Go back to podcasts 
Joining Avature CEO Dimitri Boylan for the season finale was global talent leader Jennifer Shappley, most recently LinkedIn’s Vice President of Talent.
The last time Boylan saw Shappley, she was overseeing a workforce expansion from 10,000 to 30,000 employees as Head of Talent Acquisition at Express Scripts. At that time, the then Fortune 20 pharmaceutical benefits company was, as Shappley puts it, ‘growing like wildfire’.
In the intervening decade, Shappley’s curiosity and desire to challenge herself at the sharp end of the tech sector would take her from those hiring peaks to Silicon Valley and the world’s largest social network for professionals.
It’s so interwoven into the fabric of how we hire that we rarely consider its own status as an employer, with many of the same talent risks, opportunities and challenges facing the rest of us.
During an enlightening conversation, Boylan and Shappley explored a range of topics, including why retention needs to be baked into how we do TA, the practical difficulties in creating an integrated, skills-based workforce plan and why she’s optimistic about humans in the age of AI.
Read on for some of the highlights
A Small Town Full of Big Names: Talent Wars in Silicon Valley
Following a move from Express Scripts and the relative quiet of St Louis to LinkedIn, as Shappley shared early in the conversation, it wasn’t just the dynamism of Silicon Valley that took some getting used to.
Whereas the tenure of employees had been far longer at Express Scripts, the sheer density of top companies recruiting in the concentrated geography of Silicon Valley, together with the relative homogeneity of the roles to be hired into, meant that people with in-demand skill sets would move between companies with far greater frequency than elsewhere.
There are a lot of great companies out here. If you’re a product manager, a designer or an engineer, you’ve got a lot of choice[…] It’s full-on talent wars. It’s not only about how you’re attracting folks but what you’re doing to retain them in a really competitive environment.”
Jennifer Shappley
Global Talent & HR Leader
Consequently, having strategies for attracting top-tier talent was crucial, but it was still only one side of the coin. The demands that such an environment might place on TA teams could easily lead to overpromising when engaging with top candidates, something that could come back to bite you later – especially in a town as small as Silicon Valley.
It only works for so long if you’re putting out a message that people don’t experience once they’re at the organization. That’s such a huge part of retention.”
Jennifer Shappley
Global Talent & HR Leader
It’s Good for Talent Leaders to Move Around
This growing consideration of the interrelatedness of different elements of the talent lifecycle proved to be a central theme of the discussion and indeed Shappely’s time at LinkedIn. Over the course of a decade, her role grew from talent acquisition to encompass talent management and talent development, before she eventually became VP of Talent.
Her journey reflected a broader strategic shift in how HR leaders are looking at the talent picture of their organizations, in which the different strands of recruitment, internal mobility, L&D and contingency planning are becoming increasingly intertwined. In contrast to a decade ago, today, a tech-supported, integrated workforce plan is now part of almost every top CHRO’s vision.
It’s not a healthy way to look at your organisation, your talent, and to think that you’re just going to pull one lever, you’re just going to buy talent. You’re also probably not just going to build talent. Because if you’re only developing and you’re not looking at the external markets, you’re missing that outside influence and creativity that can come from bringing in new ideas.”
Jennifer Shappley
Global Talent & HR Leader
For these once disparate functions to function harmoniously and to maximum effect, Boylan and Shappley saw a need for a shared understanding of not only the specific demands of each but also the context each operates in and the skills and ideas they help to sharpen.
Talent acquisition is just a great proving ground. It’s a place where you’re forced to work within the greater economy and the greater market. You can’t make your market; you have to make your response to the market. And I think that that drives a little more agility and flexibility in people who come from TA.”
Dimitri Boylan
CEO of Avature
The outward-looking, agile mindset so essential in talent acquisition could, according to Boylan, benefit the retention efforts of traditionally internal-facing talent management teams by helping to deliver an up-to-date picture of what’s happening outside the company. The role of talent market advisor to the wider business is precisely the sort of added value that Boylan sees TA teams offering in an era when automation and AI are able to lighten their administrative burden.
Equally, Shappley sees a lot to be gained from embracing talent management’s more structured, long-term approach and ‘working with groups who have that longer tail to things’. In her own words, “it’s just good for talent leaders to move around. It’s just good for all of us to learn more about the other pieces of the pie.”
Acknowledging the Practical Difficulties of a Unified Talent Strategy
With the structured, unified workforce plan now the holy grail for many senior talent leaders, Shappley cautions against over-theorising in the quest for perfection. Drawing on her own experience, she reminds us of the tectonic shifts currently taking place in the talent landscape.
[We were thinking] once we get that multi-year workforce plan, then all of our dreams will come true. Then we’ll be able to have robust talent acquisition strategies, development, etc.’ I think that, ironically, over the years, instead of us all getting to that place where that becomes a reality, it’s probably become even harder to have because the landscape’s been changing so much.”
Jennifer Shappley
Global Talent & HR Leader
Indeed, the widespread proliferation of generative artificial intelligence – with the introduction of agentic AI fast on its heels – has left talent teams grappling with questions surrounding which tasks will now be carried out by human employees and which skills will need to be sought or developed to do so.
It’s really difficult at this very, very early stage to imagine the workforce of 2028… It’s going to require a skillset that’s not really defined yet.”
