Three Key Questions Every Talent Leader Must Answer: Strategic Insights from Deloitte

The questions leaders are asking about AI have evolved, shifting from what’s possible to how it can be applied at scale. The pace of change in talent acquisition is outstripping most playbooks. Here, AI isn’t just automating tasks anymore; it’s redesigning how work gets done. At the same time, candidate expectations are rising, while workforce boundaries are dissolving.

To make sense of this disruption, we partnered with Deloitte for this episode of Talent Experience Live to unpack what’s shifting — Bhawna Bist broke down game-changing trends from Deloitte's TA Tech Trends Report, Brandon Kennedy dissected critical gaps in Phenom's State of Candidate Experience report, and Sue Cantrell unpacked workforce transformation insights from Deloitte's 2025 Global Human Capital Trends report. What they uncovered will change how you think about talent acquisition

Together, these conversations address three essential questions that every talent leader must answer to build sustainable competitive advantage: How do we work smarter? How do we engage better? How do we prepare for change?

In this Article:

How Do We Work Smarter? The Technology Evolution.

The first question organizations must answer centers around leveraging AI and automation to transform how talent acquisition work gets done. This isn't about replacing human judgment — it's about amplifying human capabilities through intelligent technology that handles complexity at scale.

"We're seeing a huge amount of interest from our clients to understand the space as well as advancements from the vendor marketplace around how solutions are coming to life," Bist noted, highlighting how AI in talent acquisition has evolved far beyond simple efficiency tools to become strategic enablers of entirely new approaches to finding and engaging talent.

Catch the full episode here or read ahead for highlights!

Four Key Trends Reshaping How TA Teams Operate

Drawing from insights in Deloitte's eighth annual TA Tech Trends Report, Bist highlighted four key technological advances reshaping the talent acquisition landscape. These aren't incremental improvements — they represent a complete evolution in how recruiting work gets done, moving from reactive task management to proactive, intelligence-driven talent strategies. Below are the key trends organizations should prioritize for immediate impact:

1. Agent-Powered Recruiting: This represents the most sophisticated evolution of AI in hiring. Today's agents can manage entire workflows — from initial sourcing through candidate nurturing — rather than handling isolated tasks. Organizations are categorizing these solutions as AI-assisted (supporting human decisions), augmented (enhancing human capabilities), and autonomous (handling complete processes with oversight). Each level offers different risk-reward profiles, with most organizations starting conservative and building confidence through successful implementations.

2. Intelligence-Driven Sourcing: This transforms reactive job postings into a proactive talent pipeline building. "We're seeing a lot of insights and data competition intelligence, as well as regional talent availability to enable a more targeted sourcing strategy," Bist explained. This approach leverages advanced analytics to identify untapped talent pools, analyze competitor hiring patterns, and understand regional skill availability, enabling organizations to build relationships with potential candidates long before specific roles open.

3. Interview Intelligence and Optimization: Bringing AI-powered decision support to the most critical hiring moments, these tools provide real-time transcription, comparative candidate analysis, and synthesized insights that help hiring teams move beyond subjective recall to make objective, data-driven selections. “It’s about taking those insights and data, bringing them back to decision-makers, and helping them make more informed choices  — because at the end of the day, you’ve already invested so much effort and money to get to that point” Bist emphasized.

4. Technology Stack Evolution: Reflecting a fundamental shift from monolithic ATS systems to flexible, integrated solutions, this trend helps organizations build custom stacks that combine engagement layers, conversational AI, and specialized tools tailored to their hiring volume, complexity, and candidate populations. This approach enables much more sophisticated candidate experiences while providing recruiters with the specific capabilities they need for different types of roles.

Related: Workflow Automation: A Complete Guide

The Strategic Transformation of Recruiter Work

The most significant impact of working smarter isn't efficiency — it's role transformation. Bist's research reveals a dramatic shift in how recruiting time gets allocated. In traditional models, recruiters spend "about 40% of the time in sourcing, about 30% of the time in screening and interview, 20% in admin work, but only about 10% in strategic work."

The future flips this completely: "70% of the work should be in planning, insight, governance, and decision making." This transformation requires developing new capabilities that most TA teams haven't needed before. "You need to think about an agent as your digital worker," Bist explained. "Can we use technology… [to achieve] the outcomes we want to deliver? That's a new set of work and skill sets."

