Evolution of TA: Reactive → Strategic, with Kyle Hurley, Head of TA, Medhealth Group

Talent teams aren’t just filling roles anymore; they’re steering growth. We sit with Kyle Hurley, Senior Manager for Talent Acquisition at MedHealth, to explore how a 25‑brand portfolio builds a unified hiring engine without losing each brand’s edge. Kyle’s journey from coding classes and agency desks to enterprise TA leadership unlocks a playbook for moving beyond requisitions to true talent intelligence—where data, empathy, and clear operating rhythms translate into hiring quality, speed, and trust.

Kyle shares how his team returned to “brilliant basics,” then layered in the right tools to lift both experience and output. That foundation now shows up in real numbers: a 99% NPS from new starters and a 31% hiring increase year over year. We dig into where AI makes the biggest difference today—AI‑assisted video analysis, predictive analytics for attrition and mobility, and conversational agents that cut friction across the funnel—while unpacking why governance and bias monitoring must sit inside the TA function. Tech should accelerate judgment, not replace it.

We also get tactical about multi‑brand strategy in scarce‑talent markets like allied health. Kyle explains how to centralize ways of working while keeping local employer brands vibrant, how to swap leaky “talent pools” for continuous mapping and referrals, and how to balance BAU delivery with multi‑year “big rocks” that shift capability. Looking ahead, he sees a blended TA team—analysts, sourcers, brand pros, recruiters—augmented by AI and aligned to skills‑based hiring, internal pathways, and measurable impact on the business. Agencies still play a role for confidential searches, off‑market mapping, and areas in‑house teams can’t touch.

Curious how to future‑proof your hiring without losing the human edge? Press play, then tell us your boldest TA bet for the next 12 months. If you enjoyed the conversation, subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a TA leader who should be part of it.

Enjoying this episode of The HR Community Podcast? Stay tuned for quick insights and updates during this episode, including upcoming HR events, workshops, and resources for 2025, proudly brought to you by Civitas Talent. Your journey to building better teams and thriving in HR starts here. Visit www.civitastalent.com or connect with us on LinkedIn for more. Let’s get back to the conversation!

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Guest Introduction
• 1:16 Kyle’s Career Path Into TA
• 4:29 Multi‑Industry Lessons In Talent
• 6:40 From Recruiting To Strategic TA
• 9:15 Tech Mindset And TA Tooling
• 11:35 AI Across The Hiring Lifecycle
• 15:01 Candidate Experience And Analytics
• 18:20 Building Talent Strategy For Many Brands
• 21:05 Scaling Teams, Metrics, And Roadmaps
• 24:05 The TA Team Of The Future
• 28:20 Skills‑Based Hiring And AI Governance
• 31:10 Will AI Replace Recruiters
• 33:50 Platforms, Certifications, And Market Shifts

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:07

Welcome to the HR Community Podcast. My name is Shane O'Neill, founder of Scylla Task Talent, the HR and HSC recruitment community. Each episode, we will host HR leaders and discuss their journey and discover best practice HR solutions across the HR industry. Whether you're a CEO, HR executive, or operating across the wider HR space, this podcast is for you. Please like and subscribe, and don't forget to comment and share your views. Enjoy the episode. Hi everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the HR Community Podcast. This afternoon I'm here with Kyle Hurley. Kyle is the senior manager for talent acquisition at MedHealth Group. Hey Kyle, how are you going? I'm great, thanks, Shane. Thanks very much for having me on. Oh, good, oh good. The conversation between us has been a few months in the make, and I'm I'm glad we finally carved out some time to make it happen. I guess for for those who aren't in the TA social scene that maybe don't know who you are, because I think a lot of listeners will know who you are. Tell us a little bit about yourself, Kyle. Tell us a little bit about you, your your current role, and a little bit about uh Med Health.

