Hiring can’t fix what’s wrong with the workforce right now

Why hiring won’t fix this

For years, hiring has served as the default lever for workforce change. When someone left a role, backfilling it gave companies a chance to bring in new skills without much extra effort.

“We have always kind of relied on the ability to go out and hire whatever we need,” Kohn said. “And that has been a really easy path for workforce transformation. Even if it’s just somebody leaves their job and we’re backfilling that role, just in backfilling roles, we can rethink what we need and start to bring in new skills. And we’re just not going to be doing that as much.”

Part of the problem is skills, not headcount. Kohn pointed to a mismatch between what organizations now need and what the available workforce can offer, driven less by artificial intelligence itself than by how work is being restructured around it.

“AI is part of it, but AI is still a minority of job postings,” Kohn said. “I think it’s something like 3% of jobs have AI skills listed. People need to be able to handle much more complex work than they have in the past, or to be able to oversee the output from an AI tool. And that is just not something that a lot of people have right now.”

Return to office mandates, global expansion and shifting business models are compounding the problem, sometimes leaving talent in the wrong place entirely. HRD America has covered this shift toward a labor market walking on eggshells in earlier reporting.