Why Talent Acquisition and L&D are Two Sides of the Same Coin, According to Josh Bersin

Josh Bersin, founder of The Josh Bersin Company and one of the top thinkers globally about the future of HR, had a simple message when he led a breakout session at Talent Connect 2022: Everything in HR is now interconnected, including talent acquisition and learning and development. 

“For those of you who are in L&D or sell to L&D,” he told the audience, “think about how well your L&D programs are mapped against growth, careers, new opportunities, and new roles.” L&D, he argued, is a powerful way to fuel talent mobility and the talent marketplace — and not always in the ways you’d expect. 

Josh said the future lies in what he calls “Systemic HR,” which is a break from the traditional “service delivery model” of HR. Until recently, most HR functions — including talent acquisition, L&D, and compensation and benefits — have operated in silos. 

“But now that HR is really more of a consulting function and business solution in the organization,” Josh said, “we need to bring these things together.” Recruiting, for example, is dependent on pay. Pay is related to diversity and to pay equity. And diversity is affected by who is hired and how well talent is developed. 

“If you really think about your job as a recruiter now,” he told the audience, “you’ve got to think about four things at the same time: recruiting, retaining, reskilling, and redesigning.” 

To learn more about what he had to say about each of these, and how they all work together, read on. 

Recruiting: Surprise! It’s all about people 

In a recent study, Josh underscored something that most recruiters already know: Effective recruiting is all about people. “No matter what you do with technology, how much LinkedIn stuff you buy, what recruiting tools you use,” he told the audience, “recruiting is fundamentally a human-centered problem.” 

Solving the “problem” of making great hires, he elaborated, comes down to the relationships between the recruiter, hiring manager, business partner, and candidate. It’s about being authentic. It’s about attracting candidates who want to work at your company and know what your company does and understand why they’d be a good fit.

Josh calls this “human-centered TA,” a model in which recruiters de-emphasize traditional skills like building pipelines and closing with candidates in favor of human-centered skills like empathy, business acumen, and adaptability, all the while recognizing that hiring is truly about people. Companies that embrace this human-centered model, he found, are more adaptable, more profitable, more innovative, and have higher employee engagement and retention. “Great recruiters,” he summed up, “understand how to match people to your company.” 

Retention: It’s just another name for employee experience

Josh has found that to increase retention, you need a healthy, supportive culture. Candidates, he said, want organizations that offer growth, opportunity, trust, and a sense of belonging. They want workplaces where they’re appreciated. “A lot of vendors,” Josh said, “want to sell you an employee experience platform and convince you that all of a sudden, the employee experience is going to get better. But it really comes down to culture and taking care of people.” 

According to a recent McKinsey report, the wellness market in the U.S. alone sits at around $450 billion. But Josh noted that while well-being is an enormous market, it’s good management that makes for a great employee experience. People want workloads they can handle without burning out. And they want flexibility. When they have managers who care for them and make an effort to understand why they may not be getting their work done, he said, it’s a lot more effective than offering a new stress management app. 

Josh also pointed to pay equity as crucial to retention.Yes, pay needs to stay competitive with inflation. “But you also have to keep pay fair,” he said. His company recently finished research (not yet published) that found pay equity has a higher correlation to employee experience than the amount of pay an employee receives. That includes keeping pay equal for new and current employees, but also for creating parity. He cited Salesforce as an example of this; the company recently adjusted the pay of 8.5% of its global workforce, with 92% of those adjustments made to address gender parity. 

Reskilling: It’s really about learning to grow

The big shift in L&D, Josh told the audience, is not toward more online learning, videos, and learning experience platforms. “It’s really,” he said, “about learning to grow.” 

Josh pointed to a study showing the L&D initiatives that are creating the most impact now are career- or growth-oriented learning programs that take employees from one job to another and from one level of performance to the next.

He noted that most companies have a massive skills gap in at least one area. “That’s where you apply this systemic HR operating model,” he said. “And it’s pretty clear to me that the functions of L&D and recruiting have to work together.” 

As an example, he told the story of someone who had been the head of L&D at a telephone company, and was assigned to oversee talent acquisition following the departure of the previous leader. After a year of leading the recruiting team and examining reqs, the telephone exec learned more about the skills gaps and the L&D programs his company needed than he ever had in L&D. 

Josh also spoke about the importance of “skills adjacencies” in filling roles, pointing to the HR department itself. He said that many companies need more data scientists now and that “you probably have PhDs in math right in HR” who could be moved over. “All sorts of career adjacencies like this are now becoming evident thanks to tools like LinkedIn,” he added. 

Redesigning: It’s about making the best use of the talent you have 

Josh takes a simple approach to organizational design. Rather than creating elaborate org charts, he said, you need to sit down with the employees who are doing the work, look at where they’re spending their time, and figure out if they’re doing the right work. 

“In most jobs,” he said, “when they become harder and more complex, you do more and more work that is not top of license for you.” (“Top of license” means working on the most complex tasks someone’s knowledge and ability allow.)

He pointed to nurses as an example, saying that the healthcare industry will soon be short more than 2 million nurses. To remedy this, providers are re-engineering the nursing function, trying to make sure nurses are working at top of license. “The idea,” he explained, “is that if you’re trained to be a nurse, you should not be taking out the garbage or cleaning up after the patient.” Nurses should be tending patients and leveraging their clinical training and experiences. 

In other fields, he suggests looking at organizational design and redesigning jobs to fill gaps. And the best place to start, he says, is by asking, “Is this job even defined correctly?” 

Final thoughts: Why Systemic HR is more important than ever

Over the past few years, many companies have undergone major transformations. They’ve had to keep pace with a rapidly unfolding digital environment. And the labor market has been churning and moving at an equally breakneck speed. 

“Your ability to hire, retain, train, and redeploy people is not going to be easy going forward,” Josh said. “That’s why HR is so important. The idea of really working in a systemic way is fundamental to your future.” 

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