The Future of Hiring: Where AI Ends and Leadership Begins

Episode Guests & Host

Host: Ben Brandon — AccruePartners

Guest: Nathan Sloan — Principal, Human Capital Consulting, Deloitte

Introduction

Ben Brandon: Welcome back to Building People, Companies, and Careers, brought to you by AccruePartners. I’m your host, Ben Brandon. Here at AccruePartners, we’re passionate about connecting with clients, candidates, consultants, and thought leaders who are shaping the business landscape — not just here in Charlotte, but across the Carolinas. Today, we’re thrilled to welcome Nathan Sloan, Principal at Deloitte. Nathan, we’re glad to have you here, and we’re excited to get into your perspective on today’s HR trends, talent strategy, and how organizations can prepare for what’s next in the world of work.

Ben Brandon: Let’s start where we always do. Tell me about yourself.

Nathan Sloan: Happy to be here, Ben — and thanks for the invitation back. We have a great partnership, and I always enjoy these conversations. As you mentioned, I’m a Principal at Deloitte, which means wearing a lot of different hats. I sit in our Human Capital consulting practice and work with clients on talent and organizational strategy. Internally, I also lead efforts around how we think about talent management horizontally across the practice — looking at the skills our professionals have versus where they’re deployed, and helping us pilot new approaches to how we staff and develop our people. So I get to live this topic from both a client-facing and internal perspective, which I find incredibly valuable.

What Leaders Are Getting Wrong About AI in the Workplace

Ben Brandon: AI is the topic everyone is talking about right now. From your vantage point, working with major organizations, what are leaders getting most wrong about it — and what should they be paying closer attention to?

Nathan Sloan: It’s absolutely the dominant conversation right now. And honestly, the biggest challenge I see is what I’d call pilot-itis — organizations running a large number of disconnected AI pilots without a clear understanding of how AI is actually going to change the way work gets done. There’s real pressure from external stakeholders and shareholders to show how AI improves the bottom line, and that often translates into a blunt question: how many people can we replace? But what we’ve seen drive more meaningful outcomes is when organizations take the time to understand how AI, paired with their people, can make those people more effective — not just faster, but genuinely better at their work. When you skip that step and simply demand more output because AI tools are available, you create stress in the system, erode trust with your employees, and risk burnout and disengagement. HR has a real opportunity here — almost like work design engineers — to help organizations map how roles and responsibilities need to shift in the face of AI, rather than just absorbing AI on top of an already full workload.

Ben Brandon: That resonates. We see it even at AccruePartners — how quickly our own use of AI has evolved from when we first started experimenting to where we are today. The pace of change is remarkable, and you really do have to stay engaged with it, invest in the right areas, and keep learning. One thing I’d add is that encouraging employees to experiment on their own — to find places where AI can help them with everyday tasks they’d normally do manually — goes a long way in building that early adopter mindset.

Nathan Sloan: Exactly right. Building that culture of experimentation from the bottom up, while leaders set the strategic direction from the top, is the combination that actually drives meaningful adoption.

How Workforce Planning Must Evolve at the Executive Level

Ben Brandon: When roles and skills are changing faster than most annual planning cycles can keep up with, how does workforce planning need to change at the executive level?

Nathan Sloan: This is a conversation we were literally having internally just yesterday. Historically, many organizations still treat workforce planning as a backwards-looking exercise — primarily headcount planning focused on current-state operations. Strategic workforce planning is fundamentally different. It’s about looking ahead at capabilities, work design, and increasingly at agents — how do you plan for AI agents as part of your workforce? Most organizations aren’t thinking about that yet, and it represents a significant planning gap. The other critical piece is bringing in external data. Organizations tend to rely heavily on their own internal information, but skills and capabilities are evolving so rapidly that you need external signals — platforms that can tell you what skills are being hired for in the market right now — to make your planning relevant. Some of the most interesting tools we’re seeing are ones that started in org design and visualization and have now expanded into workforce planning capabilities, connecting those two disciplines in a meaningful way.

Ben Brandon: That’s a great point. I remember the first time I heard AI agents discussed seriously was at one of our HR Power Breakfasts about a year ago — and now it’s one of the most common topics I hear from clients. The speed at which these concepts move from emerging idea to mainstream business priority is striking.