SPEAKER_01: 1:19

Before I do get into an introduction to myself, thanks very much for having me on. It is really exciting what's happening in talent acquisition. So I'm looking forward to sharing some insights around the industry, technology, and maybe even a few things that people haven't heard of coming into market. So it's a really exciting time for our sector. By the way of introduction, yeah, I'm Kyle. I've been now, as you said, uh in talent acquisition what feels like a very long time. So well over 20 years now. I think like a lot of HR and talent acquisition professionals, we didn't grow up saying, I want to be ahead of talent acquisition when I get older. And, you know, so a lot of people, my career started with me studying IT of all things. So I was cutting code in Turbo Pascal showing my age and wasn't building server rooms in my garage and didn't really have the passion for it. So I didn't choose that as my career path, as it turns out. I was doing analytical work in banks and I was traveling with the globe doing analysis and different things. So I had a whole separate career there before now over 20 years ago, falling into recruitment. And I spent 10 or so years in recruitment agency world before being given the reins to step into what has been now the last 12, 13 years or so as a leader of talent acquisition in some fairly well-known Australian and global businesses. And unlike a lot of talent acquisition professionals, I haven't had the constant through line. So I'm I've not been the financial services or the mining or the defense or the retail career guy. I've been all of those things. I've been very fortunate to have been given the reins to drive talent and strategy for some very broad and complex businesses. And as you said, currently I'm the senior manager for talent acquisition at MedHealth. And for those that don't know who Med Health is, we're a parent company, House of Brands, if you will, for a large grouping of over 25 acquired allied health and related businesses. So we have a very large rehab and return to work group of brands, some big reputable brands like your iPad Work Focus under those brands. And then you have your employment services brands, you like your Etworks, and then you have your ENDIS brands. And I look after a large national talent acquisition team and the talent strategy for 15 of those.

SPEAKER_00: 3:44

Fantastic. And I'm sure we'll get a bit more into how you're managing talent strategy for 25 different brands, because that sounds pretty complex. But I guess before we do, I mean, you touched on your journey in uh talent acquisition a little bit there, Carl, which is super interesting. Coming from a, I guess, a techie sort of background and into the recruitment operation side of things. Talk to us a little bit about working across different industries and sectors. Like, why did that come about? Was that just the the opportunity presented itself, or was it a was it a tactical choice to get into certain industries that were maybe going through a lot of change where you could sink your teeth into from a talent perspective?

SPEAKER_01: 4:26

It actually wasn't by choice. Shane talent acquisition, rightly or wrongly, finds itself on the outer very quickly when global factors and organizational environments change. And so if I think back over the course of my career, there's been sort of stints where I've been permanently entrenched as part of the furniture and working on long-term multi-risonal strategies. And then something will happen and ultimately our roles have been are impacted. So there was a period of time, probably six years of that career, Shane, where I actually was parachuted in two organizations on fixed-term or contract assignments that were going through organizational and transformational change. And so once those changes have been implemented, there isn't really a need for a skill set such as mine to sort of stay on. So it really allowed me to chameleon myself into a whole range of different industries that I never thought I would walk my way into.

SPEAKER_00: 5:20

That's super interesting. And I guess within that journey as well, over the years, through different industries and brands, different sizes, I'd imagine that you would have been part of the talent function through their journey as well. You know, I we talked a little bit about this actually when we caught up in in Melbourne a few months ago, how talent has moved from this, I guess, traditional process-driven, reactive function to now being a real strategic function and team within the organization. Talk to us a little bit about that. Did you find that was part of your sort of learning and journey as well?

SPEAKER_01: 5:57

Absolutely. The role of talent acquisition has changed probably five times through the course of my career. In some parts, you get offended sometimes when people call your talent acquisition team your recruitment team. Because if that is all that they see is the value that we provide, then you know that's that's something that we need to work with with our senior stakeholders. We've absolutely moved as an industry and as a profession from reactive to strategic. I think the days of us, you know, just posting and praying and hoping that talent will drop on our laps in in very talent short markets are well and truly gone. And I think most journeys that talent acquisition teams now into that strategic now see us sit at the forefront of business partnering. You know, businesses come to us for strategic intelligence, market intelligence, talent intelligence, data-driven insights, advice. You know, we've moved from just time to fill into impact of hiring in our metrics and how we how we measure ourselves. We're very much at the forefront of helping organizations drive and bring to life their EVP. Uh, and all of those parts make up, I guess, the real shift into that just strategic mindset.

SPEAKER_00: 7:09

One thing that I sort of took out of that, you touched on the data, the technology. Coming from a, I guess, that technology background initially before moving into recruitment and talent acquisition and being in a strategic talent role now, is uh technology like a big sort of part of A, what you're passionate about and B something that you you you roll out into organizations? Is that like a part of that strategy?

