Workforce planning and ongoing talent acquisition can help employers hold key staff as AI reshapes hiring
Talent acquisition and HR leaders heading into 2027 should prepare for a January spike in resignations and a widening gap between artificial intelligence (AI) investment and the skills needed to use it, according to two recruitment leaders.
Dominic Roberts, director of Prosperity People Solutions, and Stephanie Patoka, head of permanent recruitment and recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) at Adecco Australia, told HRD that employers must stop treating recruitment as an afterthought and plan workforce needs before roles fall vacant.
Why January is resignation season
For Roberts, the most pressing of the 2027 recruitment trends is a familiar one, building on the recruitment trends that defined 2026.
“January is always notorious for resignations, right? It’s the month out of every single year where most people go into Christmas and they come back and they resign,” he said.
He said the Christmas shutdown is the one time of year most workers fully switch off, and unhappy employees use the break to reconnect with family and take stock of their careers. When they return to work, many find their doubts confirmed and hand in their notice.
Roberts has seen leaders take a wait-and-see approach over the break, only to lose five or six key employees in the new year. He said the answer is to shift from reactive hiring to proper workforce planning – identifying which roles are critical to the business and where gaps are likely to open over the next six to 12 months.
Talent acquisition as an ongoing capability
“It doesn’t matter how stable you are, whether you’ve got the lowest attrition rate in the industry or the highest, you’ve got to run talent acquisition as an ongoing capability. And a lot of people don’t do this,” Roberts said.
In practice, that means using turnover data to identify which divisions carry the highest flight risk, then doing light market mapping – noting potential candidates for critical roles through LinkedIn or an applicant tracking system – before those roles open.
It also means departments talking to one another. Roberts said finance directors and sales heads rarely sit down to discuss how many tenders are in play, how many are likely to be won and what new hires a win would require. Even a monthly check-in would give businesses a clearer view of upcoming hiring needs.
He also took aim at how employers go to market, with many simply reposting a position description as a job ad that says little about the company or what the role offers – leaving every listing looking the same.
“The problem for a lot of firms isn’t a shortage of applicants, it’s a shortage of the right ones,” he said.
Closing the gap between AI investment and workforce readiness
For Patoka, the biggest AI challenge is not the technology itself, but whether organisations can bring their people with them.
“The organisations that succeed in the AI era won’t necessarily be the ones that adopt technology first. They’ll be the ones that help their people adapt fastest,” she told HRD.
She said Adecco’s clients are investing heavily in AI technology, yet the most common struggle she hears about is uptake: getting staff to change their behaviours enough to deliver a return on that investment.
That gap is borne out in Adecco Group’s global study, The Human Premium: Leadership Beyond the Algorithm. The survey of 2,000 C-suite executives across 13 countries found just 22 per cent of leaders are highly confident their organisations are developing future-ready capabilities, and only 39 per cent are involving employees directly in job redesign.
For new hires, Patoka said curiosity, adaptability and a willingness to embrace change are now critical skills.
She described the job market as relatively resilient, but said employers are under pressure from rising costs, productivity expectations and ongoing skills shortages. Recruitment cycles are taking longer and hiring managers have become more risk averse. One response is hiring for transferable skills – sourcing candidates from other industries who have a role’s core capabilities and training them on the rest.
Keeping hiring human
Patoka stressed that technology should strengthen, not replace, human judgement – a theme explored in our analysis of why talent acquisition shouldn’t ‘AI out the human’ in hiring.
AI can take on more of the sourcing, screening, scheduling and administration, she said, giving recruiters more time for the work where people add the most value – understanding candidate motivations, advising clients, assessing cultural fit and building relationships.
“When it comes to the selection and critical evaluation of the candidates that have come through, it’s a human that needs to do that, and culture fit remains incredibly important,” she said.
As HR pushes for greater influence at the leadership table, Roberts said recruitment deserves a similar step up. It need not outrank cash flow forecasting, he said, but treating it as a priority would make life considerably easier for employers.
