What’s shaping hiring - and why human judgment remains the ‘most important' tool: ManpowerGroup

Jonas Prising, Manpower: I think we've done a poor job so far as leaders of articulating how is this technology going to help the company from a strategy perspective? How is this going to benefit our workers, our employees? What specifically should they expect to see in terms of their work lives and the part that's going to be impactful for them in a positive way and generate that trust in the future. So articulating that with clarity and confidence is absent in today's conversation and frankly in many organisations.

Robin Pomeroy, Meet The Leader: Welcome to Meet the Leader, the podcast from the World Economic Forum that speaks to the top leaders who share how they're tackling the world's biggest challenges. In this episode, I'm talking to Jonas Prising, the chair and CEO of ManpowerGroup. I'm Robin Pomeroy at the World Economic forum and this is Meet The Leader.

Jonas Prising, thanks for joining us. How are you?

Jonas Prising, Manpower: Excellent. Thanks, Robin.

Robin Pomeroy, Meet The Leader: You wrote for an article on forum stories on the World Economic Forum's website. Over the next five years, the defining challenge will be redesigning work so people can grow with it. What did you mean?

Jonas Prising, ManpowerGroup: What we talk a lot about, and are frankly mesmerised by the speed of the technological evolution and the speed at that innovation. What we forget is the human aspect of how work gets done. In our experience, working across 80 countries globally with millions of workers deployed across hundreds of thousands of companies, what do we know is that technological innovation really depends on human adoption.

And as we think about the work and how work will need to be redesigned around AI, that's how we can see the evolution accelerating from what today is really AI being used in pretty narrow use cases as tool versus a transformational change of end-to-end value creation processes where work will change dramatically and fundamentally as we look into the future.

Robin Pomeroy, Meet The Leader: So, what we're seeing is AI kind of bolted onto the existing workplace. What you're saying is that existing workplace is going to change. Can you think of some examples or is it too early to tell what that redesign will look like?

Jonas Prising, Manpower: Well, it's a little bit early to tell, but I think we can see the early usage of AI is as tools on specific use cases and tasks. So if you think about a job, a job consists of maybe 18 to 25 tasks. Today, companies are deploying AI to solve a specific problem within a task. And so as we see the narrative evolving around the speed of technologies moving very quickly and adoption is slow, it's because it's only being deployed in specific tasks and use cases. And over time, to see the true value of AI, we believe organisations will have to rethink how work gets done across their entire value of creation. That, of course, is a transformation that takes time. Require significant investments both in technology infrastructure and frankly into change management because ultimately what's going to be very important is going to before workers and employees to understand what benefit does this have for myself and how is this going to benefit the activity that I enjoy doing today so that I can do more of it and less of it to the things that I don't enjoy doing as much.

Robin Pomeroy, Meet The Leader: Because a lot of those workers will be concerned that the transformation from AI in the workplace is to get rid of all the human jobs. You believe that's right.

Jonas Prising, ManpowerGroup: No, I don't believe that's right. You listen to the technology companies, they will say job losses of X percent of the workforce is what's to be expected, so brace yourselves. So frankly, a very negative narrative. From our experience, that's not how this technological innovation and revolution will play out. We'll eventually find the right mix between what the technology can do to improve the performance of the organisation and the performance and the value for employees as well. based on the narrative today, it feels as if everything is going to change tomorrow. We think it's going to take time. Because it involves process change, change management, and it involves trust. And today we can see people aren't that optimistic about the impact of AI to their jobs and to themselves in their professional lives.

Robin Pomeroy, Meet The Leader: I wonder what needs to happen to change that trust and maybe you're seeing organisations where they're doing a good job in bringing the workforce with them.

Jonas Prising, ManpowerGroup: Well, I think a lot of it will depend on the leadership. So I think we've done a poor job so far as leaders of articulating how is this technology going to help the company from a strategy perspective? How is this going to benefit our workers, our employees? What specifically should they expect to see in terms of their work lives and the part that's going to be impactful for them in a positive way and generate that trust in the future. And the confidence that proceeding along this route is ultimately going to be beneficial for myself and for the organisation that I work in. So articulating that with clarity and confidence is absent in today's conversation and frankly in many organisations as well. We've gotten way ahead of our skis in terms of the innovation driven by the speed of technology and we're forgetting that the actual adoption and the implementation. Depends on people's trust and confidence that this will do really good things for them in their working lives.