SPEAKER_01: 7:36

Yeah, it is. We don't sit within the technology team, but by volley, we're uh we're involved in exploring technology. There is, you know, you can keep up to date with technology on a regular basis in our profession. I think you need to. I think Talent Labs over in the US launched that, you know, in our recruitment lifecycle just in the last 12 months. It was over 130 different vendor solutions, new players into the market that have come in that can help enable and automate and drive efficiencies through a different part of the recruitment lifecycle. So it's incredibly hard to keep up with those. You're right. I didn't think that my IT qualifications would ever come 360 back around to be more important as they are now, to really understand that Java's not a coffee bean is quite important than you ever thought it would be. AI is a huge enabler of tarn acquisition functions. And, you know, it's really helped us streamline sourcing channels, candidate experiences, a whole range of automations. You know, I think a lot of the TA functions that I've been managing and have led, you know, have been early adopters in some parts of the recruitment lifecycle, but were probably behind the the stage in in others. And that's you know what I said at the start of the call. It's never been, in my view, a more exciting time for Tarn acquisition prep professionals to start looking at really driving some really, real innovative technology solutions into the business and having significant impact. So it certainly gets me out of bed in the morning. And um, yeah, the technology skill sets come through 60.

SPEAKER_00: 9:06

Yeah, I love that. Loved it. It's interesting as well. I feel like, particularly with some of the events that I've attended or been part of, I know AI has been here for for many years. I feel like the conversation has sophisticated in ways so much over the last 12 months. I feel like some of the events that we did last year, even the year before, people were coming to explore and learn and understand what AI was outside of just pin AI and and ChatGPT and stuff that they they were playing around with. Now it's like, okay, so there's so much more that it can do. And as organizations, like you mentioned, they're actually adopting it into their into their wider business, but particularly in in talent acquisition. I mean, are you seeing any groundbreaking stuff across that whole life cycle? You touched on Canada experience there as well. Is that sort of what you feel is going to be the main the main sort of needle mover? Or what what else are you seeing?

SPEAKER_01: 10:01

Yeah, it's a really good question. We try, you try to be a futurist to your organization as much as you can. You know, how do you obtain that competitive advantage? How do we drive better experiences? Where do we drive those efficiencies of scale? If I was to grab the crystal ball and look forwards, you know, I would probably encourage your listeners to look up a video by a gentleman by the name of Reed Hoffman. Reed is probably giving an insight into where the organizer, where organizations could go. And so what Reed did, he's very much someone who writes books in relation to what he calls blitz scaling organizations, helping them grow at pace. But he built an AI avatar of himself. He then fed it interviews, webinars, seminars, a lot of video of audio and video content of himself. And the video, if you go and look up Reed Hoffman, he's actually full interviewed by an AI avatar that sounds, moves, and looks like him. Now, we're starting to see these things more and more come into industry. And your first concept is well, that's it's going to be obviously AI. It's not going to look realistic. It's going to be a really terrible experience because it's not going to be conversational as you know, AI tends not to be. It can get very tripped up in some of the basics. But if you watch some of the technology, when you put all these stacks together and where the future of this is actually moving to, it's quite exciting how we can have AI to leverage that. I think the other one that I think, the other two that I would probably share would be video interviewing has been around for some time. And that's in itself is not groundbreaking. However, AI's ability now to give you real-time analysis of the interview and looking at problem-solving capability, communication skills, empathy, you know, to really assess those videos and stack rank for those, I think is really quite groundbreaking with that technology has moved to that stage. And the other one is predictive analytics. I think if you think about AI in the wider TA landscape, because we're now involved in workforce planning, succession planning, a whole gamut of the world of talent, not just attraction and engagement. You're able to look at attrition data, and AI is really able to give you insights into who within your organization has skills suitable for succession planning, who within your organization is now coming into that period where attrition is now coming up as something to be concerned about. And I think AI can be enabled in all of those areas. And that's probably the next stage for us.

SPEAKER_00: 12:40

Yeah, that's really cool. I I love it as well. And you know, we've had conversations like this with uh quite a few leaders across people and talent and worker safety, and you know, that that ability to get under the hood with data, cleaning it, you know, identifying the quality of it. And then once you've got that, being able to leverage it and you know, start to actually predict certain peaks and troughs, or as you say, like attrition rates and stuff. Another organization we were speaking to quite recently, they're in facility services and such a high volume, competitive area to recruit. And you know, with technology and AI now, they've been able to really predict when they're gonna need uh a huge recruitment campaign and able to actually look at you know different regions, locations. You know, it's the list goes on. And I think that kind of stuff for talent to be across and own and and even dare say control. Um I think that's gonna really evolve that strategy piece even more. One thing I did want to ask you as well, Kyle, was you know, when you talk about strategy, as transferable as talent can be, it's probably hard to say that you could, you know, roll up one blueprint, bring it to a completely different organization or industry and go, here's your strategy, let's get going. Talk to us a little bit about talent strategy. I guess when you look at the business that you're in now, previous businesses, when you're looking at, I guess, that kind of matrix structure, 25 brands, but also, you know, different regions, different locations, different roles, different business units. How do you sort of um sit down and set that strategy or strategies to align, like I say, different brands, different, different outcomes?