How Leaders Can Help Teams Prioritize Instead of Just Piling More On

Ben Brandon: AI is supposed to make us more productive — but in practice, it often just raises expectations. How can leaders actually help their teams prioritize and manage capacity rather than simply adding more to their plates?

Nathan Sloan: The pinch point tends to be at the manager level, and that’s where we’ve seen the most successful companies invest. Building manager capability around setting realistic expectations — and modeling the intentional integration of AI into their own work — is essential. But there’s another piece that gets overlooked: creating an explicit list of things you can stop doing. Most managers and employees default to ‘here’s what I can do more of with AI,’ without ever asking, ‘what can I pause, stop, or do differently so I’m not just adding to an already full workload?’ That discipline — identifying what to stop alongside what to start — is what separates organizations that use AI to create capacity from those that just use it to create more demand.

Ben Brandon: And I think there’s a natural evolution of the role itself that leaders need to help people navigate. If someone’s job has been largely transactional, AI doesn’t just make them faster at that transaction — it opens the door for the role to evolve toward more analysis, judgment, and strategic contribution. That’s actually an opportunity if it’s framed and supported the right way.

Nathan Sloan: Absolutely. The framing matters enormously.

Talent Athleticism and Adaptability: What It Looks Like in Practice

Ben Brandon: Something I’ve been hearing more about lately is the concept of talent, athleticism, and adaptability. What does that actually look like day to day, and how do companies build it without burning their people out?

Nathan Sloan: At Deloitte, we think a lot about this — we call it hiring for best athletes, meaning people who can truly adapt their skills, frame problems, and apply judgment across different contexts. Those core human skills — critical thinking, problem framing, communication — become more valuable, not less, as AI handles more routine tasks. But building a genuinely adaptable workforce also requires setting clear and realistic guardrails around mobility, expectations, and development. Some of our clients are even rethinking performance management to reward agility and proactive self-development — not just output. And the sports analogy is an important one here: elite athletes don’t sprint twenty-four/seven. They train, they perform, and they recover. Organizations that build intentional cycles of all three — throughout the day, throughout the week, throughout the year — will drive much greater sustainability, engagement, and retention. Adaptability cannot mean constant exhaustion. If your people are perpetually in reactive mode, you’ll lose them.

Ben Brandon: That’s a really important point for both the clients and candidates who tune in to this show. This mindset around adaptability needs to show up in the interview process too — how do you build questions that surface someone’s ability to navigate ambiguity, embrace change, and evolve alongside a role that AI might reshape significantly in the next year or two?

Nathan Sloan: Great point. And on the candidate side — think about the stories you can tell that demonstrate how you’ve adapted to shifts in technology, scope, or structure. That’s increasingly what employers are screening for.

What Makes a Skills-Based Organization Real vs. Just Relabeling

Ben Brandon: A lot of companies say they’re becoming skills-based organizations. I’ve even worked with a large company here in Charlotte that was going through that transformation — and it was clearly a heavy lift. From your experience, what tells you a company is genuinely serious about this versus just changing the labels on existing processes?

Nathan Sloan: The most common pattern we see is organizations that invest in building a skills inventory and a technology platform — but then that inventory just sits there. It’s not actually driving decisions. A truly skills-based organization treats skills as a system-level operating model. That means embedding skills into hiring criteria, learning and development, performance management, workforce planning, and internal mobility. All of those processes need to reflect skills-based logic, not just the HR team’s internal dashboard. And when you do it well, it creates a real talent marketplace — where internal movement is driven by skills and potential rather than just tenure or org chart position. That’s when it becomes a genuine retention and development tool, not just a framework on paper.

Ben Brandon: That’s a compelling vision — especially for large organizations where talented people may be underemployed in their current roles. Building out a skills inventory and genuinely acting on it gives those people a pathway to grow within the organization rather than leaving to find it elsewhere. And removing degree requirements as a proxy for capability is a big part of that, too.

Nathan Sloan: Exactly. Skills-based hiring is gaining real traction — and increasingly, the question isn’t whether you have a four-year degree, but whether you have the skills required to do the work. Embedding that into the talent lifecycle — including learning in the flow of work and rewarding skills acquisition — signals that you’re truly serious about it.

Where AI Adds Genuine Value in Hiring — and Where Humans Must Stay in Control

Ben Brandon: Let’s bring AI back into the conversation, specifically around hiring. AI is playing a growing role in everything from screening to assessments. Where does it genuinely add value, and where do you believe humans still need to be firmly in the loop?

