2025 in Focus: How Global Leaders are Reimagining Workforce Transformation

[0:00:24] John Lynch: Good morning, everybody. Great to have you here. Thank you so much for joining. We'll just give it a couple of minutes while everyone logs in. This is our last webinar of 2024, so thank you for making time in the middle of what I'm sure is a busy season to spend some time with us.

While people join, please get into the chat and tell us where you're dialing in from and who you are. We'd love to hear more about you. My name is John Lynch, and I lead content and communications at TalentNeuron.

Before we begin, I’ll briefly go over our agenda and what to expect from today’s session. So, great to see some early folks here — thank you for dropping your name in.

Let me go over your webinar experience and our session. This will be a 45-minute roundtable with our guests. We'll hear from them shortly, but we're discussing our view into 2025. As part of that, we want to hear from you about your concerns and priorities for next year.

On the right side of the screen, you'll see our chat and Q&A function. Start thinking about questions for our panel. Our topic of conversation is next year — planning season is in full swing, and I'm sure you're in the midst of it too. What issues concern you most? How do you think your priorities will change next year? If so, how and why? We want to hear your thoughts and questions, so please get involved.

We have our own perspective on these questions. In the Docs section on the right, you'll find our latest blog with more on that.

To optimize your viewing experience, there's a square box in the bottom-right corner of your screen — expanding it will make the visuals bigger as needed. Most of the time, we'll be on camera, so you'll be seeing our panelists.

If you have questions about TalentNeuron or the topics we’ll discuss today, you can request a demo at the top of the screen. Otherwise, there won't be much product talk today — we're focusing on plans for next year.

That's my introduction, but I want to introduce the rest of our panel. Today, Dave, Elin, and Christian from the TalentNeuron team are joining us. Hey, guys, we'll introduce you shortly.

First, a warm welcome to Yazad Dalal from our partner, Joveo. Hi, Yazad! Thank you so much for being here and making time. How are you?

[0:03:19] Yazad Dalal: I'm very well. Thanks for having me. Excited to be with all of you on the TalentNeuron team.

[0:03:24] John Lynch: Awesome. Thank you for joining us. Could you give a little introduction to yourself?

[0:03:31] Yazad Dalal: Sure. I'm Yazad Dalal. I'm the Chief Growth Officer here at Joveo. Joveo is probably one of the world leaders in recruitment marketing, but in the most modern form, which I'm sure we'll talk a lot about. But it's an AI-driven recruitment marketing platform. So, essentially, we help great companies find great people. We do it at a major scale. And if we do our jobs right and when we're successful for our clients, we're doing it faster, cheaper, and higher quality delivery for them, delivering applications that turn into great hires and helping them with that conversion across that process.

[0:04:08] John Lynch: Awesome. Thank you again so much for being here. Elin, I think you're the next person to introduce. How are you?

[0:04:16] Elin Thomasian: Hello. And I love seeing everybody from around the globe on this webinar, so thank you for joining. I'm Elin Thomasian. I'm the Head of Workforce Strategy and Consulting here at TalentNeuron, where we help you with anything surrounding workforce transformation, strategic workforce planning, and talent attraction strategies. Very excited to join our wonderful top leaders here. Thank you, John.

[0:04:43] John Lynch: Thank you for being here. Christian.

[0:04:47] Christian Vetter: Hi, everybody. I'm Chris. I've been in the SWP [Strategic Workforce Planning] space for 15 years. I'm a founder of the HRForecast company, which, for about 2 months, has been part of the TalentNeuron family. Excited to be here and to listen to your questions.

[0:05:04] John Lynch: Delighted. Thanks so much, Christian. And Dave.

[0:05:11] David Wilkins: Hey everybody. I'm Dave Wilkins, Chief Product and Strategy Officer for TalentNeuron. I’ve been in the HCM [Human Capital Management] space now for a little over 30 years. Super excited to have this conversation today with such a great group of folks. So, I am really looking forward to the conversation.

[0:05:32] John Lynch: Amazing. Thank you all so much for being here. It's an honor to host the last webinar of the year. We have a great panel and audience. I want to set up what we're going to talk about today. For our audience, we want to ensure we're hearing your questions and perspectives. But first, let's talk about our perspective and what we've been doing this year.

