Jim Shultman has a confession: his team is hitting their numbers. Time to offer, time to hire, productivity, and quality metrics are all on track. And that’s exactly the problem. When performance is acceptable today, the case for transformation is hard to make.

But Jim believes, and is already seeing the evidence, that the recruiting playbook working right now is going to fail within two to three years. A retiring workforce. A generation turning away from STEM. AI projected to create tens of millions of jobs that don’t exist today. When that moment arrives, TA teams that never learned to scale themselves with AI won’t be replaced by AI. They’ll be replaced by recruiters who did.

Jim is navigating this shift in real time at Thales. He has found that some of the most successful talent professionals don’t necessarily come from traditional recruiting backgrounds. One of his top performers, a former shared services agent, quickly became a standout by embracing AI and technology to improve productivity, candidate engagement, and hiring outcomes. For Jim, it’s a powerful example of how recruiting excellence is increasingly defined not just by experience, but by a willingness to learn, embrace change, and continuously evolve how work gets done.

He’s also watching a global engineering leader redesign hiring profiles away from coders and toward people who can think in prompts. The shape of what TA actually hires for is shifting underneath everyone, and most teams are too busy filling reqs to notice.

This session is for TA leaders who know something needs to change but are struggling to make that case to their teams, their stakeholders, or themselves. Jim shares what transformation actually looks like when it’s happening inside a high-performing global organization: the resistance, the compliance complexity, the counterintuitive hiring decisions, and what’s working. The question he’s trying to answer isn’t whether TA needs to change. It’s how you get ahead of it when the current way of working is still getting results.

Attendee Takeaways

The case for proactive transformation. How to build urgency for change when your team is hitting its numbers, and why waiting for a market shift to force transformation is a losing bet. Jim walks through the workforce trends, including retiring talent, STEM gaps, and AI-generated roles, that make the case and explains how he’s using them internally to shift mindsets before the pressure arrives.
Why experience beats credentials in recruiting talent acquisition talent. Discover why Jim is finding success by hiring recruiters with nontraditional backgrounds and what that says about the future of talent acquisition. As AI increasingly handles system-driven tasks, learn which capabilities are becoming more valuable, the outcomes this approach is delivering, and how to think differently about building a team for the next three years rather than the last ten.
Managing transformation when teams are resistant or comfortable. A practical framework for navigating the full spectrum of adoption, from early evangelists to active resisters, and the management moves that shift behavior. Jim shares what’s working at Thales, what isn’t, and how to retrain experienced recruiters versus bringing in people who don’t know any other way.
Skills-based hiring as a talent strategy, not just a sourcing tactic. Why companies are moving toward skills-based models, and why Jim believes it’s less about finding external talent with the right credentials and more about mapping what you have, identifying what you need, and building internal learning pathways so you can hire for potential and teach the rest. Includes a concrete example of how Thales is applying this in manufacturing and engineering right now.

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