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HR Brew

Talent

Adam DeRose

hr-brew.com

Indeed this week released two new AI agents in an effort to aid both sides of the ever-evolving hiring process.

At Indeed’s FutureWorks conference in New Orleans, Louisiana this week, the online jobs and hiring platform announced the full release of its Career Scout and previewed Talent Scout, which is set for public release later this year.

“The hiring process is filled with really mundane tasks that prevent people from getting in rooms with each other, which is where the actual magic of hiring happens,” said Heidi Laki, Indeed’s senior product director. “How do we take out all of that toil so that you can do the thing that you actually want to do, which is put humans together in rooms.”

 Laki likened Talent Scout to…well…a talent scout. Talent scouts in the sporting or entertainment businesses act as advisors to GMs, coaches, record labels, or casting directors. The Talent Scout agent doesn’t do your hiring, but it can offer TA teams valuable insights about where to find the right talent or how to best attract that talent to come on board.

And the agent tackles more of those mundane tasks associated with talent acquisition (TA) by focusing on two major pain points in the hiring process on the employer side: search and outreach.

“It’s really hard to pour through the volume of candidates that people have,” Laki said. “There’s a ton of toil in there. We wanted to remove that.”

Lake said the Talent Scout uses documents like job descriptions, screener questions, and hiring manager notes to surface for recruiters what components the agent thinks is most relevant for hiring, and allows TA teams to interact and dialogue with the agent using natural language in real time.

“No one wants to spend their time writing if-then statements to try to pull back résumés,” she added. “Imagine a world where you didn’t have to anymore.”

This AI-powered querying and reviewing feature may even produce better quality candidates for cold outreach, Laki said of early wins from the tool, adding that responsiveness is “materially better” with the agent, but cautioned the company was still looking into the why.

The agent is powered with generative AI capabilities allowing recruiters to craft personalized messages to boost responsiveness.

 Released publicly this week, Career Scout allows Indeed users to interact with the tool to better understand roles that might work for their careers based on their profiles, and then instantly delivers the job postings fitting their descriptions. The tool also helps applicants prepare for the role, helping shape application documents, or even practice interviewing.

“It’s just a private conversation between you and an agent. So there’s no judgment attached to it. You can falter and stutter as many times [as] you want, but it is like a very real experience where it is listening to you; it is asking follow up questions,” Laki said.

Indeed is betting that this agent, designed for job seekers, will also help recruiters and TA pros, pointing to more engaged and prepared candidates.

person picking a character from a mass of figures

Indeed releases two AI agents to improve hiring process for TA and job seekers

“No one wants to spend their time writing if-then statements to try to pull back résumés. Imagine a world where you didn’t have to anymore.”

Mikaela Cohen

A new buzzword has hit the collective consciousness.

“Quiet cracking” describes the feeling of increased disengagement and unhappiness among employees who, amid a weakened labor market, feel stuck at work, Business Insider 

. More than half of employees feel unhappy at work either frequently (20%) or occasionally (34%), 

 from learning management system company TalentLMS found.

While employee dissatisfaction isn’t new, economic turmoil, AI uncertainty, and return-to-office mandates have pushed the workforce into this new era, according to Rishad Tobaccowala, futurist, business leader, and author of 

“Right now, [employees] are basically saying, ‘This sucks, but there’s nothing I can do about it,’ so that’s why you have this quiet cracking going on,” Tobaccowala told HR Brew.

Employees are in “a diametrically opposite position” from where they were during the Great Resignation, Tobaccowala said. They went from commuting to the office five days a week pre-Covid, to having flexibility and autonomy during the pandemic, to now being expected to return to the 2019 workplace, and it’s giving them whiplash, he added.

“Three years ago, we were re-imagining work…We were thinking about how we fit work into life,” Tobaccowala said. “Two years later, we find ourselves in this ‘incredible’ world where it’s gone back to, ‘You will come back to work, whether you like it. If you don’t, we will kick you out of your job.’”

Employees are also experiencing whiplash when it comes to their mobility. Many companies went on hiring sprees around 2021, only to revert to layoffs by 2023, he said.

“In every way, the control has gone back to the company…We have much less, far less flexibility, because you have to deal with high prices, high real estate costs, high food costs,” he said. “In 2021, you thought there was a new world of work, and, in 2025, it’s worse than 2019.”

 HR professionals, Tobaccowala said, should remember the pendulum will eventually swing back in the favor of employees.