Recently, TalentNeuron published new research on the evolution of HR roles over the last several years. It's a breakdown of how skills requirements have changed in different roles, informed by a survey of HR leaders worldwide. Our interest is in hearing how they're approaching strategic planning and their concerns for 2024.

If you go to the Docs section, you can download the Evolution of HR e-book, which contains some of this data. One key highlight from this research is the diverse set of priorities leaders should consider when formulating business plans. The overarching driver of strategic workforce planning, as shown in the results, is supply and demand — understanding where to get critical talent and what exactly needs to be hired. But HR leaders also have to consider multiple internal and external factors, including competitive pressure, technological changes, location expansion, and unpredictable elements like mergers and acquisitions.

None of these exist in isolation. In fact, it's a combination of elements that must be factored into strategic planning every year. This year, we published a list of factors and forces that will impact HR in 2025. This breakdown of external forces outlines potential challenges.

Our perspective is that while your North Star goal may be understanding talent supply and demand, many external factors influence that. For example, the increased adoption of AI and automation technology is a top concern. Economic and trade tensions also create pressures, especially in manufacturing, but not exclusively. These factors drive the need for new strategies and approaches to talent acquisition to help move organizations forward.

There's a lot to catch up on and plenty to read if you'd like to explore further. But first, I'd love to hear from our audience. This is a great opportunity to launch a quick poll. We'd like to understand the issues you're focused on for 2025. What factors are shaping your strategic plan?

I'll stop sharing my screen for a moment. Now, let's launch the poll.

Which factors are having the biggest impact on your workforce planning for 2025? What are the most pressing issues for you? We've listed a few options, but feel free to add others in the chat, and we'll address those too.

It's interesting to see that so many people are already focused on AI and automation. That seems to be a major topic of conversation for our customers.

[0:09:21] Elin Thomasian: I think it makes sense that AI and automation goals and role redesign are leading the pack because they do go together. So I love that.

[0:09:29] David Wilkins: That was my first reaction too. Which of those is the train, and which is the caboose, right?

[0:09:38] John Lynch: Alright. This is, even early on, a pretty convincing breakdown. And I think this gives us our kind of "yes" — 30% of votes on AI and automation. But we also have some great stuff in the chat. Thank you, Nicole — supply and demand for accountants. If you're graduating a few CPAs, it's a super interesting topic of conversation around higher ed and skills. So thank you, Nicole.

Offshoring? Yes, absolutely. Location? Labor shortages in rural communities? Absolutely. Loads of location elements there. Yep. Alright, so I think we'll close out the poll. This has given us a good starting point. AI and automation are obviously at the top of everyone's list going into 2025.

And maybe, Yazad, this is a great time for me to start with you and ask a question. A lot of the chats we see on social media or from analysts are about the impact of AI and how it is correlated with talent acquisition. What have you seen from your customers? What are you hearing in the market from a Joveo perspective?

[0:10:51] Yazad Dalal: Well, first of all, no surprise at all that AI and automation are at the top of the heap in that poll. I think that's very consistent with what we're hearing in the market. What's fascinating for us is how exposure to AI has been a real game changer for employers. Companies no longer need to guess where their ideal candidates are, where they spend their time, or how they spend their time. The AI knows. The machine, the platform — it knows. More importantly, not only does it know, but it's also learning and improving with each campaign.

At Joveo, we're seeing cost-per-hire reductions of 30 to 50% in many cases. This is not just about early adopters. We're starting to see a systemic swing toward not just asking which AI tools to use but recognizing the urgency around them. It's not just talent acquisition; the recruiting process itself is becoming much more intelligent.

To share a few examples, chatbots, or what we call conversational AI, can handle initial candidate queries and screening, all that back and forth. They can do it 24/7 in 100+ languages. Ours does all that, and it's becoming common and table stakes. Interview scheduling is automated, eliminating the traditional back-and-forth around calendars. AI also analyzes candidate responses and engagement patterns and predicts job fit and the likelihood of offer acceptance. The entire candidate journey is now optimized through machine learning, creating a seamless experience from the first click on an ad to the final offer.

