What HR Leaders Should Prioritize in 2025 – Insights from SHL Connect South Africa

Skills Are the New Currency

SHL delivered a keynote on how an intelligent skills strategy can drive growth and how forward-thinking organizations are not just setting up clients to survive, but to thrive in a competitive market. The discussion revolved around two of the key advantages that skills offer in Talent Acquisition;

1. they can define what makes someone successful within organizations and roles in a fair, comparable manner, and
2. skills are the easiest identifiable factor that can be used to measure the capability or potential of candidates for a role.

With great talent becoming scarce and 65% of the skills the workforce has today being replaced or updated by 2030—a skills-based approach can help organizations remain agile to future demands and enable HR to align quicker to ever-changing business priorities.

The Employer/Employee Relationship Has Evolved

Jo Blake, Talent Executive at Woolworths, talked about the impact and disruption of talent shortages, the ageing workforce and how to embrace new skills. Replacing a highly contributing ageing workforce presents a significant issue, especially in Africa where nearly 60% of the population are under the age of 25, and only 11% of those are currently working. Creating viable opportunities and harnessing the strengths of Gen Z talent in an era where experience and qualifications are often still pre-requisites is holding organizations back.

Hiring and developing early careers talent should focus on understanding what a person can do, rather than what they have done. A good starting point to know what skills to look for is to audit existing talent, identifying the skills and capabilities across your organization to help hire, upskill and reskill talent in the areas that matter, empowering employees to control their learning journey while keeping them engaged and motivated. This will provide access to a broader, more diverse talent pool with critical future-ready skills that can positively impact your organization.

AI is Changing Recruitment But Human Skills Are Still Of Most Importance

Selo Govender, HR Executive at Discovery, discussed the future of AI in recruitment and how to embrace AI with a humanized approach to improve the candidate experience. There’s no doubt that AI is revolutionary and will impact all aspects of HR. Teams should embrace this new technology, employ a growth mindset, and experiment with how it can benefit key strategic initiatives, while being aware of ethical, legal and concerns around bias that exist.

As AI becomes more commonplace and used to deal with many of the tedious, time-consuming aspects such as helping to source, screen and communicate with talent, the human aspect will be the differentiator between organizations. Although technical AI skills may be needed for a small amount of employees, human skills will still be of most value as they can be transferred across roles and show ability to learn AI and use it to enhance productivity. In a world of AI, finding the right talent is more important than ever, and HR leaders will need to find the right mix of assessment tools, technology and data to enable objective and intentional talent decisions.

Check out our short highlights video here:

SHL provides people answers to over 10,000 organizations globally. Whatever your HR priority, we’re here to help. Learn more about how you can build skills-based organizations, improve the effectiveness of managers and leaders, make better decisions with people data, and more.