Your research finds that a human reviewing resumes remains the best hiring resource, because those of us who've looked for jobs, we fear it's an AI that's going to decide whether or not our resume is good enough to get us an interview. I mean, why are humans doing better at this looking at a resume deciding maybe this is a candidate for a job.

Jonas Prising, ManpowerGroup Well, some of the unintended consequences that we're seeing, you know, with the adoption of AI is not only do companies adopt AI, individuals are adopting AI as well. And frankly, the hiring experience today for many job seekers is inherently very unpleasant and unsatisfactory because they are sending out applications to a faceless recipient, not getting a response, any feedback that is useful to them. And sending these missives out into the dark space. So the job seeker experience, frankly, with the technology has not gotten better. It's gotten worse.

From an organisational perspective, there's been a massive increase in applications to any particular job posting. And that's because job seekers are deploying agentic AI and AI to automate their job applications. They match those job applications and those resumes to search words that they are seeing in the job ads. So what we're seeing at Manpower, a tremendous increase of applications and a tremendous uniformity in the applications because everyone is using the same large language models to optimise their resumes on digital media to look as if they're suitable for the job.

So what that all ends up doing is that the human judgement and the conversation that we have as recruiters with the candidates that we are talking to becomes the most important hiring tool that we had. So paradoxically, the technology may increase the speed, but at this point doesn't increase the accuracy. And that human element really is the great benefit that we can provide both to the candidate and to the employers that are looking for the talent because we have a lot of experience and we can judge this in a way that truly adds value to both stakeholders.

And we've been very purposeful in designing ethical AI inside our company so that any decision, the ultimate hiring decision or recommendation always lies with the human. And so a lot of the transactional work that we used to do, we don't do anymore. So we do more of the judgement, the interviews, the interaction between the candidates to find out what the perfect fit for that individual would be.

Robin Pomeroy, Meet The Leader: How do you hire? Imagine we were in a job interview and I'm applying for a job for one of your clients. What kind of questions would you ask me? What would you want to hear from me to convince you to go through to the next round or to give me the job?

Jonas Prising, ManpowerGroup: And it's a great question. And frankly, we would do this as we've done with other technological evolutions. We'd ask you, Robin, do you use AI in any aspect of your life? Are you familiar with various large language models?
What are you using it for? Why do you find it useful? What do you not find it helpful for? What were your experiences where you were really disappointed, when you were leveraging this tool, as opposed to what were you really positively surprised about and how do you think that can apply in the future as you come and explore work opportunities at Manpower.

Robin Pomeroy, Meet The Leader: But also, crucially, you said in those questions, what disappointed you? What is it not good at? So if you had a candidate come and say, yeah, it's great. ChatGPT does all my work for me now. I'm going to come in and I'll be done by lunchtime. You want some critical thinking there.

Jonas Prising, ManpowerGroup: Yeah, and I think critical thinking is another element of exactly that. What is it that it does well and what does it not do well? In our own organisation, we try to be very clear and be very explicit around what can go wrong and why we want human judgement and assessment at the end to be the determining factor whether a candidate moves forward from a hiring opportunity perspective. Because there are many things that can go absolutely wrong if you blindly trust the technology.

Robin Pomeroy, Meet The Leader We could put a phone here now, record our job interview, and when the candidates left the room say, okay, Claude, yes or no to this one. Would you say that's a good, I mean, then you could do that and choose not to. Would you do that, do you think?

Jonas Prising, ManpowerGroup: Yeah, we wouldn't do that. Ultimately whether you or I fit into an organisation is so much more than the technical background and the factual background. Does Robin fit into the culture here in this office. Would he interact well with his boss or not? Is the culture conducive to his personality? With job seekers, it's very important to tell them that ultimately the assessment that I make of your qualifications will be by myself. I will be aided by technology, so I've gotten some good information, but the decision will be made by myself or my colleagues. So to be very explicit and upfront, because I think a lot of job seekers and individuals at large will be disappointed if they think that we're having this conversation, but Ultimately, the decision has already been made by a machine. And that doesn't feel very good, and it's also potentially really not guaranteeing a very good outcome.