Where it gets really interesting is that all these advancements are interconnected. The data from recruitment marketing feeds into process optimization, not just for recruiters but also for candidates, which in turn improves marketing. This creates a virtuous cycle of continuous improvement.

There are many other areas where AI is generating excitement, such as resume screening and assessments. But from what we see with our clients, the real game changer has been in recruitment marketing and process automation, especially when it leads to conversions. How do you get the right people to accept offers and get started? Thanks to AI and machine learning, companies can now reach the right talent at the right time, on the right channel, with the right message, in an automated, optimized, and real-time way. That's pretty exciting.

[0:13:58] John Lynch: That's awesome. It's great to hear that we already have so many use cases where HR teams are realizing the value of the tools in front of them.

From our perspective and from where you know, from the customers that we have on the TalentNeuron side, this is also a priority for them. Elin, maybe you'd be the best person to ask you the next question on the value realization piece.

I mean, how many people realize the value of the AI tools they have?

[0:14:32] Elin Thomasian: I think people want to look holistically at the candidate recruiter HR journey in the process of first specifically talking about talent acquisition and think about ways that they can optimize the process where it's visible to the experience, and sometimes it's not visible, and it's working in the background.

So, I think there are different ways you can design AI to work for you that will make it very front-facing. And then there's using a chatbot for your application process or your onboarding process, where that's very visible.

You're talking to a chatbot. It's giving you responses, and you're interacting. And then there are other ways where it's in the background.

It's working to make things faster and more efficient. And I think that's the combination that's going to really resonate going forward: looking at how to use it in different ways.

A lot of times, you won't even know it's being used. It's part of scheduling, coordination, and sourcing. The integration of all these tools is really what's important so that the user's experience does not negatively affect them.

But a lot of our clients come to us and say, "Where do we start?" What's the beginning point for how we use AI? "And one of the first questions I ask them is," Well, you know, what do your systems look like? "What are your technology tools?"

And, you know, are you using all the capabilities that those tools bring you? I'd like to first audit what they already have and what they can easily turn on that they might not have thought about within the tools that already exist before having to think about what else you want to add to complicate your tech stack.

So that would be my advice. You know, where to start is thinking about where you want it to affect the most, where your challenges are, and where you think it's going to give you the biggest ROI. And then, first things first, look at your internal tech stack and see what that offers before you complicate the integration process of all of your technology with the new tool.

And that should give you a starting point if you're wondering where to go from there.

[0:17:05] John Lynch: Awesome. Thank you. I think this is part of what you were talking about, Christian, when you were contributing to the 2025 blog, which is looking forward to the value realization part. Some of it is also getting the talent that can bridge the technology and other factors of HR. Do you call them fusion skills? Is that right?

[0:17:30] Christian Vetter: Yeah. That's correct. We've been monitoring skills developments over the last few years. And with TalentNeuron, one of the key things we do is keep monitoring how concrete skill sets connected to specific profiles evolve. And what you can see if you look at that over time is that we see two extremes developing. One is what we would call very human skills — they really stay super relevant with most profiles — while the other extreme, tech skills, are also much on the rise.

So the idea here is that we believe the most successful companies in the future will not necessarily be the ones that optimize just for technology, but those that optimize on fusing tech and human activities. These skills at the intersection are the ones that need to be optimized so that the processes we used to work on in the past and the ones that will be redesigned in the future transition in the best possible way for the organization.

[0:18:51] John Lynch: Thank you. Yeah, I think we're getting some good interaction here in the chat from people who may be having maturity challenges. Isn't it that, you know, if I could read one of these, Paula, “We're on the same page, currently looking into AI for recruitment specifically. We struggled to hire quickly, and it's having a negative impact on HR's relationship with the operations team.” That's an interesting example. Something interesting about William is that, “We checked AI in the poll, but honestly, it does not impact our workforce planning. We're going to work on opportunities to enhance our teams, but it's a maturity challenge, right?” So, you know, some people are ready to adopt existing AI tools or develop their own.

[0:19:39] David Wilkins: I think there's another angle to all of that too, right? Which is, you know, who's leading the conversation?

