Adoption is not transformation
Why making recruiting faster and redesigning it are two completely different things
Greetings from Edinburgh. Welcome to Recruiting Future Feast, the weekly newsletter from the Recruiting Future podcast.
Recruiting Future helps Talent Acquisition teams drive measurable impact by developing their strategic capability in Foresight, Influence, Talent, and Technology.
I had a brilliant conversation with Tracy St. Dic from Zapier for Episode 803 of the podcast (see the Foresight section below). Zapier is moving towards being AI-native in everything it does, including talent acquisition. Our conversation really highlights the difference between AI adoption and AI transformation.
The distinction really matters because most of what is being called AI transformation in recruiting right now is AI adoption. Adoption means taking what you already do and making it faster. Screen resumes more quickly, schedule interviews automatically, draft job descriptions in seconds. You are still hiring the same way, just with a faster engine underneath, and targeting speed and efficiency alone does not bring true value.
AI transformation is a different thing entirely. It means going back to the fundamentals of what hiring actually needs to achieve and asking whether your current approach is the best way to drive measurable business value with the resources TA has available. The real value is not a faster version of the same process. It is reaching talent your current methods miss, gathering genuine signal on capability where traditional recruiting methods may give you very little, and rethinking what your recruiters spend their time on. Getting there requires questioning whether the way you hire today needs rebuilding rather than accelerating.
The challenge for TA leaders is that AI adoption is where almost all the effort is going right now, and it is hard enough in its own right. The risk is not that it fails. The risk is that it succeeds and becomes the ceiling, the point where organizations stop because it feels like enough. That still leaves the harder question unanswered. Should your hiring process exist in its current form at all? Very few organizations are asking that question yet, and the ones who are starting to, all questioned the process before they even thought about the technology.
Foresight
In its quest to become an AI-native organization, Zapier is working to shape the future of its hiring. The company is rethinking AI fluency, redesigning how candidates enter the process, and questioning what the recruiter role should look like.
On Episode 803, I spoke to Tracy St. Dic, Global Head of Talent at Zapier, about what AI-native recruiting looks like in practice and the route they are taking to get there.
Influence
AI is demanding more of the people function than it has ever been asked to deliver, and the gap between that demand and the organizational readiness to meet it is significant. The technology conversations are happening, but culture, infrastructure, and strategic ownership are lagging behind. Without those foundations, even the most ambitious AI plans stay on the surface.
On Episode 793, recorded live at HR Tech Europe in Amsterdam, I spoke to Anna Carlsson, an HR Tech Analyst based in Stockholm, and Nazim Ünlü, a Global HRD and HR transformation leader, about what is holding the people function back and the strategic shift HR needs to make to stay relevant as AI reshapes the landscape.
Talent
Employers increasingly list AI fluency as a hiring requirement, yet most cannot articulate what it means for the vast majority of roles. The gap between what the workplace now demands and what education delivers is growing, with universities still treating AI primarily as a cheating problem rather than a fluency challenge. If organizations cannot define what AI fluency looks like in their own context, they cannot hire for it, and they certainly cannot build it in the teams they already have.
On Episode 786, I spoke to Kathleen deLaski, Founder of the Education Design Lab, about the lack of clarity around AI fluency and why the current approach risks failing a generation of new talent.
Technology
A growing number of companies are declaring themselves AI-first without working out what that actually requires, and falling into the adoption versus transformation trap. Where data is patchy, content conflicting, and process ownership unclear, AI surfaces those problems rather than fixes them.
On Episode 801, I spoke to Mark Stelzner, Founder and Managing Principal at IA, about what it really takes to make AI work in the people function and why so many AI-first claims fall apart on contact with reality.
What Are You Actually Redesigning?
AI adoption is taking up most of the energy in TA right now. The harder question is whether any of that effort is leading to genuine redesign of how you hire, or whether it is focused on making the same process work faster.
What is one part of your hiring process that you have genuinely redesigned rather than simply accelerated? Leave a comment and let me know
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Many Thanks
Matt