Talent Edge Weekly - Issue #361

Workforce planning, cross-occupation talent deployment, AI-enabled coaching, 7 research studies on internal mobility, and hidden talent.

Author

Brian Heger
August 23, 2026

SPONSORED BY

Welcome to the new issue of Talent Edge Weekly!

First, a shout-out to Bonnie Levitt, Chief HR Officer at Citadel Credit Union, for referring new subscribers to Talent Edge Weekly. Thank you, Bonnie, for your support of this newsletter!

 Not subscribed to Talent Edge Weekly? Sign up now and get 5 of my PDFs.

PRESENTED BY eQ8

What skills will matter in three years? Where are your biggest workforce risks? How will AI change workforce demand?

The Future Is Uncertain. Your Workforce Strategy Doesn't Have to Be. But forecasting an agreed trajectory has always been the hard part.

That's starting to change.

eQ8's AI Workforce Agent analyzes your business plans and strategy documents to quickly build forecasts and scenario models. You can generate risk assessments and workforce recommendations much faster.

Learn how AI-guided strategic workforce planning can help turn workforce strategy into an accelerator of business performance. In a world of constant disruption, confidence comes from seeing around corners.

Have a product or service that could provide value to our active 58,000+ Talent Edge Weekly subscribers? Become a potential sponsor.

THIS WEEK'S CONTENT

Below are links and descriptions of the topics covered in this issue. If you're interested in my deep dive, you can read the full newsletter.

Also, check out my job cuts tracker & Chief HR Officer move of the week, which is an excerpt from my CHROs on the Go platform.

TALENT EDGE CIRCLE - my private community

A special thanks to Patti Phillips, Ph.D., CEO of ROI Institute, for joining my private community for internal HR practitioners, Talent Edge Circle, this past week as a guest speaker. We had a great discussion on demonstrating the ROI of talent initiatives and human capital.

If you’re serious about demonstrating the ROI of your human capital investments, I suggest visiting ROI Institute to learn more about its offerings.

For those of you ready to demonstrate the impact and ROI of a specific initiative, consider joining the other 21,000+ practitioners who have participated in their ROI Certification program.

You can also send a message HERE through ROI Institute’s website or email [email protected] 

Now let’s dive in.

Brian Heger
Follow Me on LinkedIn

THIS WEEK'S EDGE 

WORKFORCE PLANNING

My one-pager helps leaders determine whether additional hiring is needed or if other talent options can address the need.

Strategic workforce planning (SWP) is consistently ranked as a top priority by HR leaders. Yet it has one of the largest gaps between ranked importance and organizational capability. One costly result of ineffective SWP is a familiar cycle: organizations hire aggressively based on optimistic or insufficiently tested assumptions, lay people off when workforce supply exceeds demand, and then rehire when demand returns or essential capabilities prove harder to replace than expected. Not every workforce reduction is evidence of overhiring. But when organizations repeatedly hire, cut, and rehire for similar work, it is a signal to examine whether demand assumptions, work design, capacity planning, and talent alternatives are being sufficiently tested before costly workforce decisions are made. To help leaders identify where this risk may be building, I created a simple “Before You Add Headcount” diagnostic covering demand signals, work and capacity signals, and talent-alternative signals. Instead of asking only, “Do we need more people?” leaders can ask: “What work needs to be done, what is driving the need, and what is the best way to meet that work demand?” Testing these three signal areas before hiring enables leaders to make better and more informed talent decisions.

TALENT MANAGEMENT

A new report analyzes 800,000+ workplace ChatGPT conversations to show how AI use overlaps across occupations, with implications for talent mobility across occupations.

As organizations look for ways to redeploy talent to where it is needed most, one underleveraged opportunity is moving people across occupational and functional boundaries. A new report from OpenAI’s Economic Research team offers an interesting lens into where cross-occupational movement may be most feasible. The team analyzed more than 800,000 work-related ChatGPT conversations from US business users and introduced a concept they call task crossover, instances where someone uses AI to handle work that traditionally belonged to a different occupation. After removing generic tasks like writing and scheduling, they found that 43.5 percent of occupation-specific AI use crosses those traditional job lines. Customer experience, design, and HR workers showed the highest crossover rates. The pattern was strongest at smaller organizations, where workers often do not have a specialist readily available and instead handle the work themselves with AI's help. These insights carry real value for two areas in particular, internal mobility and skills-based talent strategy. They offer an early signal of where cross-discipline work is already happening, well before it would ever show up in a job posting, a title change, or a formal redeployment plan.