When it comes to AI, right? And it's an interesting question of who should be the decision-maker or the driver. It's obviously a technology question at its heart, but it's also a "how does the work get done" question, which is primarily an HR domain question mediated by technology, right?

Some of the work we've been most engaged with clients in the last year are really helping them understand what roles in the business are most likely to be impacted by AI or have the most potential to be AI-fied in some way. The reality is most roles aren't going to go away fully; they're going to partially go away because it's tasks that tend to be automatable, not skills.

Take communication, for example. Communication is a skill, but how you express it is a collection of tasks. I communicate via email, summarize findings and to-dos from a meeting, and have face-to-face conversations with people. Some of what I just said is automatable with AI, and some of it is not. So, the skill of communication is probably not itself AI-fiable, but some of the tasks within it might be.

Jobs are collections of tasks. So, as we think about how this all starts to come together, how do we identify automation potential? It's really by identifying the tasks that are automatable. Then, you end up in situations where 15% of this particular role is automated, and 30% of this other role is automated.

The next big question, which is why Alan and I were commenting on job redesign, is: now that I know some percentages of certain jobs are automatable, I am left with some percentage of jobs that are not. How do I recombine that into a new job and a new role?

Some of the work we've been doing is helping organizations identify opportunities within their existing job architectures. Then, we help them work with their IT teams to prioritize the automation investments that will have the most impact by automating and building AI solutions for the tasks that are most impactful across the most jobs.

Some of the challenges with this are as follows: Who owns it? Who starts it? How do you mediate the conversation between the HR aspect — how work gets done, how we think of work and roles and the associated tasks — and the fact that the actual automation work is IT-driven? Having the ability to hold those thoughtful, prioritized, stack-ranked conversations—ideally led by HR since HR knows the work — is key. That way, HR can direct the IT team on where to place investments, rather than the other way around.

But that means coming to the team with data, insights, and perspective — which is much of what we've been helping organizations provide.

[0:23:02] Yazad Dalal: I was going to say, just to build on what you were saying, David, we're so tempted when something new enters our world to think about how we're going to use it full scale. But I think it's almost always incremental — bite-sized pieces.

If I think about strategic workforce planning, and there's some people here interested in that topic, I saw a couple of questions. How does that fit in for just getting started? How does it impact strategic workforce planning?

A billion years ago, I used to work at an ad agency. I had a big client who paid us a lot of money to do market studies about talent availability, and they would use that data to project how long it would take to fill roles so they could plan their workforce appropriately.

You don't need to do that anymore because there's a machine learning and AI platform that if given the right information, can tell you what talent availability is, what you need to write in job postings, and employer branding to attract the right people, how long it will take to attract them, and how much it will cost. You can get that in an instant.

Taking little bite-sized pieces like that today and incorporating them into your 2025 workforce planning — suddenly, you're using AI. Are you using it on a full scale across your organization? It doesn't have to be. Do it in little incremental steps.

[0:24:32] David Wilkins: Mhmm. Yeah. Well said!

[0:24:34] Elin Thomasian: I was going to add that I saw Abdul commenting that he is taking roles and breaking them down by tasks so that employees can focus on more value-added activities. Thank you, Abdul, for that really good comment. That's essentially what you can do incrementally, according to Yaz [Yazad]. You start with the job description, the people leader, and understanding what they are asking their employees to do. It's as simple as that — breaking the role down to tasks and understanding which tasks risk automation, which should be tied to leadership capabilities rather than technical capabilities, and what parts of it you can help grow as an organization through HR initiatives.

And what parts do you need to think about in terms of automation, IT risk, and redesigning the role? It all starts from that job description, whether you're looking at recruiting, learning and development, building your gig economy, or redesigning roles. It starts as simple as:

• What does the job description look like?

• Are we aligned as an organization, leadership, and HR with what these job descriptions are saying?

• Do we really understand what we're asking folks to do?

• How can those tasks be bifurcated?

• Do we decide that we're not ready yet, and it's going to remain a people role until we build the capability to break up the tasks and automate parts of it?
  