“[Employees] are basically saying we are locked, because we don’t like what’s happening, but we need to buy some time. We have to figure out how to save some money. We need to figure out how to build our networks. We need to figure out how to leverage technology,” he said. “We need to figure out how we show up, and work, and do things on the side, and then when we’re ready, we’re ready to go.”

In anticipation, Tobaccowala recommended people leaders focus on offering flexibility and personalization at work.

“While in-person interaction is important, you don’t need to basically have it three days a week. You can get away with three days a month, or even 10 days a quarter,” he said. “Younger people may need to be more at work for training or to be with each other. Middle-aged people with parents to look after and kids to look after have to move far away for better schools and affordable housing…You talk about being agile and flexible, but you don’t do that with your talent?”

Employees are disengaged and biding their time until they can quit

…as evident by the latest (alarming) workplace trend, “quiet cracking.”

What would the world look like if employees introduced themselves not by job titles but by their skills inventory?

While it isn’t realistic to introduce yourself in everyday conversations with, “Hi, my name is Stacey. I write code in Python. I design products. I’ve worked in software engineering for 10 years,” one author suggests HR pros think of their employees as these skills instead of just, “Stacey, the director of product design.”

Craig Friedman, a talent and skills transformation leader for the Illinois-based St. Charles Consulting Group, highlights the importance of companies becoming a skills-based organization in his new book 

Enterprise Skills Unlocked: A Blueprint for Building Skills-based Talent Management

Friedman shared with HR Brew what people leaders will learn from his book.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What does a skills-based organization look like?

Skills [are] largely about data…and that’s one of the misconceptions around it…If we had skills not just tied to learning courses and on people’s profiles, but they were tied to everyone’s job descriptions, and especially tied to the work tasks, whether that’s in a workflow, or in a staffing assignment, or job posting…we can actually leverage a whole bunch of more adaptable, more efficient, more tailored talent strategies across the whole value chain.

We can create more personalized learning pathways, so we get [a] broader reach of learning, development, of leadership development, more flexible work design, more career mobility options for employees, [a] deeper reach for recruiting, more strategic workforce planning.

What’s an example of how HR can focus on skills for roles and projects?

One way that consulting companies are leveraging these concepts is through talent marketplaces. The core of a consulting business is getting people staffed on projects that are billable, and when people are not on projects, they’re essentially like inventory in a warehouse accumulating, carrying charges…So, anything you can do to get the right people staffed on the right projects more efficiently leads directly to revenue capture.

If they’re using a talent marketplace where they’re posting open staffing assignments, the machine learning in the talent marketplaces can scan across all of the employee profiles, find people who are the best matches. And, even if they’re not a 100% match, say you’ve got someone whose skills profile is a 90% match, the system can automatically tee up the project onboarding for that 10%. No extra effort on anyone’s part. No one has to create a project onboarding plan.

How can HR help their organization adopt a skills-first mindset?

You can make a lot of progress building in the long term a skills-based organization or skills-based enterprise one meaningful project at a time, and one of the best ways that I’ve seen companies do it is by finding a business issue that is tied to skills.

I had a client that worked in the mining industry. The market was changing in such a way that they needed to dramatically expand their copper mining business, and in order to expand their copper mining business, it so turns out that most of the copper that they’re mining today is near the surface of the earth. If they want to dramatically increase it, they need to dig deeper into the earth to get some more copper.

But underground mining is a completely different set of engineering practices than surface mining, so they have to develop a whole lot of new underground mining skills in order to expand their business. With the help of a skills-based organization, they can much more effectively find the talent that they need, define the skills that they need through a variety of different strategies. 

They might do skills-based recruiting to get it from the marketplace…They might move people around internally, the build, buy, repatch, borrow strategy to try to meet that capability need and get to market quickly.

What role does AI play in skills-based organizations?

For most of the last 40 years, our HR systems have been all based at the employee level. We hire employees. We give them a job title. We give them a salary and benefits, and an email address and a phone number. Slot them into a job. Everything that HR does is focused at the headcount level.

Skills-based [strategies] takes that down a level of detail, and in taking it down a level of detail, it’s both more granular, but it’s also more informative. Because skills tell us not just that we have a person, but what that person can do, what work they can accomplish. So, it moves the whole exercise of talent management from being a headcount management exercise to being a capability development exercise.

Two hands holding on opened book with text highlighted

An interview with Craig Friedman, author of ‘Enterprise Skills Unlocked’

“Skills tell us not just that we have a person, but what that person can do, what work they can accomplish.”