SPEAKER_01: 14:27

Yeah, there isn't a silver bullet solution to that, Shane. Um you're right. No, not one talent strategy, you know, it's it's sort of plug and play. I think every every time you go into an organization and in those multi-branded organizations like uh where I am now and and and previously with organizations like Babcoil, who have large selections of retail brands and then trade brands and then specialized brands, you want to centralize to have one way of working. And I think you know that that ultimately gets your efficiencies of scaling, those complex organizations. But the strategy around what each of them are looking for is intentively different. So I think you need each of the unique brands to still elevate themselves. You know, so you've got you tailored employer branding, so showcasing each of the brands' unique opportunities. But then the talent strategy, the multi-year eyes, and you'll be pivoting to different things at different times for each of the brands. There is no silver solution, as I said. I think it's important in those organizations that you champion data and technology. And I think that's probably been the key enabler on us having a successful talent strategy within those, aligning the businesses' objectives to the strategic objectives of what we're doing within talent, and then leveraging the the challenges between tactical and strategic at any point in time.

SPEAKER_00: 15:47

That's really interesting, actually. So I mean, as the strategy starts to grow, you know, as does the organization, whatever their sort of whatever they define as as growth, if it's if it's headcount, if it's revenue, locations, whatever. But as that grows as well, obviously you want to continue to grow and scale your your talent function to be able to support that. What does that kind of look like? And I mean, you don't need to give me the uh the secret sauce, but you know, what does that look like? I mean, you've got technology to leverage, but we also, I guess, need bodies on the ground. How do you start to structure that when you're looking at strategy and growth, but also delivery as well? And then you've got technology and different tools to adopt, but you know, there's a lot of nuts and bolts.

SPEAKER_01: 16:38

You've got your operational management. You know, this is keeping your lights on. You know, you need to maintain those hiring metrics, those KPIs around your delivery. You know, that you'll do that through streamlining recruitment processes, and that's what I've done within sort of my organizations. And then on the on top of that, you have your strategic value lens. And this is where you're looking at, you know, where are the areas that you can continue to add value to your organization up above and beyond the BAU? And I think, you know, that's where we talked a little bit around workforce planning, those forecasts of data insights, and you align all that to your to your business goals. It's a complex beast split between the two. Yeah, I wouldn't know how to answer that any any other way. But you know, keeping on top of your operational delivery, measuring that with your metrics, and then keeping in front of your organization to make sure that we're you're adding value where you need to be strategically. We have, you know, we've built a three-year multi-horizon roadmap. You know, we keep the business update with how we're achieving each one of those milestones. We measure ourselves as a team how we're achieving what we want to from a reputational perspective, from a NPS perspective. Are we achieving where we need to for the business's foresight? You know, we try to provide lenses as far ahead as we can.

SPEAKER_00: 17:52

Yeah, that's really cool. I think the roadmap especially is such a critical part of it now. And I think three to five years is always a you know, a good sort of ballpark or perfect sort of stretch, I suppose, because 12 months just goes too quickly now. Two years probably the same. You know, even three years now, things can change super, super quickly. But it's a good pulse check what we're sort of what we're delivering, but also what what was the the actual vision and and end goal. And there'll be so many other things that sort of come up that are completely out of our control, like the economy and stuff that's happening in the US right now. This is not a polit political podcast, so I'm not gonna get into any of that. But uh, you know, there's just so much stuff there that is just completely out of our control. But I think if you have that roadmap at least to work towards. And I guess looking at the team and the structure as well, you talked a little bit about that. You know, what are you sort of maybe forecasting or seeing the talent team of the future could look like? You know, is it, I'm sure there's a lot of listeners keen to know, are we thinking it's the team of bots and agents? Is it a team of humans? Is it a blend of both? You know, what are you sort of thinking?

