 2015 may not have been true to our reality, but the changes the recruiting profession has undergone in the last 30 years resemble something out of Back to the Future.

During a keynote at LinkedIn’s Talent Connect Summit last month, Erin Scruggs, the platform’s VP of talent acquisition, shared how the field has changed since 1995 when she landed her first recruiting job at a Baltimore-based staffing agency that primarily placed contractors in government roles.

“In that era, a recruiter spent most of their time focused on the thrill of the hunt, finding the names and contact information of people who could do a particular job,” she told the audience.

She recounted a time when she raised her hand to take on the arduous task of placing a candidate in a nuclear reactor mechanic role that required experience working on a Nimitz class aircraft carrier, a nuclear-powered Navy warship. The role went unfilled for weeks, and the firm had no proprietary matches.

Scruggs spent 10 business days researching the role and leads, including calling the Navy’s personnel department, which faxed her the names and numbers of military outplacement specialists, who then recommended veterans that she could contact. Ultimately, she found nine candidates who fit the criteria. One was interested and took the job.

Fast forward to today, Scruggs is able to find 312 candidates who fit that same criteria in a matter of seconds using LinkedIn’s AI recruiting tools. These recent technological advancements have freed up much of the busy work recruiters slog through daily. And it’s made the profession much more strategic than some had given it credit for, Scruggs said.

“My dad [had] three PhDs and two masters. He was a physicist, so smart. I went into recruiting…I was doing a lot of repeatable tasks every day, and I could tell he was like, ‘It’s not a smart profession.’ And I just think it’s so different now,’” Scruggs recalled in an interview with HR Brew.

“It’s such a smart, strategic profession of trying to predict the future, trying to influence, [and] help people think more broadly about talent,” she added. “It’s become not at all transactional now, and I think it’s showing the recruiters what’s possible and what they could be thinking about and framing that around the problems we need to solve.”

Recruiting in the AI future. As AI technology advances, recruiters will have more capabilities at their disposal. Scruggs is excited for talent acquisition professionals to harness the increased availability of data and insights.

“There’s so much that we can do just from a data insights perspective that we just have no capacity to do today,” she said. One barrier HR teams have to accessing and using said data is privacy. As employers develop responsible AI use practices, leaders will have to ensure they’re updated to keep up with developments, she said.

Beyond the immediate impact of AI tools, HR professionals could also see long-term effects of technological advancements. For example, she expects AI will disrupt how companies approach talent management and skills.

“I talk to a lot of peers who are really deeply investing in building their skills architecture,” Scruggs said, adding that talent leaders are asking questions like: “How many job families do we have? What are the skills for each? How do you show what skills are transferable within the organization?”

Scruggs said LinkedIn is contemplating building a universal skills taxonomy that can be used by different organizations. Others, including Walmart and Home Depot, are also discussing developing a universal skills classification.

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