A lot of times, people assume that when thinking about automation, headcount is going to go down. What we find, through talking with our clients, research, and market observations, is that it's not really about headcount reduction — it's more about redesigning the role to meet future skills capability. And, again, that goes back to the fact that, yes, parts of the role might be automated, but even if that person is no longer performing that task, they still need to understand it, direct it, and comprehend how that function will be replaced by a tool they now need to learn to operate and facilitate in their day-to-day function.

These are all important things to think through, but looking at the task level and the skill level is a really good place to start.

[0:27:24] John Lynch: Awesome. Thank you. I wanted to highlight one statement here, which is, I think, a good place to segue into a question. Julian Holmes is interested in who owns work in an organization. This is a part of the issue of the demand side of workforce planning. What have others experienced? So I think that's a good question to ask about the audience, but I can, maybe, Dave, if you would like to give your perspective. I think that would be a good place to segue.

[0:27:54] David Wilkins: Since he's had many conversations with organizations about this, I think the short answer is — it depends. Right? And I don't want to give a very consult-y answer there, but that's the truth.

In our conversations with clients, it's great when HR has the level of sophistication, maturity, and gravitas within the organization to state with no ambiguity that they own the workforce and the work, which is probably the best place for it to be situated. But in many organizations, it's much more fractured. HR owns some of it, the CEO owns some, and the CFO owns some since they hold the purse strings. Sometimes, the operating teams own some of it because they own the metrics by which the work is completed.

Then, in big and tech-led organizations, the CTO owns a lot of it because they wield immense power in technology-driven companies. So, it's often a more nuanced question with joint ownership. There needs to be an ability to collaborate and make decisions collectively, where different points of view and shared perspectives come together across diverse stakeholders.

So, I think it's less about who the outright owner is and more about how cross-collaboration and collective ownership can emerge to make informed, well-reasoned decisions across the organization.

But Christian, I'd love your point of view.

[0:29:51] Christian Vetter: Yeah, I think this is also where the SWP function and its processes really come into play and interact. I'm totally with you, Dave, on that ownership. The question is also who owns the future of work — who's going to guide us into that future scenario? And I think this is an excellent vacuum that SWP can fill.

If you look at the function a few years back, it was rather isolated. They had ownership of the process, but it was really hard to get concrete benefits out of it. Other functions wouldn't really buy into that. Even the business sometimes wouldn't buy into that, and it was really hard to derive concrete operational measures from it.

Now, also coming back to what was posted before as a question by Paula regarding how to speed up the organization — right, the struggle to be fast enough — this is really where SWP plays a role. Fusion skills are also relevant because now, with all the data being connected in the organization, that silo suddenly becomes one connected data intelligence.

Suddenly, SWP managers and those they converse with can have data-backed workshops and decision-making. They can do very fast and quick scenario thinking. It's all blended together, even beyond HR, into the business function.

That way, I see that the ownership of work may not be fully placed within that function, but it can be significantly supported by it. In the end, if that's done right, every individual employee can benefit from it. With this data-backed baseline, all functions can benefit. Recruiting and TA [Talent Acquisition] suddenly know years in advance where gaps will emerge.

The talent development knows what the skills of the future are in 2-3 years from now, that I need to start building now so they don't become a scarcity. And every employee in the organization, of course, also asks, like, what's going to happen to me? Where am I in 2, 3, 4, 5 years from now?

This can all be answered through that function and that hub. And that's also one of the imperatives why we decided to join TalentNeuron because it's a unique chance to bring in that internal skills world with the external global data view. It's one compelling, first-in-the-world platform that will bring that all together and help SWP become that function that I think everybody wants.

[0:32:49] David Wilkins: It's almost, John, like it's a conversion point question and an orchestration question. Right? It's that orchestration across the different functions and the now versus the future with the gap analysis woven in. Right?

And I think that's what the future looks like: It's less about right-owner ownership and more about orchestrating how all these things come together and how they're informed by converged data between internal, external, now, and future, and how all that comes together to make informed decisions.

[0:33:25] John Lynch: I think there's a couple of comments that speak to that. What is the outcome of all this talk?

