The South African Human Resources (HR) community gathered for HR Summit – held at Sandton Convention Centre on 2 September - to discuss the future of work and talent in South Africa. At the Summit, the Talent Conference (sponsored by Pnet) explored how organisations can no longer approach talent as a series of isolated vacancies or processes.
Simon Blair
Emerging technology and rising competition for scarce skills are changing the job market, demanding that organisations take a more strategic approach to building, attracting and retaining capability. Together, these themes point to an HR function that takes a central role in operational resilience and strategic growth in a modern enterprise.
Theme 1: The golden rule of hiring
Speakers at the Talent Conference, including Pnet’s Head of Insights and Customer Success, Paul Byrne, highlighted how the rules of hiring have changed over the past few years. A traditional recruitment model of advertising a vacancy, waiting for applications and selecting from candidates who respond will not guarantee a business access to critical talent in a skills-constrained market.
South Africa’s high unemployment rate has not translated into access to the skills organisations need to grow their businesses. The reason for this is that there is a deep mismatch between the capabilities employers need and the qualifications and skills available in the market.
According to recent Pnet data, 54% of advertised jobs require a bachelor’s or postgraduate qualification, yet only 36% of applicants meet those requirements. Given that the external talent pool is too small to meet that demand, organisations cannot fill every role by competing harder for the same people.
The upshot is that companies need to take a more deliberate approach to engineering their talent pipeline for the future. Not only do they need to think of the opportunities to attract the right talent, but they also need to map out talent risk in the same way as they do financial, operational or cyber risk:
- What happens if they are competing with too many other employers for scarce talent?
- What happens if critical skills and knowledge sit with too few people?
- What if future capability is not being built or accessed fast enough?
- How much business disruption would losing key employees cause?
Thinking about tomorrow’s talent need before it becomes critical
These questions highlight why it is important for organisations to address talent gaps before a vacancy becomes urgent. This means identifying which capabilities are high-value, high-stakes or genuinely scarce; understanding where those capabilities exist; and building relationships with people who could become critical to the organisation.
The new golden rule is: “Do not wait until you need talent to start looking for it.” Once a business starts deliberately engineering its capability pipeline, it can address talent gaps with a range of strategies.
For the companies that are most successful in attracting talent, recruitment is an ongoing strategic capability rather than a transactional HR process. They look beyond advertising vacancies towards mapping out future skills and capability needs; proactively reaching and engaging talent; converting applicants into employees; and measuring business outcomes.
The components of their strategic architecture will include:
- Business strategy: What talent does the business need to mitigate operational risk and maximise growth opportunities?
- Talent risk: Where could scarcity or concentration disrupt delivery?
- Talent-market intelligence: Insight into where the skills and capabilities can be accessed, how scarce they are, and how much competition there is for relevant talent.
- Pipeline: Which internal skills are available now, will be ready soon or are worth developing?
- Preference: How can the organisation leverage employee value propositions, credible career pathways, employer brand and positive candidate experiences to be the employer of preference for key talent?
- Activation: When demand for a skill or capability emerges, how can the organisation move quickly and credibly to fill the role?
A healthy internal talent ecosystem supports succession planning and internal staff transfers, helping to ensure access to capability into the future. But many organisations are also supplementing recruitment with strategies such as “borrowing” specialist or contingent expertise and augmenting human capability with technology.
Theme 2: High tech, human touch
Most functions in the business are being disrupted by the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), and this includes HR and recruitment. Around 43% of organisations are now using AI in HR tasks, up from 26% in 2024, according to research from the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), illustrating how quickly HR adoption is ramping up.
Speakers and panellists at the Talent Conference at HR Summit highlighted the complexity of balancing the efficiency and effectiveness gains of emerging technology against the regulatory risks and ethical issues it raises. The fundamental question is: What should machines do and what should remain the responsibility of people?
There was broad agreement that machine learning and AI can help HR professionals and recruiters to identify patterns, uncover risks and make better decisions across the talent lifecycle, from talent attraction and workforce planning through to retention, learning, mobility, reward and equity.
But data and AI need to be used as a responsible augmentation of HR professionals’ capabilities rather than as a replacement for human agency. It is essential to understand what a system is optimising for, what data it is learning from and whether its definition of a “successful” candidate or employee could be discriminatory.
There is, for example, a danger of reproducing historical preferences or disadvantaging people whose potential is less visible in the data when using AI for talent matching. This is particularly important when career gaps, location, educational institutions or incomplete records can influence recommendations.
Recruiters and HR leaders bring context, motivation, judgement, trust and accountability to decisions that affect people’s careers and livelihoods. That means employees and candidates should not disappear behind an algorithm. Conversations with humans should aways be central.
Organisations therefore need AI literacy, data discipline, ethical guardrails and the ability to challenge or override automated recommendations. They also need to distinguish efficiency from effectiveness: a faster process is useful, but the real test is whether it produces better talent decisions, wider opportunity, stronger retention and greater trust.
The new talent conversations
The conversations at the Talent Conference point to a fundamental shift in how organisations need to think about talent. Businesses need to anticipate talent needs rather than simply respond to vacancies, while building the intelligence, relationships and internal capability needed to keep their talent pipelines healthy.
At the same time, technology is transforming how HR engages talent, but its value depends on responsible use and human judgement. The future of recruitment will be about combining data and technology with the insight, context and accountability that humans bring to decisions about people.
