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When the World Stops: The Capacity Problem Talent Has Normalised · Edan Haddock - Total Talent

• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Hello everyone and welcome back to Eden Haddock Total Talent.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: I am your host, Eden Haddock, Head of Talent and People Experience at Movember.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: And before I get into today's episode, I want to start somewhere a little different.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: I want to apologize for disappearing for the last couple of weeks.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: I lost my father-in-law and everything changed very quickly.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: I had to drop what I was doing and head to Scotland.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: So the podcast stopped.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: Work stopped.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: The normal routine stopped.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: And as anyone who has experienced something like this will know, for a period of time, the rest of the world just becomes noise.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: There are moments in life where the meetings, the emails, the deadlines, the LinkedIn messages, and the endless list of things that seemed incredibly important yesterday suddenly aren't important at all.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: Family is.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: Being there is, and everything else can wait.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you for bearing with me while the podcast went quiet.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: I'm back.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: And strangely, the experience gave me a very different perspective on something I was already planning to talk about.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: Capacity.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: Because this episode is really a sequel to my previous conversation about capacity planning and talent.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: But I want to take the conversation somewhere much more human today.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: Because capacity planning sounds clinical.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: It sounds like spreadsheets, requisitions per recruiter, hiring forecasts, productivity ratios, time to hire, workforce demand.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: But what happens when life happens?
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: What happens when one of the plates suddenly stops spinning?
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: Or more accurately, what happens when the person spinning all of those plates suddenly has to walk away?
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: The machine doesn't stop.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: Think about the average internal talent professional's day.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: You've got interviews scheduled, hiring manager briefings, candidate calls, offers being negotiated, roles advertised, roles about to be advertised, roles that probably shouldn't have been advertised yet, you know.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: You've got candidates waiting for feedback, you've got managers chasing candidates, you've got candidates chasing managers.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, with that, you're in the middle.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: You've got the managers chasing you, you've got the candidates chasing you.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: Your ATS has tasks waiting.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: Your calendar looks like somebody has been playing Tetris with it.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: You've probably got your Teams or Slack notifications going off, emails arriving, and then there's LinkedIn.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: Good grief LinkedIn.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: That inbox never ends.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: Candidates messaging, agencies messaging, people wanting career advice, people wanting introductions, suppliers, recruiters, people you've never met asking you to look at their CV, people you've never met following up on a message they sent you yesterday asking why you haven't responded to their message.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: And amongst all of that, we're trying to do something I think most good talent people genuinely care about.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: Create a good candidate experience.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: That's the bit that matters.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: Because behind every application is a human being.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: Behind every interview is somebody who might have prepared for hours.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: Behind every offer is potentially a major life decision.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: Behind every rejection is someone who deserves some dignity and some communication.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: And we carry that.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: Good talent people carry that.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: Which means when something happens in our own lives and we suddenly need to stop, there is this uncomfortable feeling.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: What happens to all of that?
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: Who picks it up?
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: Who contacts the candidates?
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: Who moves the interviews?
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: Who briefs the manager?
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: Who knows what's happening with that offer?
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: Who knows that Sarah is waiting on another offer and needs an answer by Thursday?
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: Who knows that the hiring manager for that role is going on leave next week?
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: Who knows that the candidate in the final stage had a terrible experience earlier in the process?
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: And you've been personally rebuilding that relationship.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: And really, it raises a much bigger question.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: Have we actually built resilient talent functions?
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: Or have we built functions that rely on individual people carrying enormous amounts of organizational knowledge in their heads?
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: We talk about capacity as though every day is normal.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: This is where I think traditional capacity planning starts to break down.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: We tend to calculate capacity based on normal operating conditions.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: How many requisitions can one recruiter manage?
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's fifteen, maybe it's twenty, maybe it's twenty-five.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe somebody somewhere has decided it's forty because they found a benchmark in a slide deck.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: But those numbers usually assume something.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: They assume the recruiter is there.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: They assume the hiring managers are available.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: They assume candidates behave predictably, right?
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: They assume the technology works.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: They assume nobody gets sick.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody has a family emergency.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody burns out.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody takes unexpected leave.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody needs to suddenly get on a plane to the other side of the world.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, our capacity models often assume that humans behave like infrastructure.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: Always available, always operational, always online.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: But we're not infrastructure, we're people.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: And genuine workforce capacity needs to account for that.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: Because if one person unexpectedly disappears for a week, if that causes the entire entire recruitment process to wobble, right?