HR should stop thinking of employees in headcount—consider them as a collection of skills

 want to spend less time working and more time lounging poolside in the sweet, sweet summertime? According to one recent survey, it depends on who you ask—and maybe how old they are.

Some 49% of workers reported working less in the summer, according to a recent 

 released in June. Gen Z is leading the pack, as 64% of employees aged 21–25 and 56% of employees aged 26–29 said they are taking it easier, compared to 39% of employees over 45 years old (Gen X) who reported doing the same.

“People actually tend to be more productive and task focused when there’s nothing else to do [recreationally],” said Adam Grant, organization psychologist, author, and Glassdoor’s chief worklife expert. “And it’s summer; there’s a lot more to do. The desire to relax is amplified. Sun’s out. It’s warm. People are excited to do activities.”

As a way to embrace this, HR can offer shortened workweeks or more flexibility in the summer. Some 59% of people leaders have already provided additional flexibility or time off this summer compared to the rest of the year, according to a recent 

Grant told HR Brew that US workers might be picking up on a “summer holiday” culture favored by many in Europe, where it’s common for employees to take several weeks off in the summer. “A lot of us have fond memories of summer in childhood, going to camp, being on the water, and there’s a desire to recapture that a little bit,” he added.

Decreased productivity during the summer doesn’t necessarily mean employees are less dedicated or loyal to their roles, Grant cautioned. Instead, it’s a reflection of a trend towards a “seasonality” to how work gets done, he said.

“It’s not something we ever saw people talk about when I started in this field, and now it’s a pretty common refrain,” Grant said. “‘I’m going to be as productive as I can during the winter, and then in summer, I’m going to embrace the fact that it’s a different season.’ There’s more freedom and flexibility to have fun and relax.’”

Palm trees and a pool emerging from a computer screen 

Employees work less in the summer. Workplace expert Adam Grant wants HR to get used to it

Automatic reply: Hello! I’ll be slow to reply to emails from now until Labor Day. I’ll respond to your email as soon as I’m more productive this fall. Thanks!

An illustration of a photo of HR Brew reporter Paige McGlauflin.

Paige McGlauflin

Companies are at a pivotal moment with how they attract and retain talent.

Talent shortages have and will continue to make it difficult to hire, particularly for hard-to-fill roles, meaning organizations must also think about how existing talent can be trained or developed to meet these needs. To address these challenges, some companies have commissioned 

 to oversee recruitment and talent acquisition, performance management, learning and development, and workforce and succession planning.

In April 2024, Walmart created its own chief talent officer position. The retail giant appointed Lorraine “Lo” Stomski, the executive then in charge of its 

Stomski, who holds a PhD in industrial organizational psychology, had spent her career working on and eventually learning leadership development as well as job assessment and selection. She joined Walmart in November 2016 as VP of global learning and leadership, before rising to SVP of enterprise leadership and learning in March 2019.

In those positions, Stomski oversaw a vast array of initiatives, while another organization oversaw all of recruitment. Stomski and Donna Morris, Walmart’s chief people officer, discussed creating a chief talent officer role to streamline her job, and the recruitment organization’s responsibilities, under one role.

“You start to see this in the industry, the emergence of chief talent officers really taking care of the end-to-end talent ecosystem. It became really clear for us, to become a talent academy, you really needed to have that,” she told HR Brew in late April.

Transforming Walmart’s talent operations, however, involved more than just combining these roles under one team. Workers primarily want three things from their employer, Stomski said: Purpose, to make an impact, and to grow.

If employees aren’t satisfied with those expectations, their opinion of their employer can sour, prompting them to leave. Translating that individually to a worldwide team is a big task, according to Stomski.

“It’s a beautiful end-to-end system that works, but we’ve got to get each of those pieces right and at our scale,” Stomski said, adding that with “2.1 million career paths, it’s very cool, but it could be very daunting. You can get one piece of it wrong, and it will affect that experience of the associate.”

In order to meet those demands, Stomski ensures that each of her teams—which include recruitment, talent management, workforce planning, and learning and development teams like Walmart Academy—work together smoothly in a way that she calls her “talent flywheel.”

“Think of it as this moving, mutually reinforcing wheel, and I’ve got leaders on each of those spokes, if you will,” she explained.

 designed to train associates for hard-to-fulfill roles, including for technicians or commercially licensed drivers, were born from these cross-team conversations.

“Who knows, our recruiters could still be, to this day, going, ‘I don’t know how we’re going to get truck drivers, this is really rough.’ But once you pull all of those components together, it opens the team’s eyes,” Stomski said.