Dimitri Boylan
CEO of Avature
Shappley states that while it’s important to have a unified workforce strategy in place, attempting to create a perfect system capable of accurately projecting and preempting all your organization’s skills needs is not a realistic aim for the immediate future, rather ‘a guiding light than a real destination’.
The Vague Imperative of AI: Pitfalls to Avoid
Across industries and departments, organizations everywhere are dealing with huge uncertainty surrounding how artificial intelligence will affect what they do and how they do it. Given its impact on the workforce, it’s fair to argue that no function bears the burden of navigating this new paradigm responsibly and fair-mindedly, while also seizing its transformative potential, than HR. In short, AI is revolutionizing who and how we hire, the roles we hire into and the skills that will be necessary to perform them, now and in the future.
Faced with often overwhelming pressure to act, coupled with a dizzying array of new AI tools on the market, talent leaders are dealing with what Boylan calls ‘the vague imperative’. It’s something Shappley has also observed, citing pressure among HR leaders to avoid losing not only ground but also face: “It can feel like ‘I just need to show I’m doing something with AI, so as to look like I’m meeting that imperative, [that I’m] modern, that I have something to talk about on stage.’”
Quizzed on how best to manage this expectation, Shappley’s advice was to stay curious, mentioning that she educates herself by listening to podcasts and, crucially, using some form of AI every day, if only to experiment and understand what it can do.
As a talent leader, I would never want to be in that place where I feel that imperative, I feel the pressure to be using AI, and I don’t have a strong point of view on where we should be using it and where we shouldn’t.”
Jennifer Shappley
Global Talent & HR Leader
But, she believes that by educating herself and exploring the topic, she is able to participate in such discussions with greater conviction as to what it can do, where it can replace routine, administrative processes that add no unique value, and, likewise, what it can’t do: “Coming in with that point of view gives you more control in that conversation versus just feeling like I’ve been told I need to use [AI] so I just need to stick it somewhere.”
Boylan saw this latter point as a fundamental issue to consider when assessing how and when to implement AI. While he believes there are things ‘everyone will do with it’ that will form a benchmark of productivity, a lack of understanding of both where the tasks AI performs fit into your wider business goals and how to measure that impact risks undermining its value.
Shappley echoed this, stating that it’s about bringing it back to the question of what you’re trying to achieve with your different HR activities and whether they’re a differentiator for your business. Once that has been established, she said, the focus should be on improving quality rather than merely efficiency – something that, alone, will fail to deliver your cutting edge in an age of widespread automation.
What are you trying to achieve with your candidate experience? How are you measuring that? Is that a differentiator for you? Well, that’s going to drive you a certain way or not in your use of AI. Make sure you’re using it in a way that’s improving [the candidate experience], not just in a way that’s driving efficiency.”
Jennifer Shappley
Global Talent & HR Leader
Not All Skills Are Created Equal
It seems almost impossible today to touch upon the impact of AI on HR and workforce planning without discussing skills. A skills-based approach will require AI to work at scale. Likewise, for HR teams to manage the disruption caused by AI and recalibrate the workforce successfully, a nuanced understanding of the individual tasks that compose a role and the transferable skills necessary to perform them is critical.
However, turning theory into reality has proved difficult for many organizations. While the technology is quickly arriving at a level to accommodate skills, there are practical considerations still to be resolved. For example, both Shappley and Boylan were in agreement that there can be no successful skills-based approach without taking a candidate’s proficiency into account.
Proficiency matters a ton when you’re talking about roles and the level of the role. So to just say that communication skills are needed doesn’t really get to a point of being able to do something with [skills].”
Jennifer Shappley
Global Talent & HR Leader
Likewise, there’s a need to recognise that some skills matter more than others in different contexts. From a technical perspective, weighting skills matching to ensure the right skills are being given priority relevant to the task will provide the level of nuance necessary for skills to provide true value.
While warning against being ‘sucked into the hype around skills without bringing it into the practicality’, Shappley still sees great benefit in exploring skills in the age of AI.
What I like more about how skills is evolving is that it’s focusing more on the tasks of the job. What are the responsibilities and tasks that individuals are going to do in these roles? Getting an understanding of the tasks of a job is just a smart place to be spending time at a point where more automation and AI is coming, and it’s going to change the tasks.”
Jennifer Shappley
Global Talent & HR Leader
Feeling Optimistic About Our AI Future
If there’s pressure on talent leaders to adopt AI, then according to Shappley, it is felt even more keenly in Silicon Valley, where being a first mover is often part of the brand – not that she’s complaining: “I love the pace, I love the innovation I love the cutting edge and getting to work with smart, creative people who are trying to do new things.”
Very much an AI optimist, she believes that uncertainty around the shape of tomorrow’s workforce, and indeed society, shouldn’t dampen our enthusiasm for what is and will be truly transformative technology. Instead, she left us with a call to embrace this uncertainty with great positivity.
Every time there has been some kind of revolution, there have been new ideas and products that have come out of that. We’re so deep in the middle of such a massive shift right now, it’s hard to know what new ideas may ultimately come out of this 10 or 15 years down the road. I think a lot of the roles that we do right now are going to change. In the short term, that might feel like they’re going away. In the long term, they’re just going to be different. I ultimately can’t predict the future, but I’m a big believer in humans and our ability to create.”
Jennifer Shappley
Global Talent & HR Leader
