Last fall, I sat in a conference room at Talent Connect 2024 surrounded by senior recruitment leaders digging into a discussion about the impact of artificial intelligence. AI is no longer new and many leaders are curious and experimenting but most are still early on their adoption journey.

One CEO sat in that room, surrounded by arid desert, and expressed genuine fear. “This isn’t great,” he said. “We are all going to be replaced by technology and I’m going to have to significantly reduce my workforce. I’m no tech guy and I don’t really understand what’s going on right now.”

The conversation in the room shifted to one of concern, focusing on what will be left behind and the threat of change. I sat back and watched it play out, until eventually another chief executive stepped up with a far more optimistic take. She talked about the power of the recruitment industry to materially change people’s lives, at a time when employment dominates at least a third of our lives and Gen Z is looking to switch roles every two years.

“We have never been more needed,” she said. “We can sit back, or we can embrace the opportunity to redefine ourselves and our value proposition.”

The truth is the real tension in that room is not about technology but about the reinvention of what it means to be a recruiter. And that’s because we now live in a world where the pace of change is such that even if we’re not changing jobs, our jobs are changing on us. We know that 70% of the skills that were needed for the average job in 2015 are going to be different by 2030, so we need to change the way we hire. And skills need to be at the heart of that.

Skills have to be the new currency

In our current knowledge-based economy, hiring decisions have been centered on formal education and past job titles, with both of those serving as a proxy for what someone might be able to do.

But as we move into what Aneesh Raman, LinkedIn’s chief economic opportunity officer, calls the innovation age, computers will know so much that technical skills will no longer be what matters. Instead, workers will need attributes like creativity, curiosity, and courage to stand out, and those can’t be judged so easily by past accomplishments.

My son has just sat his 11-plus exams to get into high school, and he asked me the other day about the skills he’s going to need to get a good job and build a successful career. He’s a smart boy but I told him that what will set him apart will be his ability to have good human conversations, to be relatable, compassionate, and communicative.

Those are the skills that the future recruiter will have to identify because in an era of unending transformation businesses will be looking for agile talent that can be reskilled and upskilled to meet demand.

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