Working smarter means recruiters can spend more time engaging with hiring managers and understanding what defines a successful hire. Technology can help you find candidates, but it’s still essential to define and validate the criteria for success. The technology handles execution while humans focus on strategy, governance, and relationship building.

How Do We Engage Better? The Experience Revolution.

Working smarter provides the foundation, but engaging better determines whether that technology creates value or causes friction. Organizations face a complex challenge: delivering personalized, innovative candidate experiences while meeting business demands for speed, efficiency, and compliance.

Analyzing findings from Phenom's State of Candidate Experience: 2025 Benchmarks report, Kennedy identified one of the most critical tensions facing modern talent acquisition: "You have candidates that expect a personalized experience, innovation, easy apply, seamless handoffs throughout the funnel — But they also really want clarity in the process." The research reveals significant gaps between what candidates expect and what organizations deliver, while recruitment teams simultaneously face mounting pressures: "There's cost pressures, there's speed to hire pressures, there's quality pressures from the business, along with compliance-driven mandates."

Watch the full episode here or read on for highlights!

Beyond Surface-Level Experience Improvements

The solution to engaging better isn't choosing between competing priorities — it's designing systems that address all of them simultaneously. Kennedy observed, “many organizations are missing opportunities to accelerate their tech strategies or their transformation strategies because they're looking at those things independently as opposed to holistically."

This holistic approach requires understanding that apparent trade-offs often represent design challenges rather than fundamental conflicts. The same AI technology that personalizes candidate communications can also streamline recruiter workflows. Intelligent matching systems that improve candidate experience also reduce time-to-hire and improve quality scores.

The Business Case for Better Engagement

Kennedy emphasized that organizations must reframe how they evaluate candidate experience investments. Traditional ROI calculations miss the broader business impact of poor experiences: "If you have a clunky candidate experience, if your technology is not personalized, if it's not engaging, if there isn't clarity in the process, you have a risk to your brand promise, you have candidate drop off, and you have increased cycle times that impact your time to fill."

The outcomes extend beyond immediate hiring metrics. Inadequate screening and matching lead to mis-hires, creating turnover costs, transition costs, and higher attrition. When organizations take a comprehensive view of talent acquisition costs, the business case for experience investment becomes compelling.

Design-First Engagement Strategy

Kennedy's guidance for better engagement centers on sequence: design the experience before selecting the technology. "Make that upfront investment in doing end-to-end experience design and use that as the anchor for all of the cascading activities that go into investing in technology, business process design, and technology process design."

This approach prevents common implementation mistakes. "Take the time before you go make a massive investment in technology,” he stressed. Better engagement requires understanding candidate moments that matter, designing seamless transitions between touchpoints, and ensuring technology enhances rather than replaces human connection throughout the journey.

How Do We Prepare for Change? The Workforce Evolution.

The third question extends beyond current hiring needs to encompass how work itself is transforming. Cantrell's insights from Deloitte's 2025 Human Capital Trends reveal that AI is dissolving traditional boundaries that have defined employment, requiring new approaches to workforce development and organizational design.

"We're seeing this era where the lines between what AI does versus what workers do are increasingly blurred," Cantrell explained. This "convergence" creates new questions about decision rights, capability development, and human agency in AI-enabled work environments that organizations must address proactively.

Stream the full episode here or keep reading to catch the highlights!

The Dissolution of Traditional Work Boundaries

Preparing for change requires acknowledging that traditional definitions structuring the employment relationship are becoming obsolete. Job descriptions no longer capture the full scope of what workers do. "Most workers are doing work outside the boundaries of their job descriptions," Cantrell noted. The concept of "worker" has expanded beyond employees to include contractors, gig workers, and AI agents, all contributing value in different ways.

Even fundamental HR metrics may need to be replaced. "Measuring how much discretionary effort workers are willing to expend on their organization's behalf only benefits a company, but whether it helps workers is far less clear." Cantrell reflected, “Is trust a better measure?".

Human Performance as Change Strategy

Cantrell introduced a crucial concept for change preparation — "human performance". This approach requires optimizing for both business outcomes and human outcomes simultaneously. "If you create more human outcomes, you're going to have greater business outcomes. They mutually reinforce one another."

