2024 Talent Reports: Insights and Actions for the Age of AI
It’s a watershed moment for the business world and how it builds and develops workforces. Three tectonic events — the lightning-fast rise of generative AI, the shift to a skills-based approach to talent, and the bringing together of TA and L&D for a holistic approach to talent management — have arrived to make this a time of epic change and opportunity.
As the vice president of talent at LinkedIn, I’m fortunate to have a front-row seat for all three of these transformations.
My role, leading talent acquisition and talent development, is a new one for both me and LinkedIn. And it’s an exciting one. Because if we get this right, work and careers will become more fulfilling and meaningful, and employees and companies can flourish in a virtuous cycle.
But how do we get it right?
No one has all — or maybe even most — of the answers. We’re all rewriting our playbooks. So, I’m delighted to announce that LinkedIn has surveyed talent professionals around the world, talked to experts in the field, and scoured our own platform data (collected from 1 billion members worldwide) to generate the 2024 Talent Reports: Insights and Actions for the Age of AI. These two separate but closely related thought leadership reports — the 2024 Workplace Learning Report and the The Future of Recruiting 2024 report — launch today.
The changing talent landscape
The timing for these reports couldn’t be better. Despite economic headwinds and the ever-tightening scrutiny on budgets, our surveys show that companies clearly understand that this is a turning point for talent, and they are planning to seize the moment. In the next six months, nine out of 10 global executives plan to increase or keep steady their investment in learning and development and more than eight out of 10 plan the same for talent acquisition.
While this continued investment in talent is essential, knowing where and how to invest can be another challenge. For example, while just 38% of U.S. executives are currently helping their employees become AI-literate, the Workplace Learning Report tells us that fully 80% of employees say they want to learn AI skills for their professions. These reports can help shape how you invest both your time and your money.
As I read these reports, I came back — time and again — to the three major factors at play in reshaping how we find and develop talent:
• Skills-based. Skills are the thread that pulls our candidate and employee life cycle together. And as we reshape our talent strategies, we need to think expansively about knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) and grapple with the critical importance of understanding skill proficiencies.
• Talent management. My new role reflects the belief LinkedIn has in the benefits of a unified approach to talent. As we move into the future of work, we will need more and more leaders who have experiences and perspectives from different parts of the business — like, say, TA and L&D — and fewer who are niche leaders with deep expertise in one thing only.
• AI. As talent leaders, our roles should be to help our teams and organizations develop a mindset in which they see AI as a net new thing that is going to help them do their jobs better or help them focus on the parts of their jobs that they most enjoy doing. Let’s encourage them to look for more and more ways to include it in their workflows.
I encourage you to read the full reports, which are chock-full of helpful and sometimes provocative data, analysis, and forward-looking ideas. But I also want to share three of my favorite takeaways from each report.
Three takeaways — on the importance of alignment, AI skills, and career development — from the Workplace Learning Report
1. Align learning strategy to business strategy. For the second year in a row, the crucial importance of aligning talent strategy to business strategy was the No. 1 priority for L&D leaders. As well it should be. The C-suite needs to give talent strategy the same weight it has historically given the product road map or sales strategy. Fortunately, what I’m hearing from peers around the globe is that more and more frequently there’s a seat at the executive table with their name on it.
2. Lean into AI skills — for your people and for yourself. The need to provide employees with the tools to learn more about generative AI is clear: 4 out of 5 people want to learn more about how to use AI in their professional roles. LinkedIn wants to make this easy for you, so we’re unlocking 250 AI-related courses and making them free until April 5, 2024.
3. Invest in career development to keep employees learning new, vital skills and to keep them happy. I love the phrase that the Workplace Learning Report attaches to career development, calling it a “virtuous cycle.” Employee growth spurs company growth, which spurs employee engagement, retention, and further growth. You can also call that a “win-win,” and I’m delighted to share that LinkedIn Learning is rolling out new career development tools that will help your employees and your company advance.
Three takeaways — on the importance of AI tools, skills-based hiring, and “full stack” recruiting — from the Future of Recruiting Report
1. Leverage AI to supercharge recruiting. It’s inevitable that AI, and specifically generative AI, is going to have a huge impact on the work we do. I agree with the 62% of recruiting professionals who express optimism about AI’s impact on recruiting. As the report notes, TA teams are already using GAI to write (or rewrite) job descriptions, personalize outreach, source candidates, and match employees with open positions. Of course, it will still be the human skills that set the great recruiters apart.
2. Implement skills-based hiring. Fully 73% of the recruiting professionals we surveyed say hiring based on skills is a priority. And it makes sense, right? Focusing on skills can not only increase talent pools by up to 10x, it can help you develop a more diverse — and more productive and innovative — workforce. To fill skills gaps, TA leaders will need to partner with L&D to ensure their organizations have the right upskilling and internal mobility programs in place. In fact, 84% of recruiters this year say that TA and L&D need to work more closely, up six percentage points from 2023.
3. Increase your agility by developing recruiters who are “full stack” and can work seamlessly across different domains. There’s a good reason the insights team at LinkedIn recently found that adaptability is the skill with the biggest increase in demand over the last year. Recruiters, in particular, need to be nimble and cross-functional as never before. Glen Goodman, the chief talent officer at ChenMed, says something in the report that resonates with me: “You have to build a recruiting team that you can suddenly point in a different direction tomorrow.”
Final thoughts: The future is agile and “full stack”
At LinkedIn, we also want to develop “full stack” leaders who have experience in and knowledge about many different areas of the business as generative AI reduces some of the need for domain-specific expertise.
And that’s a reason I’m particularly glad to see LinkedIn launching these two thought leadership reports together, to get talent leaders thinking holistically about the difficult challenges and exciting opportunities presented by what feels like a pivotal moment for workforces everywhere. I encourage you, regardless of where you sit in your organization, to read both the 2024 Future of Recruiting and the 2024 Workplace Learning Report and share the insights and key points with your colleagues.