SPEAKER_01: 19:05

It's a really good question, actually. I've got a couple of thoughts uh sort of around that. If I if I sort of leverage sort of what we've done at MedHealth, for example, you know, we talked a little a lot about team, you know, you asked about those. When we put our roadmap into place, you know, I think quite frankly, we did some self-assessment as a team and we sort of put our hands up and addressed that we're probably more reactional than we are strategic. We've been very reliant on your standard sourcing channels, not leveraging the power of our employee advocacy, not really mapping and providing the good candidate experiences that we would all sort of hold ourselves accountable to. So we went quite on the development journey, which I think I shared with you when we first caught up, Shane. We went on quite the development roadmap as a team, you know, to get back to the brilliant, brilliant basics of how we wanted to hold ourselves accountable for the actions that we wanted to deliver from the operational perspective before we. Got into our big rocks. Our big rocks are those big strategic ones. And since then, you know, we've we've implemented three or four different technology vendors, which has really driven some efficiencies. And those are those first few exciting big rocks that allow us to go, right, we've got those basics right. You know, our and an internal NPS currently is sitting, you know, for for candidates. So we do our culture amp surveys, I mean new starters, we're sitting at 99% NPS.

SPEAKER_00: 20:26

Yeah. Wow.

SPEAKER_01: 20:26

So as close to as perfection as we want to get to. So we're really driving the right experiences for our candidates coming in. You know, we've really made sure for those that are unsuccessful, we're giving those the experience on the way out. So we have that brand reputational piece. Now we're moving into the strategic thing, the forward-facing thing. MedHealth by nature, the target, the talent that we're after, we're targeting allied health professionals. So you think about occupational therapists, you know, speech therapists, physio, psychiatrists. There's a finite amount of talent in Australia, you know, and they're very well locked away in their existing organization, very rarely in the standard mechanisms and sourcing channels that we use. You know, so we're really now looking at leveraging technology, you know, moving from the fad word for a long period of time was, well, let's build a talent pool. You know, and I think talent pools, you know, in my view, now is probably sort of going back to old school assessment centers.

SPEAKER_00: 21:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 21:21

You know, we don't we don't ask people to come in, you know, 30 or 40 people at a time to an old traditional assessment center. There's ways we understand what the skills, success behaviors look like, and we can map those and do those at scale using a range of technology solutions. The same, the same with our talent pools. You know, for us, if we put an occupational therapist in a talent pool, it's like going into a bucket with a hole in it. As soon as it goes in, it's going back out. It's never going to be in there long enough for us to keep warm because we will ultimately hire them and bring them into an organization as quickly as we we can. And some of the improvements we we've made, we've really had some staggering change. We've done sort of 31% more hiring today this year than we'd same time last year. And technology and that capability development's been the huge enablers in those. So, where do we go to from here? I guess, you know, what does the future tech a team look like? It's absolutely leveraging further AI. I think moving right into the space of not just being a business partner, but now a strategic advisor. You know, so now we're looking at AI governance, I think will be a big skill set that'll be needed for talent acquisition professionals. I think not just helping organizations understand or find the road in the 500 AI solutions out there trying to get in front of our C-suite to help drive and enable better experiences from go-to-woe in our recruitment lifecycle. But now making sure, you know, we've seen very large cases in the US around bias coming into AI sourcing tools that weren't factored in. You know, so I think TA will be at the forefront of making sure we're building compliant AI solutions that help our business. I think helping organizations move away from the musical chairs recruitment approach into skills-based hiring. And I know a lot of people talk around skills-based hiring, and I'm certainly in that camp as well. I think TA would be at the forefront of that. Yeah. You're making sure we understand the competency frameworks that each of our roles need and how we can build from within. And that's sort of that buy-borobot type mentality, I think, is always going to be sort of top of mind. The other one I think that we'll sort of see us doing more in is the data and insights.

SPEAKER_00: 23:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 23:30

You know, I see us really providing those to the next level. And I think AI will be a big enabler for that to give us more what I call talent intelligence that's going to really drive our performance. So I'm excited by all of that. You know, that's the stuff that gets me me out of bed. You know, I'm a technology technology person at heart. And so, you know, I'm just excited for now the impact, you know, that the TA can have and reporting right up into your chief operating officers.

