We’re in a new era of talent acquisition—one that goes beyond role fulfillment to find the right combination of talent, skills, and AI support for every role.
Sara Braun
Editorial Strategist, HR
Workday
Talent acquisition has long relied on a familiar starting point: A need emerges, and HR opens a new requisition to begin the search for a full-time hire.
That model still works in some cases. But it also reflects a narrower era of workforce planning—one where the primary question was how to fill a role and not what combination of talent and skills could best solve the workforce need.
The AI era is ushering in a more holistic way to think about talent. The biggest change is not simply that recruiting teams can move faster but that organizations now have more flexible ways to meet a business need than opening a req and hiring a full-time employee.
This more comprehensive and aligned talent playbook was the topic of conversation in a recent discussion between Medtronic Head of Global Talent Acquisition Mark Smith and Rockwell Automation Global Head of Talent Attraction Patrick O’Rourke. Both emphasized AI as a part of the much broader change in talent strategy—a move away from default hiring decisions and toward a more deliberate workforce design.
Modern workforce planning asks more than how to fill a role; it defines the right combination of talent and skills to best solve the workforce need itself.
Report
In many organizations, talent decisions still happen too late and too narrowly. A manager decides they need help, asks for a requisition, and the process moves forward around that assumption.
Smith challenged that model directly. Too often, he argued, leaders default to hiring “someone like the person that was in it before” instead of stepping back to ask what the work actually requires now. That reflex is understandable. It’s fast, familiar, and easy to operationalize. But it can also lock organizations into higher-cost, lower-flexibility decisions before they even consider alternatives.
O’Rourke made a similar point. The better starting point, he suggested, is a decision tree at the beginning of the process, not a requisition halfway through it. Before approving a role teams should be asking more fundamental questions:
Is this work likely to last 12 months?
Is there a redeployment plan afterward?
Does this require a permanent employee at all?
That is a meaningful shift in framing. The question expands from who to hire to whether the job in its current version is still optima,l and if the hiring manager needs to make changes before proceeding.
Smith says the old “build, buy, borrow” model no longer captures the full talent picture. In his view, teams now need to think across a wider range of options, including internal mobility and AI. O’Rourke put it more bluntly: The model is bigger than build, buy, borrow. Now it includes bot—a reference to AI agents and other automated solutions.
In total, the expanded talent playbook can include:
Full-time employees for stable, ongoing, long-term role fulfillment
Contingent workers or consultants for project-based needs
Former employees returning with relevant experience
Internal employees who can be redeployed or upskilled
AI agents or automated workflows that can absorb repeatable tasks
What matters most is choosing the right mix of talent, technology, and time horizon for the business need in front of you. Smith is actively pushing this at Medtronic, working across HR, procurement, and finance to move these conversations earlier. His goal is not only to help the organization fill jobs more efficiently, but also to help leaders make better decisions before defaulting to headcount.
Hiring decisions used to be centered on the build, buy, borrow model. Now, it’s the four Bs: build, buy, borrow, bot.
Patrick O’Rourke,
Global Head of Talent Attraction
Rockwell Automation
This is where AI becomes strategically important. Much of the public conversation around AI in recruiting has focused on speed: faster screening, faster scheduling, faster communication. Those gains matter, and both leaders pointed to them.
O’Rourke said Rockwell Automation brought in Paradox (now part of Workday) to “help speed things up, make it more efficient, give the recruiters time back” so they could spend more time with hiring managers and candidates.
That’s valuable, but it’s only part of the story.
The more important shift is that AI makes it easier to support a more expansive talent strategy. If recruiters spend less time on repetitive administrative work, they have more time to act as consultants. If AI can help generate cleaner role requirements from manager input, surface internal talent, or support different workforce scenarios, then the organization has a better chance of making the right decision before opening a requisition.
Smith pointed to exactly that kind of future. In the past, companies could choose between full-time employees, contingent workers, statements of work, and consultants. What they didn’t have, he said, was the ability to ask whether an AI agent might be part of the answer. That does not eliminate the role of human talent but expands the set of ways organizations solve for workforce needs.
And with 82% of organizations expanding AI agent use in the future, it’s also becoming imperative to stay competitive with new levels of operational speed and scale across industries.
As that decision set gets bigger, the recruiter role changes with it.
Neither Smith nor O’Rourke described a future where talent recruiters become less important. In fact, both argued the opposite. Recruiting is still a people business. Relationship-building, judgment, and conversation still sit at the center of the function. Workday research supports their take—as AI becomes a bigger part of enterprise operations, human-centered skills are proving more important and irreplaceable.
What changes is where recruiters create value.
O’Rourke said the goal is to give recruiters time back so they can become “true talent consultants.” Smith echoed that idea and pushed it even further. He wants recruiters engaging earlier with leaders, understanding the true need, and helping to challenge assumptions about whether a role should be filled with a full-time employee, contingent labor, internal talent, or something else.
That is a much more strategic remit than traditional requisition fulfillment. It moves talent acquisition upstream into workforce decision-making.
It also raises the bar for what the function must understand. Recruiters need enough business context to talk credibly about cost, duration, skills, workforce mix, and organizational tradeoffs—not just candidate pipelines.
Recruiters need to have more conversations with leaders, and have them earlier—not reactively. They need to understand the true need behind a hire.
Mark Smith,
Head of Global Talent Acquisition
Medtronic
One of the clearest signals in the conversation was that this broader playbook cannot focus only on external hiring.
Smith noted that 35% of Medtronic’s 12,000 hires in the last fiscal year were internal. That’s not a side story. It’s a major part of how the company is already meeting talent demand. His point was that these tools and workflows need to serve internal talent just as effectively as they serve external candidates.
To boot, Workday found that internal hires are a staggering 82% more likely to be high performers by their first rating cycle than external counterparts.
That matters because internal mobility is often treated as an aspiration rather than an operational capability. Companies talk about redeployment and reskilling, but supporting systems, workflows, and visibility are often still built primarily around external recruiting.
If organizations are serious about expanding the talent playbook, internal talent has to become a real first-order option. AI can help here too—not as a replacement for managerial judgment, but as a way to identify adjacent skills, find candidates, and make the internal market easier to navigate.
Taken together, Smith and O’Rourke are pointing toward a larger redefinition of talent acquisition. For years, talent acquisition teams have been measured largely by how efficiently they could move a requisition through the hiring process. In this new model, they have an opportunity to shape the decision before the req exists at all.
That means helping the business answer questions like:
Is this work permanent or temporary?
Is hiring the best answer, or just the most familiar one?
Could internal mobility solve the need faster?
Could AI remove part of the workload altogether?
What workforce mix makes the most sense for cost, flexibility, and long-term value?
This adds a much higher level of strategic thinking behind every hire. It also reflects a broader reality: In the age of AI, workforce planning is about orchestrating the right combination of people, skills, and technology to meet business demand.
The organizations that get this right will not just recruit faster. They’ll make smarter decisions about how work gets done in every area of the business.
Feeling the strain of rapid market changes on your talent strategy? Develop a plan to define goals, evaluate possible vendors, and unlock workforce potential with the right skills technology in this Workday Buyer's Guide.
Report
In the past decade HR has undergone a major evoluton from a supportive role to a strategic one. However, as this report finds, HR teams are more conservative on AI than finance and IT. That makes the potential competitive advantage even greater—learn more below.