 Looking ahead with her role, Stomski is focused on ensuring that her team continues to fulfill its promise of being a talent academy and having the best talent to serve the business.

“With the rate of change that’s going on in our macro environment out there…we have to move at an even faster pace,” she said.

As an example, Stomski notes that AI and machine learning’s impact on talent operations will continue to be at the forefront. Her team is “constantly” researching the outside economic environment, and speaking with outside leaders including startups in the AI and machine learning space, and fellow organizations participating in Walmart’s Opportunity Summit, a consortium focused on skills-first talent strategies.

What’s most important, however, is listening to and gathering feedback from Walmart’s own associates. Toward that end, Stomski’s team travels to various stores, clubs and training facilities to speak with associates directly and learn what is top of mind for them.

At a recent visit to a training for first-time managers held in Saratoga Springs, New York, for example, a participant gave Stomski a letter explaining her background as an immigrant from Brazil and how monumental the experience was for her, followed by a list of questions including Stomski’s opinion on leadership, and ways the new manager could grow her career. “That’s what we are in service to, is to make sure that she gets that opportunity to continue to grow,” Stomski said.

“I think we have exceptional talent, but at 2.1 million, the ability to reach them and to see them and to talk to them, you have to be in that constant state of listening,” she added. “You can’t do it sitting in Bentonville [Arkansas], you’ve really got to be out there talking to our associates.”

Lorraine "Lo" Stomski, Walmart's chief talent officer

Walmart’s first chief talent officer on her role

How Lo Stomski is transforming the retail giant’s talent operations to meet the needs of a global workforce.

Walmart’s first chief talent officer explains her role

An illustration of reporter Courtney Vinopal's headshot.

Courtney Vinopal

Parental leave is becoming more prevalent in the US, with more employers providing paid time off so workers can bond with a new child.

While this is a welcome development for employees with families, it also creates additional complexities for managers, who have to figure out how work will get done when team members are absent for months at a time.

Announcing a parental leave can be a “love ‘em or leave ‘em moment” for workers, so it’s critical for employers to respond the right way, said Sarah  Olin, CEO and co-founder of LUMO, a parental leave consultancy.

“The single biggest determinant around leaves is culture, not policy,” she said. “If your culture isn’t strong, if your managers aren’t skilled, it’s going to be a hard time for everyone, and you’re ultimately going to lose people.”

To help foster a culture where workers feel comfortable taking leave, HR teams should consider the following strategies to ensure things run smoothly when colleagues are out, experts told HR Brew.

Many companies would like to hire a temporary contractor to fill in for an employee while they’re on leave, but don’t have the budget to do so, said Allison Whalen, CEO and co-founder of Parentaly, a program that helps managers and workers navigate parental leave.

If a business does have the budget to hire an external backfill, this approach may work better for some roles than others, she said. “If you’re a recruiter, that's something that is fairly easy to bring in an outsider backfill,” she said. Sales teams, on the other hand, are typically hesitant to bring in external replacements because it takes them longer to ramp up and learn about the business.

Having colleagues fill in for one another. 

Oftentimes, employers will evaluate which projects need to continue and which need to be put on pause when a worker takes leave, Whalen said. They may then split up the remaining work among colleagues.

There are pros and cons HR should consider for each type of coverage scenario, she noted. If an employee’s manager fills in for them, they bring “strategic oversight” to the role, but are likely busy with other things, and “may not treat this with the right level of attention,” she said. Meanwhile, a peer will understand the job, but carries “the highest risk of resentment because this is not exciting to them.”

An employee going on leave can also ask a direct report to fill in for them as a “stretch opportunity,” which may allow them “to push their boundaries, to do something they’re really excited about,” said Whalen. The downside, though, may be that this worker isn’t skilled or senior enough to take on some aspects of the role.

Whatever plan a manager lands on, Whalen suggested that it’s ideal if the employee going on leave is “the main driver of creating the coverage plan.” By bringing the employee into the planning process, you’re “[giving] them agency in their career,” as well as involving the person who is “closest to the details of their day-to-day work.”

HR teams can be proactive about hiring if they expect employees to go on leave, Whalen said. Assuming 10% of their workforce will be on a leave of absence, they can staff up in anticipation of that, with the expectation they may need to adjust hiring goals during certain periods.

LUMO has advised a small retail store in Charlotte with 40 full-time employees that overhires to help cover for colleagues on leave, Olin said. “They have more employees than they would typically need because they have so many working moms.” Taking this factor into consideration when hiring ensures the store is covered when short-term needs arise as well, such as when an employee is dealing with a sick kid.