SPEAKER_00: 24:00

Yeah. And I love the the way you describe that as well. I'm sort of smirking to myself, but the way you described it is you talk very passionately about it, Kyle, for started. Quite informative, even with the forecasting and the tools and data. One thing I noticed was it was it was very optimistic. It wasn't, you know, you didn't once mention this is going to completely replace what we do, replace us, replace jobs, you know, we're screwed. It was very much like, hey, you know, we're at a really cool sort of crossroad now, I suppose, or we're we're sort of working our way up that hill uh where we've evolutionized talent acquisition. It's now a true strategic function in a lot of organizations. Enabling AI and adopting AI could be our next sort of step into, yeah, hey, this could be this could be really cool. We could create a lot of opportunity here.

SPEAKER_01: 25:40

Yeah, we'd we're definitely not going to be replaced by robots, Shane. That's a guarantee. I think there's a huge component of empathy that's needed and human interaction during parts of a recruitment life cycle. And and you know, if you think about what talent acquisition and talent moving between jobs and moving from a stable employment to another one, you know, maybe those that weren't active being passively approached to consider it, you know, they're fairly substantial, life-changing, family-orientating, big decisions. So there needs to be empathy, there needs to be human interaction through those, you know, because they are significant decisions. And we're seeing in market now, I think you know, you can see quite publicly that candidates are AIing the AI. Yeah. You know, we're now seeing candidates have AI write their resume, their cover letter for every position that they go for, which questions their ability to actually do the role. We see them in interviews, in dialogues with you know, AI solutions running off-screen, helping them to articulate the most perfectly worded answer.

SPEAKER_00: 26:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 26:50

You know, so AI is always going to be there, but there's a human intervention point in these sorts of things. But there are other things that are really exciting as well around AI. It's it, you know, it's not just about using them for for evil. You know, we see open AI now coming out in the recent days, you know, launching a new product, you know, it'll come out in 2026, which will be a direct competitor to LinkedIn.

SPEAKER_00: 27:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 27:14

And I think that's going to be game-changing for HR organizations and the talent functions within those organizations to work out what that means for their talent strategy, how we now start assessing the qualifications that are coming out of this new product, you know, used to be LinkedIn learning in university organizations that were our baseline. And now we we've got open learning and their certifications. And what does that mean? And how do we assess those? And is it going to be valuable for us to be able to really quantify that this person has the skills and capability which will then support our interview conversations, which are always very much believed, arrived, aligned, sorry, to uh to culture. Um, you know, and so culture is still a big part.

SPEAKER_00: 27:57

Yeah. And I've noticed even on the technology side, I'm sure you have too, because you're you're you're well across it, is a lot of the technology that's been rolled out or operating in the in the wider sort of people and culture and talent space, not just the ATS, but the recruitment stuff were kind of a nice to have. You know, the some of the talent tools were were nice to have. You know, there's thousands of them on the market. Now you can see the big players really up in their game and investing, like you've got workday now with Paradox, you know, SAP with smart recruiters, uh, you just mentioned uh OpenAI, who potentially will be competing with Microsoft's LinkedIn. So we when you see that kind of activity happening, you know, well, hey, it's clearly a fairly lucrative market for that kind of stuff, but there's a lot of demand, and I think you know, a lot of these enterprises are are doing their roadmap ahead over the next five, 10 years, and they're saying, hey, this is what organizations are really going to need, and this is what a lot of our customers are going to look for. So yeah, I'm I'm I'm excited too.

SPEAKER_01: 29:00

Yeah, absolutely. And I don't think it's it's going to be in every industry for every need. You know, if I think about times when I was working with large mining businesses, say like the likes of a BHP and an Orica. And for Oureca example, you know, one of the projects that we were delivering was building and staffing a new mining site in a jungle in Mongolia.

SPEAKER_00: 29:21

Yeah, wow.

SPEAKER_01: 29:21

I I honestly can't see, even in the current day and age, how we would have AI help us in any of that particular activity. You know, there is need for human invention, there is need to take things into the environment that they are to make them fit for purpose. Yeah. So it's never going to be all AI. It's it's it's going to still require, you know, people with you know foresight and strategic thinking and and hands-on delivery for some of our talent initiatives.

