What TA Teams Need to Do Differently Before 2030

The World Economic Forum projects that AI will create 87 million new jobs by 2030. These are roles that don't exist yet, requiring skills no one has mapped, in a talent market where STEM pipelines are shrinking and a significant portion of the current workforce is aging out.

For organizations like Thales and Serco, that structural shift is already the operating environment their talent acquisition teams are navigating.

We sat down with Jim Shultman, VP of Talent Acquisition at Thales, and Serco’s Steve Smith, Chief of Staff & Group Director of Talent Acquisition, and Kevin Alexander, Director People Services, Asia Pacific, to take on the critical questions TA leaders are facing. What does the recruiter role actually look like in five years? What does it take to shift from filling requisitions to building talent pipelines? And where does AI fit as an efficiency lever and a strategic foundation?

Watch the full session here, or explore the highlights below.

Why Is Traditional Talent Acquisition No Longer Sustainable?

Both organizations operate in sectors that demand more than technical skills. They need people with the human judgment to work in high-stakes, often volatile environments. Serco runs government services at the intersection of justice, immigration, healthcare, and defense. Its people make consequential decisions in front of vulnerable populations, often under pressure. Thales operates across aerospace, defense, and cybersecurity, filling roles in three vertical markets with anywhere from 10 to 20 sub-business lines each. The talent those organizations need is both niche and deeply human in the qualities that matter most.

Against that backdrop, the supply problem is acute. STEM pipelines are shrinking, and a high percentage of specialized workforces will retire by 2030. And the job requisition model that has organized recruiting for decades (a manager has a need, creates a req, a recruiter fills it) was not designed for a market where the required roles may not have a job description yet.

"That model is not going to work when there is no talent available on the market," said Shultman. "That model is not going to work when the talent for the jobs don't yet exist."

How Are TA Teams Deciding What to Automate and What to Protect?

The mindset shift Shultman is driving at Thales is less about process redesign and more about what recruiters are actually paid to do. Phone screens, manual intake calls, and administrative scheduling are tasks that AI and automation should be handling. Shultman was specific about where the time returned should go. Recruiters need to learn their talent markets, understand where future skills develop outside the company, and build relationships before requisitions open. That's the talent marketer's mindset. Stop waiting for reqs to post and start building pipelines for needs that aren't yet formalized.

For Alexander's team in Australia, the challenge is the sheer range of role types running at once. High-volume positions like corrections officers and contact center staff run alongside highly specialized roles such as warfare officers for frigates and aviation-certified medical officers for remote care.

Skills-based hiring has become essential for identifying candidates with the human attributes Serco's roles demand: composure, judgment, care and the ability to de-escalate. "If it's a simple process, it goes to AI,” said Smith. “If it requires quality judgment, it stays with people. Two easy buckets for me.” That division determines what gets automated and what doesn't.

Related: Before You Add More AI to HR, You Need to Know Where You Stand

What Defines a Future-Ready Talent Acquisition Team?

The session closed on the question the room came to answer: Would the most successful TA team of the future be the one that re-skills recruiters, adopts the best technology, or moves fastest? The answers from all three speakers pointed in the same direction, even when they took different routes to get there.

Shultman's answer was re-skilled recruiters, without hesitation. "I'll go with the re-skilled recruiters all day," he said. "Not human in the loop, human in lead. I would take a re-skilled recruiter who's a subject matter expert and that person would dominate any machine any day of the week."

Smith agreed and added that the time back from automation shouldn't be about reducing headcount. "I want that time reinvested for value," he said, with the focus on protecting the candidate experience and the quality of every hiring decision.

Alexander chose all three but said his real takeaway was something different. "It's actually vision," he said. "What role is the human going to play in talent acquisition in the future, and really defining that clearly so we have a journey to go on. Where is the automation going to be? Where do we deploy agents, and what are the humans going to do?" That question, he said, has to come first.

How Can Talent Acquisition Teams Prepare for the Future of Hiring?

For teams still operating in the req-filling model, Shultman shared that the path forward starts with getting the repetitive work off your team's plate so they can focus on what only humans can do. If phone screens, basic screening, and scheduling are still consuming recruiter hours, the mindset shift to talent marketing will always be aspirational rather than operational. The tools exist, but the blocker is the willingness to trust them and redesign workflows accordingly.

Smith offered a practical model. Map every task by repetitiveness and its value-add to business outcomes. Tasks that are highly repetitive and lower-value should be automated; high-value tasks that require judgment stay with people. The middle space is where most of the real work of adoption happens.

Alexander's advice? Define your vision for where humans sit in the process before adding the technology. Otherwise you're building an automation strategy without a north star.

In aerospace, defense, and government services, you don't prepare for critical moments when they arrive. You prepare long before. The same logic applies to the talent shortage heading toward 2030. What Shultman, Smith, and Alexander made clear is that the teams best positioned to meet it won't necessarily be the ones with the most technology. They'll be the ones who knew where to put the humans first — and started building from there.

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