Some large organizations have a bench of well-trained employees that can pop in and out of assignments as needed, said Elena Arecco Bridgmon, LUMO’s co-founder with Olin, and chief operating officer.

“When I worked in financial services, we had a SWAT recruiting team that would staff up and down for the ebbs and flows of hiring,” Arecco Bridgmon explained.

HR can consider posting a temporary assignment to be filled by an internal employee in another department while a worker is taking parental leave. Companies like Indeed and UrbanSitter have tried this approach, hiring “internal interns” to fill in, the 

This option means HR may still have to shuffle around staff to ensure coverage for the person who is hired for the internal assignment, but it gives workers the opportunity to try out a role in a different function, Whalen said.

image of pregnant woman on phone at work station

5 ways to manage coverage for maternity, paternity leave

The growing prevalence of parental leave means managers must figure out how work will get done when team members are out.

5 ways HR can manage a parental leave of absence

follows a shepherd boy on a journey to find the treasure from his dreams, [spoiler alert] only to learn that the treasure was back home where his journey began (so why did I read all 208 pages?). Coelho suggests sometimes you have to go on a journey to recognize the value of what you’ve got.

In some ways, recruiters have been on their own AI-powered, 

-esque treasure hunt in TA. But even AI proponents see core 

 to the future of work. New AI tools have created a new set of issues and concerns—forcing some to rethink how to pursue new talent.

And in some ways, emerging AI tools and platforms are creating the opportunity for recruiters to return to their people-focused roots: building and leveraging professional relationships, creating a positive candidate experience, and navigating the nuances of human needs in the workplace.

“[TA] can be very transactional anytime you’re using AI,” said Bonnie Dilber, a recruiter with Zapier and a 

. “You’re never going to have that same human touch, and if you’re a company that wants to hire the best talent out there, that talent wants to feel courted; they want to feel like your company is putting as much human time into them as they are into you.”

New AI tools have allowed for recruiters and TA pros to better communicate with their networks, create more effective cold-outreach messages, and for companies to better correspond with the massive amount of applicants for open roles that 

 via templated auto-send emails. But these AI level-ups, perhaps, aren’t always delivering on the candidate experience.

“Candidates are now complaining about that saying, ‘I don't want to hear from your ATS. I want to hear from a person.’ So what makes any product person believe that a candidate’s going to want to go through an experience where everything is automated or done through a machine, rather than a person, when people don’t even like getting a rejection [email] from the system,” said Dayforce’s VP of global TA Steve Knox.

Dayforce’s strategy is evolving “more and more” towards “bringing that human element back into the recruiting process,” said Knox in noting that the high-touch aspects of the company’s recruiting process are the components of the program that receive the highest praise.

“Every time I ask candidates, ‘How would you feel if this process was automated’, everybody runs screaming, saying they would never want to go through that,” he said.

Joel Lalgee, who runs a boutique recruitment firm, The Realest Recruiter, and hosts a podcast of the same name, told HR Brew that AI has allowed for the mass-sending of personalized messages creating “a lot of high-quality spam.”

“But you only have an advantage with AI if you’re the only one using the tool,” Lalgee said. “Once everybody’s using a tool, it then becomes really, really noisy…In the future, if we’re all used to this high-quality spam, we’re not going to respond to messages.”

This is where a strong employer brand comes into play, otherwise recruiters for smaller or lesser-known organizations will need to contend with standing out in messages and differentiate their outreach from other companies. Lalgee said he sees in-person recruiting at conferences or industry events as continuing to be a key future component to TA

In addition to returning to bespoke, human-authored outreach, AI tools available to candidates have also led some TA leaders to bring candidates back into the office for in-person (ID-verified) interviews or skills assessments.

“When it comes to global hiring, we’re seeing a lot more fraud,” Lalgee said, pointing to people showing up for interviews who aren’t who they say they are, different people showing up for work on the first day than the person who interviewed, or “pyramid schemes”-type candidates, who take on roles but then outsource the actual work to freelancers or contractors.

Lalgee also pointed to fraud involving AI-use itself: in a virtual interview setting, candidates can sometimes appear on screen but are caught looking off screen for an excessive amount during the interview, referring to AI tools to deliver the best answers.

“I think the only way that I’ve heard from people trying to solve that problem is just to get people back on site,” Lalgee said. “Which kind of ruins remote work for everybody. So I’m like, how did we screw that one up?”

image of people waiting to be interviewed for a job