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: That isn't a resilience problem with the individual.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: That's a design problem with the function.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: And here we go.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: And then AI arrived.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: Because over the last few years, we know AI has started taking more and more of the administrative burden out of talent.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I am incredibly bullish about that.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: I use AI.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: I advocate for AI.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: I think augmented talent teams absolutely where our profession is heading.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: Scheduling can be automated.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: Notes can be captured.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: Transcripts can be summarized.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: Candidate communications can be supported.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: Market research can happen faster.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: Job ads can be drafted faster.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: Data can be analyzed faster.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: Sourcing can become smarter.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: Screening can be supported.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: Reporting can be automated.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: Administrative tasks that used to take hours can take minutes.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: Fantastic.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: That should create capacity.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: But has it?
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: Has AI actually created more breathing room for talent professionals?
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: Or have we simply filled the space?
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: Because something very interesting has happened, I believe.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: Every time technology gives us an hour back, we find another hour's worth of work.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: We automate something and say, Great.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: Now talent can spend more time advising.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: Brilliant.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: So we add talent advisory.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: Then we automate something else.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: Great.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: Now talent can spend more time on workforce planning.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: Excellent.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: Add workforce planning.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: Then AI improves again.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: Great.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: Now talent can get closer to REM.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: And salary benchmarking, skills intelligence, internal mobility, succession, employer brand, talent analytics, workforce design, candidate engagement, strategic sourcing, organizational capability.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: Suddenly the talent function is doing more sophisticated work than it has ever done before.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's fantastic.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: I've spent a lot of time on this podcast arguing that talent needs to evolve beyond recruitment.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: I stand by that completely.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: But there's another side to this.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: Have we protected our profession by doing more?
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: When people asked whether AI would replace recruiters, our response was effectively no.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: Because we're going to move up the value chain.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to become advisors.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to understand the workforce.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to understand REM.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to understand capability.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to use data.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to influence organizational design.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to become strategic talent professionals.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I believe that's exactly the right direction.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: But we need to be careful.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: Because there is a dangerous assumption hiding underneath it.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: That AI creating capacity means organizations need fewer talent people.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: Well, maybe.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: But what if that's the wrong conclusion?
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: What if AI hasn't exposed an opportunity to remove capacity?
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: What if AI has exposed just how underresourced talent has been for decades, right?
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe we were always carrying too much.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: Think about recruitment before generative AI.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: Think about what recruiters were expected to do.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: Source, screen, schedule, interview, coordinate, brief, write ads, manage agencies, negotiate offers, maintain the ATS, manage candidate communication, coach managers, attend meetings, report, build pipelines, manage compliance, support onboarding.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: I can go on.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, somehow deliver an amazing candidate experience throughout all of it.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: We accepted that as normal.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: We wore being busy almost like a badge of honor.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: I'm managing thirty-five roles.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: I'm managing fifty roles.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: I'm working across three regions.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: I'm doing back-to-back interviews all day.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe the question we should have asked wasn't, how do we make recruiters more efficient?
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe we should not have asked that.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe we should have been asking, why did we design the job like this in the first place?
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: Because there is a difference between productivity and overload.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: And talent has confused those two things for a very long time.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: A recruiter managing enormous numbers of roles isn't necessarily productive.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: They might simply be overloaded.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: A recruiter responding to messages at nine o'clock at night isn't necessarily committed.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: They might simply not have had enough hours in their working day.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: A talent leader jumping between six completely different disciplines isn't necessarily demonstrating agility.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: The operating model might simply be asking one person to do the work of three.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: And technology can hide that.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's the uncomfortable bit.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: AI can make an under-resourced function look functional.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: It can allow fewer people to carry more.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: And for a while, that looks like productivity until something happens.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: Someone gets sick, someone resigns, someone burns out, someone takes parental leave, someone has a family emergency, someone's world stops.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: And suddenly you discover whether you actually had capacity, or whether you simply had just enough technology to keep the overload moving.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: There's an old concept in technology called the bus factor.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: Essentially, how many people could disappear from a project before it couldn't continue because critical knowledge disappeared with them?
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's a slightly grim expression.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: But I think talent needs to think about its own version of that.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: If your recruiter disappeared tomorrow unexpectedly, could somebody else understand their desk?
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: Not just open the ATS, but actually understand it.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: Which roles are genuinely urgent?
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: Which hiring managers need extra support?
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: Which candidates are vulnerable to dropping out?