Robin Pomeroy, Meet The Leader A lot of countries are seeing population decline. What do leaders of companies need to be thinking about, and leaders maybe of governments as well and other organisations, to handle what could be really fundamental change over the next five, 10, 20 years?

Jonas Prising, ManpowerGroup: Well I think the good news is that there are people and human potential that we can unlock in new ways. This forces us to unlock that human potential. And we're not relying anymore on population growth providing us with a new flow of workforce because there are pockets of our societies where people haven't been able to participate, either in globalisation and presumably in aspects of this new technology innovation. There is then the pressure of trying to make sure that we bring in talent pools that have been previously overlooked or have had difficulties getting into the workforce, now making extra efforts and understanding how we can bring them in because we need them so that we can continue to grow the prosperity of a community, an organisation, or a nation.

So the negative aspects of slowing population growth, which of course historically has always been key, population growth drives prosperity growth, along with productivity improvement. So the fact that we are now coming into a situation where a lot of nations are no longer having the population growth as a driver of economic growth is a big change. And I think both the promise of the technology evolution that we're living through right now, and the opportunity to tap into the talent pools that haven't had the same opportunities to participate, forces us to make greater effort to integrate them into this evolution so that they can also have meaningful and sustainable employment.

Robin Pomeroy, Meet The Leader What kind of parts of society are you talking about?

Jonas Prising, ManpowerGroup: Well, first of all, the most underutilised resource in our workforce is female participation in the workforce. High in some places, mostly much, much lower than the 50% of the population that it represents all over the world. So the female participation rate is a tremendous opportunity for us to bring in skilled, motivated, and engaged talent. Of course, we have to facilitate that participation more than what we are doing today, be it through child care, after school care, flexibility so that women can participate and they still carry a lot more of the burden.

But then you also have other aspects of the population, long-term unemployed individuals who have had great difficulty getting back into the workforce. We need to redouble our efforts and bring them in, and of course also youth unemployment. Which tends to be at twice the average unemployment rate in any industrialised country and in emerging markets many, many times higher unemployment than that. And that is a key opportunity that we have to ensure that we bring young people in early so that they can contribute and feel the benefits of employment or work.

Robin Pomeroy, Meet The Leader And that's another challenge that might be exacerbated if we do AI wrong. There's research suggesting already those early careers, those early roles, those jobs are being done by AI and there's a risk of a generation of people missing out on those early roles. So that youth unemployment could even be exacerbated if we're not handling AI right.

Jonas Prising, ManpowerGroup: It could, and I've read these reports and the studies. Our own data, however, would indicate that at this point we think that increase in youth unemployment and the difficulty of finding employment for college graduates and high school graduates is more related to the economic cycle than it is to the structural change.

Of course, you'll always be able to find certain pockets. Say, young coders with no experience having more difficulty now than being hired, because we can see coding is one area where AI is having an impact in demand, although it's still, in most countries, one of the top three or four roles that companies are looking for. So less intense demand, but still very high demand.

But aside from those pockets, we think this has much more to do with the economic cycle. Employer confidence is low. Economic uncertainty is high, geopolitical tensions are high, that means employers pull back. Who are they hiring in times like this? Individuals, talent, that have the requisite skills to become immediately productive and contribute to the areas that they want to accelerate.

They are less likely today as in the past to hire younger people that don't have the experience and that cannot be as productive as quickly as they want the talent. So we think this is more of a cyclical issue, an economic cycle issue, and employer confidence issue than any aspect of impact of AI. So it may have an impact over time, but as with any prediction of what's going to happen with AI in the labour markets, I think it's way early to call and whoever makes those calls today is going to be mostly wrong.