Now, Susan, thank you for your comment here. “There are numerous posts on LinkedIn about companies reducing their workforce by using AI for multiple functions. So, whether that's true or less pros are, that's a big factor. But that is the outcome we're talking about — headcount and also the consequences for talent acquisition.”

What does this mean for talent pipelines? Yaz, maybe this is a question I could direct to you. When you look at the talent acquisition piece — you're working with customers and in the market — who is doing it right? What are the leaders doing that others aren't?

[0:34:21] Yazad Dalal: I'll split it into HR and then also talent acquisition. In terms of what they're doing differently from the rest of us, maybe two things that I see the most progressive organizations and leaders doing.

On the HR side, I think it's looking to the service industry for inspiration. This is not an AI example immediately, but I wanted to share it with you. My wife was a senior leader in hospitality for more than a decade.

And I remember the head of HR for Google in Asia Pacific asked her to come and speak to their entire HR organization. It's more than 100 HR leaders in that part of the world. What they wanted her to talk about was how luxury hotels deliver service to guests because Google HR wanted to deliver similar amazing experiences to their employees. And that's a sophisticated approach because they're assuming that if we've ticked all the table stakes boxes, what's the ideal state?

Now, what does AI have to do with that? How do you now bring the next level of service and efficiency to your people if you're in human resources? Right? I'm in a hotel room right now, and it's very nice. There's no USB ports. Have they kept up with technology? But the Wi-Fi is really strong, so at least they got that part right. So, if you've ticked all the other boxes, maybe the next question for a sophisticated HR organization is how do we start to leverage artificial intelligence, machine learning platforms, and all these existing tools to deliver amazing experiences to our people?

That's on the HR side. In talent acquisition, I see our most sophisticated clients taking the longer view. I think we were touching on this a little bit because a lot of folks on this call are here because of the importance of strategic workforce planning, which, by definition, is taking the longer view. So, our most advanced clients are taking the longer view and seeking global best practices and expertise along the way.

In recruitment, that often means working with an established partner who has developed the right tech and AI and has built up years of data that AI trains on because AI needs data to operate intelligently. And what's their goal with that approach? Going beyond cost per application, going beyond time to fill to say, what is the cost of the real outcome that we're pursuing? Did this person accept the offer? Did they start their job?

As an example, we work with the world's largest e-commerce and logistics company. I'll let them figure out who that might be. How they measure talent acquisition success is not how much an application costs. They want to measure outcomes. What was our cost per first-day start? Or, in their language, maybe it costs per first-day swipe or punching in.

And in even more progressive clients, we're seeing them pursue the lifetime value of an employee all the way at the top of the recruitment funnel, looking for the lifetime value of an employee. What does that mean? It's a fancy way of saying tenure or how long they stayed as the primary measure of quality.

In this example, we work with the world's largest ride-hailing company, and it's not enough for them anymore. It used to be the cost per first trip that a driver completes. What they want to know now is the sources of applications for drivers that yield the longest-term lifetime value. In other words, they can predict that this driver from this source, using these processes, will drive for two, three, or four years.

And so they've got an algorithm that they can use to predict that, and what they're asking us to do is constantly optimize for those sources that yield the driver who drove a few more hours in their second shift, a few more hours after that in their third shift, which starts to, according to our client, predict how long they'll drive for in terms of years.

So really, the long-term view when it comes to workforce planning, I think that's pretty critical.

[0:38:51] David Wilkins: Love it. John, you know, there's a comment here from Michelle that, I think, is brilliant, and Alan has already responded to it. But this question of the human element is what and how we prioritize budget and think about learning agility, digital fluency, growth mindset, and change agility. Right? I mean, we're talking about an unprecedented period of inflection and change in the workforce. We're seeing the emergence of AI agents, partially automated work, the elastic workforce, global talent pools, all the things Yaz has been alluding to about connecting more to the actual work that happens and how we think about that. But it fundamentally starts with people.

Interestingly, my initial reaction to Michelle's comment was to be slightly contrarian and go the other way. “To fully appreciate and understand the degree to which we need all of the capabilities and competencies she's articulating, we must first better articulate the amount of change and strategic workforce planning activity the business is currently under. A lot of this stuff happens under the radar, in pockets, and in ways that are not fully understood or rolled up at the top level.”