Nathan Sloan: Hiring was actually one of the first HR processes where AI started to gain real traction — summarizing interview notes, reviewing candidate materials, supporting hiring managers with structured data. There’s a useful maturity model here: AI-assisted, AI-augmented, and AI-driven decisions. The real opportunity is in the first two. Humans should remain accountable for the decisions themselves, with AI providing better information and reducing manual burden. Where it gets risky is when AI starts owning the candidate experience directly. If a candidate’s first meaningful interaction with your organization is with an AI tool rather than a person, that has real implications for how your employer brand is perceived. Getting that balance right is critical.

Ben Brandon: I’ve seen this play out with some of our clients — organizations that have invested in AI-powered hiring tools designed for high-volume, field-based roles, but then tried to apply them across all corporate functions. The business gets told it’s ‘AI-powered hiring,’ but talent acquisition teams know the candidate flow isn’t right for professional roles, and they feel locked in because the tool has already been procured. There’s a real risk of misapplication when procurement decisions outpace operational understanding of where AI actually fits.

Nathan Sloan: That’s a very fair observation — and a trap many organizations fall into. The answer is always to map the actual process first: where can AI add value, where does it create risk, and what’s the impact on the human experience at each step? That analysis has to come before the technology decision, not after.

The Single Most Important Workforce Investment for CEOs Right Now

Ben Brandon: If you were advising a CEO today, what’s the single most important workforce capability they need to invest in over the next few years to stay competitive?

Nathan Sloan: Work redesign. That would be my answer. Not more AI pilots — but sitting down with functional leaders and genuinely rethinking how work is structured in an AI-enabled environment. Most organizations don’t have that capability internally today, and it’s a place where HR can step up in a powerful way. We’ve always done job architecture and job design — this is the next level: work design, at the task level, with AI as a core variable. The organizations that get ahead of this will have a meaningful competitive advantage. And I’d add one more thought: be careful about assuming you no longer need entry-level talent. AI may reduce certain junior workloads, but if you stop hiring people into foundational roles, you create an experience gap that can’t be solved by technology. How do you develop your next generation of managers and leaders if they never had the chance to do the work that builds those instincts?

Ben Brandon: That hits close to home. I started my career in public accounting, and I watched a lot of first-year work get offshored to global delivery centers for cost reasons. And I kept asking — how do you become a second-year associate if you never did the first-year work? The Big Four have incredible training programs that offset some of that, but the principle holds. You have to develop talent for the jobs of today and the jobs AI will create tomorrow. And there are projections out there suggesting AI will generate dozens of entirely new job categories — roles that don’t even exist yet. So we’re preparing people for a future we can only partially see.

Nathan Sloan: And that’s actually the real opportunity — especially in professional services. The emergence of AI-driven roles will create more demand for the kind of advisory, strategic, and human-judgment work that we do. The challenge is helping people — including students and early-career professionals — understand that the path forward is still very much worth pursuing.

Closing Remarks & Upcoming Events

Ben Brandon: Nathan, this has been a fantastic conversation — thank you for sharing such thoughtful, real-world perspectives on AI, workforce strategy, talent development, and the future of work. These are exactly the kinds of conversations our clients and candidates need to be having right now. Before we wrap up, I want to give a quick but important plug: Nathan and I will be together again very soon. I’m excited to announce our 2026 AccruePartners and Deloitte HR Power Breakfast, taking place on February 26th. Nathan will return as our moderator, and we’ll have a fantastic panel of practitioners who are navigating these exact challenges every day — including Meredith Monz, CHRO at Scout Motors; Ana O’Meara, CHRO at Miller Environmental Group; Andy, SVP and Head of Talent and Employee Experience at Lincoln Financial; and Corey Pollen, Head of the Employment Law Team at CRC Group. It’s going to be a candid, high-value conversation with leaders who are in the arena. We’ve already had such strong interest that we’re moving to a larger space upstairs. Nathan, this will be your third time joining us — we are genuinely grateful for this partnership. And to everyone listening, thank you for tuning in. We’ll see you next time on Building People, Companies, and Careers.

Nathan Sloan: Thanks, Ben. Really enjoyed it. See you on the 26th.

Ben Brandon: Absolutely.