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: Which offers are close?
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: Which conversations happened outside the system?
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we do still do that.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: Which candidates have competing processes?
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: Where are their sensitivities?
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: What promises have been made?
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: What's the context?
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: Because talent is incredibly relationship driven.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: And relationships don't fit neatly into dashboards.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: That means resilience requires deliberate design, good documentation, good systems, shared visibility, clear ownership, cross-training, technology that captures context rather than simply transactions.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: And critically, actual spare capacity.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: That last one matters.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: Because we have become obsessed with utilization.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: We want everybody operating at maximum capacity, every hour accounted for, every recruiter loaded with requisitions, every piece of technology maximized.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: But one hundred percent utilization is not resilience, it's fragility.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: If your team is operating at one hundred percent capacity when everything is going perfectly, you have already exceeded capacity.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: Because life doesn't operate perfectly.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe capacity is the wrong word.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe we need to stop thinking purely about capacity and start thinking about headroom?
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: How much headroom exists in your talent function?
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: If demand increases by twenty percent next month, what happens?
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: If someone is away unexpectedly, what happens?
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_00: If five priority roles suddenly land, what happens?
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: If a business critical hire needs extraordinary attention, what gives?
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: If your answer is everyone just works harder, that's not a capacity strategy.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's hope.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: And hope is a terrible workforce model.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: Technology should create headroom.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: AI should create headroom.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: Automation should create headroom.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: But we need the discipline not to immediately consume every second we create.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: Because some capacity needs to exist simply because humans are human.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: Now that doesn't mean people sitting around doing nothing.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: It means having enough flexibility in the system that unexpected events don't create chaos.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: And this is also about candidate experience.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: I think this becomes particularly important for talent.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_00: Candidates don't care about our capacity models.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: They shouldn't have to.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: A candidate doesn't know that your recruiter has 32 open requisitions.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_00: They don't know someone called in sick.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_00: They don't know the hiring manager changed the brief.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: They don't know your ATS migration has gone sideways.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: They simply experience silence.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: And silence feels personal.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's why capacity is directly connected to candidate experience.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: We can talk endlessly about candidate experience strategies, personalization, employer brand, communication journeys, candidate NPS.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: But if the people responsible for delivering that experience are permanently overloaded, eventually the experience breaks.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: You cannot process design your way out of chronic undercapacity.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: AI can help enormously.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: But AI should amplify humanity.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: It should become the excuse.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: It shouldn't.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's a terrible ambition.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe the goal is AI means our recruiter can manage an appropriate workload while having dramatically better conversations.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_00: More time with candidates, more time with hiring managers, more time understanding the market, more time thinking, more time advising, more time challenging, and yes, enough headroom that if life happens, the whole system doesn't collapse.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_00: Now that sounds like progress to me.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: So what happens when the world stops?
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: Well, for me recently it did.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: I had to step away.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_00: And it reminded me that no matter how important our work feels in that moment, there will always be things more important than work.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_00: There should be.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_00: And a genuinely mature organization understands that.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_00: A genuinely mature talent operating model plans for it.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_00: Not specifically for bereavement, not specifically for illness, not specifically for emergencies, just for humanity.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_00: Because humans are unpredictable.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_00: Life is unpredictable.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_00: Capacity planning, therefore, cannot simply ask how much work can this person theoretically carry?
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_00: It needs to ask, how much work should this person carry while leaving enough room for them to remain human?
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe AI gives us an opportunity to finally answer that.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: Not reducing talent teams until everybody is stretched again.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: But by redesigning what good capacity actually looks like.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe the greatest benefit of AI isn't doing more.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's finally giving us the opportunity to do better.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_00: To be more strategic, more human, more thoughtful, more present.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: And perhaps a little less obsessed with keeping every single plate spinning every single second of every day.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_00: Because sometimes the world stops.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_00: And when it does, the work needs to be able to continue without demanding that the human does.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: So that's it from me this week.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_00: Slightly more personal episode than usual, but one I wanted to share.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: And thank you.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you once again for bearing with me over the last couple of weeks.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's good to be back behind the microphone.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_00: It really is.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_00: This is Eden Haddock, Total Talent.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: No guests, no sponsors, just one practitioner, still on the tools, trying to work out where talent goes next.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_00: If you enjoyed this episode, follow the show, share it with someone in talent, and join me again for the next one.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_00: You can search for Eden Haddock Total Talent on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_00: Until next time, look after yourselves.