And I would bet that if an organization could collectively and accurately represent all of the talent-related transformation work that is currently happening, whether that's related to boomer retirements, new business directions, response to competitive pressure, digital transformation efforts, or take your pick, they would quickly realize that everything Michelle is articulating here is essential for the business to be successful.

Because all of those things involve some version of change, and in the absence of learning agility, digital fluency, growth mindset, and change agility mindset, no company in the world will be able to prosecute the level of change that these companies are undergoing.

So I almost feel like if you led with the data, if you led with the amount of this work that's happening and the depth, degree, and sophistication of the work required to execute and prosecute these changes, it would suddenly become a lot more apparent that we need to invest more heavily in those competencies in the business.

[0:41:17] Yazad Dalal: This next comment isn’t related to AI, but I think it’s important. “But there's such an easy place for us to look to predict what we'll be faced with 10 years from now, which is 12-year-olds and 13-year-olds. You know, my 12-year-old, almost all his homework assignments are not necessarily done with ChatGPT, but it's expected that he will leverage it. It's not a crime to use the Internet to do our work. It's not a crime for him, but the assignment includes it, which means the assignments are harder but become normalized quickly.”

And how they communicate and create; I have a 9-year-old and a 12-year-old. Their handwriting, unfortunately, requires a lot of remedial work because they are fully digital. But if we look at the tools and how they're leveraging them, many are the same tools we use in everyday work, but the assignments they're getting are different.

Use ChatGPT to figure this out, but then I want you to give me an answer in your own words that maybe contradicts what ChatGPT said.

We can look to junior high school and university to start predicting the sort of skills we're going to expect to see but also project into our open roles. And, of course, a lot of those roles don't even exist yet. We don't even know what they're going to be. "Prompt Engineer," as one of the commenters mentioned, did not exist as a term two years ago. Suddenly, it's a job.

[0:43:02] David Wilkins: Yeah. Right.

[0:43:07] Elin Thomasian: Go ahead, Chris.

[0:43:08] Christian Vetter: If you look at the job postings we monitor, you can also see how some organizations adapt to that really fast, and you will find a lot of requirements for prompt engineering at specific companies, while others don't react to that yet. We've taken that as a chance to have an evaluation done on how we can predict an organization's success based on their job postings.

We analyzed all the jobs we could find over a period of one or two years and flagged every individual skill within the postings. We gave it a traffic light system: green means the skill is very relevant to the future and the trends we see, yellow is stable, and red is not that important.

Of course, there might be many other factors when we correlate that with the organization's stock performance. Still, we saw a positive trend between companies with very future-oriented hires and their performance. I think this puts a great emphasis on how HR actually impacts business.

[0:44:26] Elin Thomasian: Success. Going back to the conversation, I think Michelle said, "Listen, I think some organizations just have change fatigue. There's a lot being thrown at the workforce. Change is happening very rapidly at a speed and velocity they're not used to. Catching up is really what is exhausting to lots of cultures and workforces.”

The answer is that it's absolutely given that it's happening. I think we're seeing it all over in terms of burnout, change fatigue, resistance to change, and organ rejection. But that's where change management and change readiness are so important — driving the value proposition from the top about why workforce transformation is needed. So it's not just happening in pockets where people feel it's happening to them, but it's happening to them in mind when done with a holistic change management philosophy.

A lot of times, we talk to clients who don't want to jump right into strategic workforce planning, and then they have this moment of realization where they screech to a halt and say, wait, this is a lot of change we'd have to implement. Hold on. Before we do any of this, can you also help us think through how to implement some of this? Do we start with a pilot? Do we start with a holistic approach?

That's when it is very important for us to work together, whether you're in HR or working with a consulting firm. When thinking about this level of change, understanding how your organization will absorb it and being able to gauge and take the temperature of employee sentiment throughout the change is key — not just implementing the change management approach and setting it and forgetting it. It needs to be a constant, living process, coupled with the transformation that's happening — the people side integrated with the business transformation.

So, I just want to emphasize that, as it comes up often, and obviously, Michelle is highlighting it for us. I just wanted to make sure we put a bow at the end of that conversation.