Robin Pomeroy, Meet The Leader The World Economic Forum did a Chief People Officers Outlook report that finds that geopolitical forces, something you just mentioned, are directly shaping talent strategy with knock-on effects to migration and visa restrictions, localisation policy, cyber security. So there are certain things, there are some policies maybe that are making it difficult to maybe hire across borders. Are you seeing that? What do you think of that finding?

Jonas Prising, ManpowerGroup: Yeah, no, I think that what the World Economic Forum's research is showing is clearly reflected in reality. So companies are much more cautious about cross-border hiring at this point in terms of knowing whether the person that is on the other side of the digital screen is actually Robin or is it somebody else or an AI reflexion of Robin trying to find employment on behalf of somebody completely different for non-nefarious or nefarious uses.

Robin Pomeroy, Meet The Leader: That's already happening, isn't it?

Jonas Prising, ManpowerGroup: That's already happening and I have seen those attempts with my own likeness, my own voice that has been used from interviews like these to have actual conversations with my colleagues and the only reason they can determine that it's not me is that I normally don't wear a tie and this person wore a tie.

Robin Pomeroy, Meet The Leader: You're wearing a tie right now.

Jonas Prising, ManpowerGroup: And I'm wearing a tie right now. But normally I don't, and that's how they picked it up, and they said, well, can we just go back to our normal chat channel? And then, of course, the whole fraud scheme fell apart, so it has become very, very sophisticated. And no doubt, the multipolar world and the increasing restrictions around immigration policies is having an impact, very clearly visible in the country where I work and live in the U.S., our migration policies have become much more restrictive, and that is clearly visible both in labour market data and in opportunities for individuals to come to the U,S., but the same is true in many other parts of the world as well.

Robin Pomeroy, Meet The Leader Is that going to change, do you think, or is that the future we're looking at?

Jonas Prising, ManpowerGroup: It's hard to say, but of course with the demographic changes that we know are happening, most countries need an influx of skilled, capable talent. And so how and what shape that takes, frankly, from my own perspective, we believe, will become a known need. And as such, countries we expect are going to moderate the current, you know, more hard-line policies and facilitate migration of the skill sets that they are looking for into their countries because it's going to be vital for their economic growth and prosperity.

Robin Pomeroy, Meet The Leader So this is Meet the Leader, this podcast, and we like to hear how you've developed as a leader. All of us have experiences working for people. We've had good bosses and bad bosses. But what was something that you thought, maybe in retrospect, that person really got it right? I've really benefited working for that person.

Jonas Prising, ManpowerGroup: Early on in my career I had some really interesting job opportunities which I thought translated in a straight line acceleration even further and my boss at the time was very frank and said, no, I think you're forgetting that in this particular job you are advising, you are participating, but you're not leading and you're managing a team. This is about you as an individual contributor in today's job that does not translate into you as a team leader, helping your people grow and deliver results as a team. And I was baffled. I said, how can that be? I'm very successful at what I'm doing. I said well, how about you take the small team and let's see what you can do in this division. Let's see if you can manage this business together with your team members.

And this is the first of many, you know, sleepless night episodes as I experience both the responsibilities of guiding an organisation, very small, helping people be successful, helping guide them and realising that it's not about an individual.

Organisations are the ultimate team sport, and you have to get people to work together towards a common objective. And how to do that can induce many sleepless nights, frustrations, concerns, and anxieties. I was fortunate this was an early career example of one of my bosses giving me frank and clear advice on what I needed to focus on to be successful and that I shouldn't conflate it with past successes and different roles that didn't really have the skill sets. And he was right. I made lots of mistakes in that experience and I learned a lot and hopefully it helped shape the leader that I am today and things that I try to deploy when we work with our teams today.

Robin Pomeroy, Meet The Leader is there a book you'd recommend?

Jonas Prising, ManpowerGroup: I have truly loved reading True North, which is a business book that was written many years ago. It goes something like this, and it's a lot about leadership in general. The author is Bill George. He used to be the CEO of Medtronic. He works at Harvard Business School today. And, you know, he talks about the importance of value-based leadership and what he's taught me in in the moments that i've had the opportunity to not only to read his book but interact with him as well is that truly great leadership of course necessitates capable leaderships you have to know what you're doing you have a bias for action so without you know knowing what you doing but not doing anything is not going to help so those are sort of foundational elements that are extremely important.