SPEAKER_00: 29:48

Yeah. I'm going to throw another sort of curveball at you before we uh before we wrap up because I'm looking at the clock and I'm mindful of your time. When we spoke a few months ago, I think it was in Melbourne, we talked a little bit about each other's background. And I know you were on the agency recruitment side for for some time, and you talked about how when you know LinkedIn became came on the scene, there was a lot of question marks whether it would replace what we do in the in the agency land. I mean, it it has evolved massively, especially the recent publication of their agents and stuff. But I mean, that whole evolution, it did change it, but you know, it didn't replace it, obviously. I guess my my curveball question to you is a bit of selfishness here. Where do you see the agency side sort of fit into a lot of this? Because I mean, I'm recruiting in people and talent. I can see how these teams have evolved, how organizations have really evolved from a talent perspective. So, you know, they've got the capability and the technology and the brands to recruit a lot directly. Where do you see maybe agencies potentially in the future slotting into this whole ecosystem?

SPEAKER_01: 30:57

It was not all doom and gloom, Shane. That's that's that's that's for sure. And and I answer that in a couple of different ways. You know, so 20 odd years ago when LinkedIn, when I first started using LinkedIn, the only people that were on there, and I was in agency world, as you touched on, the only people using LinkedIn were recruiters.

SPEAKER_00: 31:15

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_01: 31:15

So that's the only profiles that are on there. Now, I don't know, I think there's 70 billion profiles or something, you know, it's it's it's huge. And it's a it's a money-making machine for Microsoft now. And a lot of that comes off the back of organizations using their corporate licensing and people like you and I using our premium service. LinkedIn has become, you know, almost the strongest and sole platform for people in the business networking space. But also, I think if you think about most people that are on there now will put their hand up and say, when you're not actively looking, it becomes almost spam-like. You know, the amount of people out there with unemployment, certainly across the Australia-Pacific region, as low as it is, talent is hard to find. And so that's no different, you know, in the sectors that I've worked on. And so we'll always have agency support there for us for two things. One, you sometimes will have the ability to approach talent that we cannot. You know, we we are bound by non-poach agreements, you know, a whole range of different things, depending on the industry sector, there will be nuances to those. And so there are some talent, is it just we're we're unable to touch. And if we engage with an agency, you know, your representation out there is typically unbranded. You know, you're you're aware of talent in the marketplace that we may not know of is the other key part to this as well. You know, so we as best as we can, we use those sourcing tools like LinkedIn. But, you know, quite frankly, I think our employee advocacy and referral programs are probably one of the biggest parts of our success. And I think uh we'll always have our agency partners sitting there for the in case of emergency type situation. The other one that probably is important to know is you know, organizations will always go through change. And we talk, we see ANZ and NAV, unfortunately, being in the press in the last week and they're going through some right sizing again. And I feel like a lot of organizations do that. And in some parts, that's how our talent acquisitions team find ourselves on the on the oursel from time to time as well. Through that, there tends to be off-market conversations, those confidential conversations that really can only happen when we're doing market mapping through an external provider that we really don't have the flexibility to do ourselves for confidential reasons and a range of others. So we use our agency partners when we have an urgent need and we know that our time to hire might be X, and you're in market in places where we can't touch.

SPEAKER_00: 33:47

Yeah, awesome. Oh, great response. Gives us a lot of confidence as well for the future. That's good. That's all the questions from me. Thank you so much, again, Kyle. That was great. Like I say, a couple of months in the making. So it's good to actually sit down and flesh it all out. For those listening, feel free to reach out to myself as as you do. But um, feel free to I hope you don't mind if you say this card, but feel free to reach out to Kyle as well. I connect on on LinkedIn or whatnot. He's uh a man to know in the uh in the talent community scene. And I'm pretty sure you're you're across some social events as well that uh some of our TA community community could potentially get involved in. But uh thank you again.

SPEAKER_01: 34:24

No problem, Shane. And also for any uh heads of talent acquisition, I'm I am a community manager for uh a global community group of heads of talent acquisition called TA Exec Social. So more than happy to connect with any other heads of TA where we we sort of talk all things technology in a in a in a safe in a safe space.

SPEAKER_00: 34:41

Love that. I think one thing about our our industry is people aren't too shy for a social event. So no, I appreciate the open invite. Thank you again, Carl. Thank you, listeners, and uh we'll be back on the podcast very soon. Thanks, Ren. Thank you for tuning in to the HR Community Podcast. Remember to like and subscribe and share your views and comments below. This podcast was brought to you by Civitas Talent, the HR and HSC recruitment community. Whether you're a candidate looking for a new role or organization looking to secure brand new talent for your team, please get in touch with us today. Thank you.