Recruiting Future with Matt Alder - What's Next For Talent Acquisition, HR & Hiring?

The gap between claiming to be strategic and actually operating strategically has real consequences, and nowhere are they clearer than at the top of HR. CHRO turnover is unusually high at the moment, and it also spikes sharply in the first year under a new CEO. A change at the top usually brings a new thesis about what the business needs, and what the CEO needs from HR shifts with it. Many CHROs find themselves running a system built for the previous mandate, and by the time the gap becomes visible, trust has already eroded. The problem is structural rather than personal, which means it can be fixed.

So what separates the HR leaders who thrive in the role from those who don't?

My guest this week is Jackson O. Lynch, founder of Talent Sherpa and a former CHRO who works with CEOs, CHROs, and boards on connecting talent systems to business strategy. In our conversation, Jackson shares why mandate misalignment drives so much churn at the top of HR, what operating at the top level means in practice, and why AI is making the redesign of work urgent.

In the interview, we discuss:

Why is CHRO turnover so high?

Mandate misalignment and the conversation that rarely happens

What does strategic HR look like in practice?

Systems for transformation versus systems for stability

Looking at business strategy through the talent lens

Business logic versus compliance logic in the C-suite

The trust issue

Why AI is forcing a rethink of how work is designed

Can HR take this opportunity for reinvention, and what does the future look like?

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The job of Chief People Officer has never been more demanding, and the way organizations decide who gets it is changing fast. Appointment volumes have fallen sharply, boards are rethinking what they value in an HR leader, and the profile of the people winning the top seats looks different from even two years ago. Experience of having done the job before is no longer the deciding factor it once was, which changes the calculation for everyone with ambitions on the role. So what are boards really looking for when they appoint a Chief People Officer?

My guest this week is Olivia Sharp, a Partner at executive search firm Eton Bridge Partners, where she leads searches for Chief People Officers and board-level appointments and heads the firm's research into CPO hiring globally. In our conversation, she shares what the data reveals about experience versus potential, the skills that now define the role, and how TA leaders can position themselves for the top job.

In the interview, we discuss:

The fundamental shifts in what organizations value when hiring Chief People Officers

Why boards are taking calculated risks on potential rather than buying proven experience

What the appointment data means for first-time CPO candidates

The leadership qualities that now matter more than HR expertise

Where the traditional HR career path falls short

The commercial capability gap in HR development

How TA leaders can position themselves for the top job

The swing back to external hiring and why new doesn't mean radical

What will the Chief People Officer role look like in the future?

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Skills have been on the HR agenda for decades, but they rarely became the basis for real decisions; frameworks took so long to build that the business had moved on before they were finished. What's different now is that AI agents are starting to handle work that used to require a person, and that changes the question employers need to ask. It's no longer just about who to hire; it's about whether the work needs a human at all. When you can map work to the skills it requires, you have a basis for deciding what stays with people and what moves to an agent. Making that shift isn't straightforward, though; it raises questions about what HR itself needs to look like and what capabilities the function needs to develop. So what does it take to make skills the basis for deciding how work gets done?

My guest this week is Ciara Harrington, Chief People Officer at Skillsoft. In our conversation, Ciara shares how Skillsoft is rethinking which work needs a person, why HR has to become more technical to lead that conversation, and what happens when you add "bot" to your talent strategy.

In the interview, we discuss:

How is AI changing the way we think about skills?

Build, buy, borrow, bot

Helping leaders understand what work could be done differently

Tasks, skills, jobs, and units of work

How understanding skills underpins this transformation

AI can be more expensive than humans

Building an effective governance model

Hiring technical skills into HR and connecting the data

Critical human skills and why they need to be developed faster

What does the future look like?

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This is the final episode of Decoding the C-Suite, a five part miniseries from Recruiting Future about how leadership really thinks about AI, recorded with the leadership team at SmartRecruiters seven months into their acquisition by SAP.

Three years into the AI boom, the marketing noise has never been louder. Everything is AI-powered and every vendor makes the same claims. In the final episode, Steve Hardy, who leads marketing at SmartRecruiters, is unusually candid about all of it: why he tells his own sales team to stop demoing, what he calls AI washing, why buyers should start with business priorities rather than features, and what actually builds trust with buyers and candidates alike. The series closes with the question that ran through every conversation: what does good leadership look like in an AI-driven world?

This is episode four of Decoding the C-Suite, a five part miniseries from Recruiting Future about how leadership really thinks about AI, recorded with the leadership team at SmartRecruiters seven months into their acquisition by SAP.

AI is moving faster than any buyer can absorb, and that creates a genuine design problem: build for the boldest customers and you lose everyone else, build for the cautious and you fall behind. Shefali Netke, VP of Product Design at SmartRecruiters, lives in that tension every day. She explains how to design for a spectrum of readiness rather than an average user, why she refuses to keep designing for the old world, how her team builds AI fluency, and what it takes to merge two design cultures into one team.