This represents a fundamental shift from viewing employee well-being as secondary to financial metrics. Organizations that invest in greater employability, skill development, and worker well-being see stronger business performance as a direct result, making them more resilient during periods of rapid change.

Addressing the Experience Gap

Change preparation requires solving a paradoxical challenge threatening sustainable talent pipeline development. "61% of employers have increased experience requirements for entry-level talent in the past three years." Cantrell pointed out, "Yet at the same time, workers — particularly entry-level workers and career changers — struggle to find foothold jobs where they can acquire experience."

Preparing for change means expanding existing definitions to account for new approaches and skill acquisition processes directly related to work. "What we need is an expanded definition: the ability for workers to apply skills, knowledge, and human capabilities like emotional intelligence, problem solving, and creativity under real-world conditions to create outcomes." She reiterated.

Building Stagility for Sustainable Change

Organizations must master what Cantrell termed "stagility," which provides workers with stability and grounding while maintaining the agility to adapt quickly to market changes. "Leaders and organizations need more agile work. 85% of leaders in our survey say they want more agile work. But workers, 75% of them, want stability.”

Change preparation requires replacing traditional sources of security with new anchors: skills-based career paths, an AI-powered workforce, and internal talent marketplaces that create mobility opportunities. "Instead of thinking about a job, why don't we think of skills and outcomes in terms of organizing work? Talent marketplaces can play a role in that."

This strategy enables organizations to maintain workforce stability while building the flexibility necessary to adapt to technological advancements, market shifts, and evolving business requirements.

Where All Three Strategies Converge: An Integrated Approach

While each expert brought unique perspectives, several critical themes emerged across all discussions. Here are the essential insights to carry forward as you build your comprehensive talent strategy:

Skills as the Foundation

Working smarter, engaging better, and preparing for change all depend on skills as their foundational data structure. Skills power AI matching algorithms, enable personalized candidate experiences, and provide the common language for career mobility and development. Without robust skills architectures, organizations cannot fully realize the benefits of their technology investments or create meaningful pathways for workforce evolution.

Related: Why the Time to Invest in Skills is Now ft. Deloitte

The Human-AI Partnership Model

Rather than viewing AI as a replacement for human workers, successful transformation requires designing complementary relationships across all three areas. AI handles data-intensive, repetitive tasks while humans focus on relationship building, strategic thinking, and complex problem-solving. This partnership model requires intentional design to avoid unintended consequences like cognitive decline or workplace isolation.

Strategic Implementation Roadmap

While these key insights reveal what organizations need to focus on, the question becomes how to put them into practice. Below are the phases of a roadmap that provide a framework for implementing an integrated talent acquisition transformation.

Phase 1: Foundation Building: Start with lower-risk AI applications like sourcing and scheduling. Map complete candidate journeys using human-centered design principles to identify where technology can enhance rather than replace human touchpoints.

Phase 2: Strategic Expansion: Scale successful pilots while expanding skills strategies beyond hard skills to include human capabilities. Prepare recruiters and managers for evolving roles through training on AI partnership, strategic thinking, and data-driven decision making.

Phase 3: Organizational Integration: Build cross-functional alignment between TA, HR, IT, and business leaders. Create shared success metrics that balance efficiency, experience, and long-term workforce development while establishing governance frameworks for ongoing optimization.

What Lies Ahead for Talent Acquisition

The insights from these conversations point to a single truth: talent acquisition is evolving from a support function to a strategic differentiator. Organizations that master the integration of technology, experience, and workforce development won't just improve their hiring; they'll transform their entire approach to human capital, as Bist reflected.  "It's an exciting time for talent acquisition, and where I feel the most disruption is happening through technology. It's opening the aperture for really redefining talent acquisition. Understanding what the work is, what success looks like, and how we bring technology and our teams together to deliver the right outcomes."

The organizations that will thrive are those that approach transformation by answering all three questions simultaneously. They're building AI capabilities that make work smarter, designing experiences that engage candidates and employees more effectively, and preparing their workforce for a fundamentally different future of work.

This integrated approach — advancing technology capabilities, reimagining experiences, and building organizational readiness creates sustainable competitive advantages that extend far beyond efficient hiring processes. Organizations that master this integration will find themselves not just keeping pace with change, but defining the future of talent acquisition itself.

Your talent acquisition transformation starts here! Schedule your Automation Conversation today to see how Phenom can help you build your integrated transformation roadmap.