Stop Buying Tools. Start Designing Your Hiring Machine.

Author: Alan Walker
Stop Buying Tools. Start Designing Your Hiring Machine.

New ATS demo in January >>> CRM implementation by March >>> AI pilot by June >>> Restructured out of the org chart by September.

If that timeline feels uncomfortably familiar, you're not alone. I've spent 25 years in and around talent acquisition, and I've never seen so many TA leaders working so hard on the wrong things. There's a particular kind of busy that looks productive but isn't. Running vendor evaluations, building business cases for new platforms, sitting through yet another demo where someone shows you AI-generated job descriptions like it's the moon landing. All of it feels like progress. Almost none of it is.

Because here's the uncomfortable truth: you cannot technology your way out of a structural problem. And the problem most TA functions have isn't a technology problem. It's that the function was never actually designed in the first place.

The layoffs told you everything you needed to know

When the cuts came between 2022 and 2025, TA didn't just take a hit. It took a disproportionate beating. Recruiters were let go at roughly five times the rate of engineers. In one study of layoffs at major tech firms, nearly 28% of those let go were HR and recruiting professionals. LinkedIn kept cutting its own TA team, which tells you everything about how even the companies that sell talent solutions view the people who deliver them.

The instinct is to read this as a demotion of the function. I don't think it is. I think it's a verdict on how the function had positioned itself.

If you'd built a TA operation that scaled linearly with requisition volume, that was measured primarily on time-to-fill and cost-per-hire, and that existed in the minds of your leadership team as "the people who post jobs and book interviews," then of course you were first on the chopping block. You'd made yourself a variable cost. Variable costs get cut when the variable changes.

The organisations that protected their TA functions through the downturn weren't the ones with the best ATS. They were the ones where TA had made itself structurally essential: integrated with workforce planning, embedded in business strategy, owning talent intelligence that nobody else in the building could replicate. The layoffs didn't prove that TA is expendable. They proved that tactical TA is expendable. There's a difference, and it matters.

TREC Article Stop Buying Tools. (2)

Your ATS strategy is not a talent strategy

I have lost count of the number of TA leaders I've spoken to who, when asked about their talent strategy, start talking about their technology stack. They'll walk you through their ATS selection process, their CRM roadmap, their plans for an AI sourcing tool. All perfectly reasonable activities in isolation. None of them, individually or collectively, constitute a strategy.

Here's a stat that should sting: only 2% of companies use all the functionality in their CRM. We're spending months evaluating, buying, and implementing tools that the vast majority of the team will quietly ignore within a year. And then we do it again with the next platform.

Tool selection has become a comfortable proxy for strategic thinking. It's tangible. It has a timeline. It produces a deliverable. It feels like you're doing something. But while you were running that RFP, did anyone stop to ask whether the underlying operating model actually works?

A TA operating model has at least ten dimensions that have nothing to do with which vendor logo sits on your careers site. Governance and decision rights. Service delivery design. Process architecture. Workforce planning integration. Capability and skills frameworks. Capacity planning. Stakeholder engagement models. Data infrastructure. Performance measurement that goes beyond the same three metrics we've been reporting since 2005. Most organisations have never deliberately designed any of these. They inherited a model from whoever set it up originally, patched it under pressure every time something broke, and called the result "strategy" because it had a slide deck.

That's not strategy. That's institutional muscle memory. And it's the reason a shiny new ATS doesn't fix anything. You're upgrading the engine in a car with no steering wheel.

Skills-based hiring: the biggest gap between conference slides and reality

Everyone is talking about skills-based hiring. It's on every conference agenda, every vendor pitch, every CHRO's LinkedIn post. And on paper, the case is overwhelming. Skills-based assessments are five times more predictive of job performance than education credentials and twice as predictive as work experience. A skills-first approach can expand your talent pool tenfold. Eighty-five percent of companies say they're doing it.

So why has almost nothing actually changed?

Harvard Business School and the Burning Glass Institute studied 11,300 roles at major firms that had publicly committed to skills-based hiring. They found that the actual increase in hiring workers without bachelor's degrees was 3.5 percentage points. Fewer than one in 700 hires were affected. One in 700. That's not a transformation. That's a rounding error with a press release.

The problem isn't intent. It's operating model. The companies that made skills-based hiring work (Koch Industries, Walmart, Apple, General Motors, among others) didn't just remove degree requirements from job postings and call it done. They mapped credentials to roles. They embedded skills frameworks into their hiring systems. They retrained hiring managers to assess differently. They redesigned their entire intake process and connected it to L&D and internal mobility.

In other words, they treated it as what it actually is: a fundamental redesign of how the organisation thinks about capability. Not a policy change. Not a checkbox. A different operating model.

If your "skills-based hiring initiative" amounts to removing the degree field from your application form, you haven't gone skills-based. You've gone marketing-based. And your TA function is the one that should be owning that distinction, loudly, before someone else points it out less kindly.

