Have you ever tried to get close with someone but you just couldn’t click? For HR leaders, does your chief information officer immediately come to mind?
The CHRO-CIO relationship seems more important than ever. Both roles are critical for leading AI adoption, and the two being siloed can spell bad news for their company. As an example, recent Gartner research found that just one-in-five CIOs focus on mitigating negative impacts to employee work or wellbeing when making generative AI investments.
But a recent iCIMS report, surveying more than 1,000 HR leaders and 500 CIOs at companies with 1,000 or more employees globally, found CHROs and CIOs aren’t seeing eye-to-eye with talent acquisition’s role.
Growing close. HR leaders recognize tech’s growing role in talent acquisition (TA) strategy. A majority of CHROs (85%) say the TA tech used “is more of a priority today than it was two years ago.” And 22% said integrating AI into hiring processes was their single top priority for talent acquisition, while 20% said improving TA analytics and reporting was at the top of their list. Already, 60% of HR leaders say they’re using AI across the entire hiring process.
For their part, a significant majority (90%) of CIOs believe that a close relationship between HR and IT is essential for recruiting top talent.
Having a close partnership with the CIO has a myriad of benefits, said Laura Coccaro, iCIMS’ chief people officer, including allowing HR teams to be more innovative with AI and tech investments, and ensuring that these initiatives truly have an impact across the whole organization.
“It just helps accelerate that adoption curve for TA teams, for HR teams that are looking to leverage the technology,” she added. “Bridging that gap and having that partnership, and really figuring out the way to find the strategic value in leveraging AI, for example, is a huge step in the right direction. And you can’t, you shouldn’t, be doing that in isolation. It’s important to be thinking holistically and with your exec peers on that front.”
Disconnect. Nearly two-thirds (65%) of CIOs say they’re already working closely with HR on talent acquisition technology. But they pointed out several roadbumps that they’re running into with their HR peers, including strategic disconnects, limited budgets and resources, and lacking a shared understanding about tech capabilities. Some 42% of CIOs reported also running into pushback to change from HR.
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“There’s still this perception, and in particular, a perception from the CIOs within their organizations about the delivery and the impact that those talent acquisition organizations are having,” Coccaro said.
In iCIMS’ report last year, 90% of HR leaders anticipated talent acquisition roles shifting to becoming strategic talent advisors. Today, 88% say they are “actively driving strategic change within their organizations.” Yet there’s a disconnect from how the rest of the organization values TA.
Just one-third of HR leaders, for instance, say their organization views talent acquisition as a strategic function, and the rest view it as a support function or simply as a transaction process. With CIOs specifically, only 27% believe TA has a “significant impact on business outcomes,” while the majority think it has only moderate or minimal impact.
That perception of how CIOs view TA is “telling,” Coccaro said. “We’ve got some ways to go in terms of how we continue to elevate the strategic view of that function based on what we saw and heard from the CIOs.”
It’s even more important that HR leaders ensure that they are building and improving that partnership with IT, particularly as they try to alleviate the administrative burdens that prevent their TA teams from serving in more strategic capacities. And, the issue will only get more pressing: 53% of CHROs, for example, are spending more time on TA than they were two years ago, and 70% expect hiring to increase in 2025 from last year.
“There’s so much opportunity for us to bridge that gap across from our talent function to our CIO function,” Coccaro said. “They need to be in lockstep today in the environment that we’re operating in. With AI coming to the forefront, making decisions around technology [and] how we’re using it, they need to have that mutual, strategic seat at the table.”