The clear moral compass, knowing right from wrong, is what people expect from leaders so they can trust what comes out and others before self. So our job as leaders is to enable future generations and the entire organisation and team to be more successful. If that happens, the leader itself will become more successful also. But it's not about the leader as a person, it is about how the leader can really engage and motivate and develop the organisation and the team, that will drive sustainable long-term results. And those are the four elements that I always think about trying to adhere to in my own leadership, that that is a very, very important aspect.

Robin Pomeroy, Meet The Leader So that book is True North.

Jonas Prising, ManpowerGroup:True North by Bill George. Great.

Robin Pomeroy, Meet The Leader Can we do a rapid response round? I'm gonna say a statement about the future and you'll say whether it will happen or not.

Jonas Prising, ManpowerGroup: I'm ready.

Robin Pomeroy, Meet The Leader These are future scenarios. Yep. We'll finally get a four-day week.

Jonas Prising, ManpowerGroup: Will happen.

Robin Pomeroy, Meet The Leader When will it happen?

Jonas Prising, ManpowerGroup: Well, that we don't know.

Robin Pomeroy, Meet The Leader Where will it happen, in which sectors will it happen? I'm getting out of the quick-fire mode here but I want to know in which areas of work do you think we'll have the four-day week?

Jonas Prising, ManpowerGroup: The reason I think it's going to happen is that it's happened in the past. You know, when we were an agrarian society, the work week consisted of, not a work week really, it was just work all the time, you know, 60, 70, 80, 90 days a week with no vacation. The vacation is unheard of, weekends didn't exist, and here we are, you now, a number of decades later, and it's a 40-day week, and I think the big challenge is this notion of we can have a four-day week when productivity improves with a commensurate amount. The difficulty in the experiments that have been done in a number of countries is to implement 35-hour weeks, for instance, in France 10 or 12 years ago when the work that needed to get done still required 40 hours. So then it becomes a very difficult equation. So when productivity improvements happen that free us up, the desire of workers to have more free time is evident already today. So it's a question of when that productivity improvement happens. I have no doubt that it will translate into fewer working days, or I could be very wrong and that all that it translates into is much greater flexibility to mould your life, your working life, at different points in your week or during your day. Today it's still relatively rigid. That might be the way it evolves, but to the same effect.

Robin Pomeroy, Meet The Leader I'll get back to the quick fire style now. In the future, we'll all work for an AI agent. No.

Jonas Prising, ManpowerGroup: I can't see that.

Robin Pomeroy, Meet The Leader Specialists rather than generalists will be kings in the AI era.

Jonas Prising, ManpowerGroup: I think both specialists in specific areas, but yet generalists that have a much broader view of the context will also be valuable. We are very focused right now on the specialist skills that are required to accelerate the evolution of AI, but I think in the practical application more broad-based at scale, generalists will still be a very, very important role.

Robin Pomeroy, Meet The Leader: I think we know the answer to the next one. The face-to-face interview is more important than ever.

Jonas Prising, ManpowerGroup: Agreed.

Robin Pomeroy, Meet The Leader We finally, in the future, fix the skills mismatch.

Jonas Prising, ManpowerGroup: That would be the ambition and truly the vision of how we can see tremendous improvements in education and in really getting a more skilled workforce up faster. The biggest shortfall of globalisation, changing skill sets, paying attention to it, we now have the opportunity to get it right and I think this could definitely be one of the big achievements of the new technology.

Robin Pomeroy, Meet The Leader Jonas Prising, thanks for joining us on Meet the Leader.

Jonas Prising, ManpowerGroup: Thank you, Robin.

Robin Pomeroy, Meet The Leader That was Jonas Prising, chair and CEO of ManpowerGroup. If you enjoyed this episode and know someone who also might enjoy it, please do send it to them. And leave us a rating or review. Meet the Leader is available on all podcast apps as well as our other programs, Radio Davos and Agenda Dialogues. You can find them all at wef.ch/podcasts. I'm Robin Pomeroy at the World Economic Forum. Thanks for joining us on Meet the Leader.