AI-ENABLED COACHING

A recently published 191-page open-access ebook spans 17 chapters on AI-enabled coaching, from leadership development applications to ethical standards.

Technology continues to create new opportunities for organizations to expand coaching at scale, prompting HR practitioners to determine where AI-enabled coaching fits within their broader coaching strategies. In fact, given growing Talent Edge Weekly reader interest in this topic, I recently invited Dr. Anna Tavis, Clinical Professor and Chair of the Human Capital Management Department at NYU and author of The Digital Coaching Revolution, to join my private community, Talent Edge Circle, as a guest speaker on the topic. We covered topics ranging from the democratization of coaching and the emergence of fully AI-powered coaches to privacy and data ownership. For those looking to explore the topic further, another useful resource is the recently released, open-access ebook, Coaching in the Age of AI, edited by Robert Wegener, Tamara Garcia, Nicky Terblanche, and Till Grossrieder. This 191-page volume spans 17 chapters covering everything from AI coaching for leadership development to ethical standards for AI coaching platforms and the future of the coaching profession. A physical book version is also available for purchase with a discount code applied. And if you are part of Talent Edge Circle, you can also access the 90-minute replay of our recent discussion on AI-enabled coaching in our private member platform.

INTERNAL MOBILITY

My one-pager highlights seven research studies on internal mobility, translating each into a key finding and practical implication for talent leaders.

With many organizations increasingly focused on moving internal talent to opportunities, from full-time roles and lateral moves to short-term projects and gigs, we’ve been spending time in Talent Edge Circle, my private community for internal HR practitioners, discussing ways to strengthen internal mobility. Aside from sharing practices and lessons learned from implementations within our own organizations, we also draw from academic and scientific research to help shape and test different strategies. With that in mind, I pulled together seven studies that can help others stay current on the research. They cover different factors impacting internal mobility, including talent hoarding, how development breadth affects lateral movement, how certain jobs shape future career options, the role managers play in enabling mobility, how internal talent markets balance employee preferences with business needs, and the career value of lateral moves. The studies were published in journals such as the American Economic Review, Academy of Management Journal, Quarterly Journal of Economics, and Management Science. Since some full articles require a subscription, my one-pager summarizes what each study examined, a key finding, and one potential implication for talent practice, with links to the original research so you can explore further.

TALENT ACQUISITION

A new article argues for hiring based on potential, not pedigree, to uncover overlooked talent. I also reshare my hidden talent infographic.

One persistent challenge in hiring is the gap between how objective organizations believe their process is and how objective it actually is. A new article by Emilio J. Castilla, professor at MIT Sloan and author of The Meritocracy Paradox, examines this challenge. His research has found that the more confident a hiring team feels its process is fair and merit-based, the less vigilant it becomes about the bias that shapes who gets hired, which can result in hiring criteria that unintentionally exclude capable candidates from less traditional backgrounds. His alternative is what he calls an opportunity mindset: hire people who are good enough to succeed, then build the onboarding, mentorship, and development structures that help good people become great. He illustrates the shift with a simple example. Say an engineering team has an open entry-level role. The traditional approach narrows the pipeline to candidates with a four-year computer science degree from a highly ranked university. Under an opportunity mindset, the team instead asks what skills the role actually requires, then widens the pool to include community college graduates, career switchers, and parents returning to the workforce. As a bonus, I am resharing my post and infographic on eight segments of “hidden workers” and the red flags that may indicate your hiring process is overlooking them.

MOST POPULAR FROM LAST WEEK

ORGANIZATIONAL CAPACITY

My one-pager shares 9 ways organizational ways of working can quietly diminish workforce capacity, with warning signs to watch for and one practical next step to address each one.

🔓️ There is more content in this issue, but you must be subscribed to view it. Subscribe Now (it’s free) or sign in if you are already a subscriber!

Subscribe to keep reading

This content is free, but you must be subscribed to Talent Edge Weekly to continue reading.

Already a subscriber?Sign in.Not now