[0:46:51] John Lynch: Yeah. Thank you. And I think I hate to be the person who has to draw a line under the conversation, but out of respect for all this time, we are at the 45-minute mark. We're going to go over it in a couple of minutes because I have one more question for everybody. But as everyone said here in the chat, change fatigue seems to be at the top of your conversation.

We're spending a lot of time talking about AI, but there is a multitude of things we could have covered today. As a last roundup question, I'll ask this of everybody, and I'll start with you, Christian. Hopefully, you get some rest and can get over a little change fatigue yourself at the end of the year. Any New Year's resolutions for 2025 that you want to share?

[0:47:36] Christian Vetter: Going to keep it very simple here. I just got a newborn kid. So I'm going to be all about trying to have a good family life as well and, of course, grow with the TalentNeuron family as much as possible.

[0:47:54] John Lynch: Awesome. Thank you. Elin, what's yours?

[0:47:57] Elin Thomasian: Well, wellness is always important to keep in mind. We always, in January, have that "I'm going to the gym more often," and that kind of wanes throughout Q1 into Q2. I think one of my loftier goals is to do a lot more reading about the pace of change that's happening and in what pockets, and learn from case studies.

With this conversation and all the themes coming up, it's important to ground ourselves in reality, not just think about the ideal scenario but look at real, on-the-ground examples of companies and HR organizations going through transformation. I'd love to do more reading from a research-based perspective as well. Sometimes, we are too quick to make decisions and move forward without grounding ourselves in the science of it.

That was a geeky answer. Sorry, guys. Wow.

[0:49:02] John Lynch: Very good. Dave, you're next on my screen.

[0:49:06] David Wilkins: Yeah. Sure. I mean, for me, not to bring it too much back to work-life balance, but with the acquisition of HRForecast and the stuff we have available to us today, John, my New Year's resolution is to bring to life a brand new category of workforce transformation as our head of product and strategy; to pull together these discrete pieces and try to help as much as we can with all the questions that have come up in the chat. How do we do this effectively? How do we hit the easy button? How do we use AI to make all of this a lot simpler? We have an unprecedented opportunity to bring this together in a way that will help people with these questions. So, super excited to be working on that this year.

[0:49:53] John Lynch: Amazing. Thank you. And, Yaz, you had the last 2025. What does that hold in store for you?

[0:49:59] Yazad Dalal: Well, first of all, I loved Elin's commitment to more reading. That's, I think, my perpetual for almost 50 years. But for me, my elder son is a Fortnite addict, which means half his vocabulary comes from gaming. Their biggest frustration in video games is when there's a lag because the play pauses for a second. So his favorite way of making fun of me is if I can't think of a word or forget what I was saying, he goes, "Oh, Dad is lagging. You're lagging, Dad. You're lagging."

When I use resolution, I work at a company where there's zero lag. They're constantly optimizing. The machine can work a lot harder than all of us. So, my New Year's resolution, I was telling my team a few weeks ago, is to have a low tolerance for the lag in how I work.

I want to be able to keep up with change and keep up with my people and my kids. So, there is a low tolerance for lag in 2025.

[0:50:58] Elin Thomasian: I think you're not even realizing, but maybe one of your resolutions is understanding, Gen Alpha lingo.

[0:51:08] Yazad Dalal: Yes. I already have a list of vocabulary words, Elin, that is embarrassing.

[0:51:20] John Lynch: Alright. Wishing you all a lag-free 2025. I hope you have a great holiday season, too. It is my last task to make sure that everyone has a chance to join us here for the first webinar of 2025. We'll be talking about some of the data we discussed today — Superhuman resources, data analytics, and the rapid evolution of HR — with Erica Lee and Miguel Marín from our TalentNeuron team.

But once again, thank you ever so much for joining us, and that goes to our panel, too. It's been a real delight. Yaz, thank you for coming in and speaking to our audience here. And to you all, I wish you a great holiday season and a great start to the New Year.

[0:52:03] Elin Thomasian: Bye, everyone.

[0:52:04] Yazad Dalal: My pleasure. Best wishes to all of you.

[0:52:07] John Lynch: Thanks, folks. Take care. Bye-bye.