AI doesn't need a better buyer

AI adoption in TA has nearly doubled in a year, from around a quarter of organisations to nearly half. The efficiency gains are genuine and, in some cases, dramatic. Application review times cut by 80%. Job description drafting reduced by 90%. Single recruiters managing pipelines five to ten times larger than before. If you're not paying attention to this, you're asleep.

But here's what should actually keep you up at night: more than 80% of organisations using generative AI see no material impact on their bottom line. Not because the technology doesn't work. Because they bolted it onto processes that were already broken. Faster screening doesn't help if your job architecture is wrong. AI-generated job descriptions don't help if your intake process doesn't capture what the hiring manager actually needs. Speed without direction is just chaos with better reporting.

And now agentic AI is arriving. This is different. Generative AI assists with tasks. Agentic AI owns them. It doesn't help a recruiter write a job posting; it identifies the hiring need, researches market conditions, creates and distributes the posting, screens applications, and schedules interviews with minimal human involvement. Gartner says 82% of HR leaders plan to deploy some form of agentic AI by mid-2026. Microsoft is already issuing security credentials to AI agents. HR vendors are creating employee records for them.

This is not a tool decision. This is a "who does what around here" decision. And if the TA leader isn't the one redesigning team structures, defining decision rights between humans and machines, and building governance frameworks for autonomous agents, then someone else will. Probably someone from IT or finance. And they will not be sentimental about what the TA function used to look like.

From system buyer to operating model architect

The shift I'm describing isn't incremental. It's not "do what you've always done, but with AI." It's a fundamentally different job.

The old TA leader picked vendors, managed agencies, reported on time-to-fill, and fought for budget every year. The new TA leader designs how capability flows into, through, and across the organisation. That means having a genuine seat at workforce planning (currently, only about a third of TA leaders participate, and over 40% say their company has no workforce plan at all). It means owning skills intelligence as ongoing infrastructure, not a one-off project that degrades within 18 months. It means designing hybrid delivery models that combine owned capability, RPO partnerships, AI automation, and flexible capacity based on what actually makes sense, not what you've always done. It means building an AI governance framework before you scale, not after something goes wrong.

About one in eight TA functions have made this shift. They're the ones Bersin calls "Systemic HR" organisations. They significantly outperform on business outcomes. They're not buying tools. They're designing systems.

The other seven out of eight are running out of runway. Not because they're bad at recruiting. Because recruiting, as a standalone transactional function, is being automated, outsourced, and absorbed. The value has moved upstream, into architecture, intelligence, and design. And it's not coming back.

TREC Article Stop Buying Tools. (3)

So, what now?

If your biggest achievement this year is selecting a new ATS, I'd gently suggest you ask yourself a question: while you were evaluating platforms, who was designing the operating model?

Because someone is. Somewhere in your organisation, decisions are being made about how talent flows in, how skills are managed, how AI gets deployed, and what the TA function looks like in two years' time. If you're not the one making those decisions, you're the one those decisions are being made about.

The TA profession isn't being slowly demoted. It's being rapidly sorted. On one side, leaders who are redesigning how their organisations think about talent as an integrated system. On the other, people who are still running vendor demos and wondering why nothing changes.

Pick a side. The architecture won't wait.

And what are Udder doing about all this?

I should declare an interest here. When we founded Udder, we built it on exactly this principle. Not because we were clairvoyant, but because we'd spent enough time on the other side of the table to know what was broken. Too many consulting businesses in our space operate as glorified order takers. The client says they need a new ATS, so you help them pick one. The client says they want to implement a CRM, so you configure it. Nobody asks whether the ATS is actually the problem. Nobody challenges whether the CRM will get used (spoiler: see the 2% stat above). Nobody tells the client that what they actually need is to fix their operating model before they spend six figures on a platform that will paper over the same cracks.

Now, if you visit our website right now, it says "Your HR Tech, Done Right. From vendor selection to seamless implementation." I'm aware of the irony. But here's the thing: that's the front door. It's how people find us, because technology selection and implementation is a problem they know they have. It's when we sit down and have the broader conversation that they start to see what we actually do. We have started to think of ourselves as Hiring Engineers, not implementation partners. An implementation partner builds what you ask for. A Hiring Engineer helps you understand what you actually need, designs the architecture, and then helps you build it. Sometimes that includes new technology. Sometimes it means getting more out of what you already have. Sometimes it means the most valuable thing we can say is "don't replace that system, fix the process around it." And then help you do exactly that.

Not every client wants that, and that's fine. Some have already done the strategic thinking themselves and just need expert hands to implement well. We're happy to do that. Others come through the door thinking they need a tool and leave realising they need to do some fundamentally different thinking first. And then there are the ones who hear "Hiring Engineers" and light up, because that's exactly the kind of partner they've been looking for. We work with all three. But if I'm writing an article asking TA leaders to stop being system buyers, it would be fairly hypocritical to run a business that only helped them carry on doing exactly that.

Inspiration for this article comes from research, my own thoughts, and Udder's lived experience. The research included the following sources:
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Alan Walker

Alan Walker

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