ServiceNow’s head of TA on HR’s AI opportunity

We know, we know—you don’t want to read another word about AI.

But trust us, you need to check out this conversation with Sarah Tilley, SVP of global talent management and acquisition at ServiceNow.

She sat down with Kate Noel, SVP and head of people operations at Morning Brew, for a recent episode of HR Brew’s People Person podcast to talk about her experience leveraging AI in TA, and the lessons she’s learned along the way, chief among them the importance of approaching the tech with a human touch.

“You can’t do this well without having the things like relationship building, the emotions…the creativity, the judgment,” she said, later adding, “It is still using the human judgment and the experience, but it’s refining it and it’s making the vision sort of more actionable in a lot of ways.”

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about your day to day.

I lead the talent acquisition and the talent management function here at ServiceNow. I’ve been here for four years. That’s all of the hiring we do globally, and also succession planning, how we support some of our most senior executive leaders in terms of their readiness for bigger roles, internal mobility, etc., a handful of other things.

I’m going to start a sentence, and then you finish it. AI and recruiting is making hiring more…but also more…

It’s making hiring more effective, but it’s also making it…more obvious why the human component is important in these decisions.

The biggest misconception my company has about AI and hiring is…

That AI is making hiring decisions.

One thing recruiters are still better at than AI is…

The emotional side of changing a job and helping people through that.

The hiring process becomes less human when…

You rely on AI to be the layer that handles all of the communication and the interaction.

One hiring practice that AI is exposing as broken is…

People relying on their gut instinct on hiring.

AI has existed for some time now. How has it existed within the HR landscape?

AI is about removing the repetitive, time-consuming tasks so that you can bring in the more human strengths and capabilities that are needed. So on the TA side, it’s been getting that work out of the way…it’s about recruiters, recruitment practitioners being able to build relationships, coach hiring leaders, and then I think more thoughtfully assess candidate potential…We use GenAI for interview optimization. So how do you use AI to craft tailored interview questions and evaluate their effectiveness? AI supported candidate rediscovery. So that’s basically AI powered tools that help talent teams, talent acquisition teams reconnect with strong past candidates, applicants.

How do you think HR leaders should be thinking about AI?

We’ve really broken our strategy into what we call two speeds. One speed is about the foundation and how do we get some of the fundamentals, right?...And then we talk about speed two, which is transformation. So then how do we ensure we’ve got the foundations right so that we can go faster and further on the transformation? And with that, it really is about how are you using insights? To me, that’s where the biggest opportunity for transformation in HR comes from…The role that HR has played, some organizations, it’s been more transactional, some organizations, it’s been more critical to how the business operates, but you can’t separate what’s happening with the talent and the skills that are needed now from what needs to happen within the business. And so it’s a lot more integrated. And so I think that it really is going to be more and more about the data, the insights that you can use from all of the things that AI brings to your fingertips, and that you can then use to transform the function, but the business more importantly…So how are you ensuring that you’re getting the speed one, the fundamentals, right with AI, but then also how do you then look to the areas of transformation?

What fundamentals need to be in place?

It’s going to differ by function. For us, for example, the foundational things could be like, how do you craft a job description in the right way? How are you ensuring that you’re communicating regularly to candidates? These are just some of the fundamentals in TA. That could look very different in compensation or learning and development. Some of the fundamentals are like the delivery mechanisms by which we’re going to land some of our learnings in our education, but the transformational stuff and TA is like, okay, now what do we have at our fingertips in terms of what we know about talent that succeeds at ServiceNow or any organization?…the more you teach [AI], the more it learns.

For more from this conversation, tune into the People Person podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube, or watch it below.