Trouble Finding Workers? Hire Through Diversified Talent-Supply Chains

BY Michael Stahl | October 23, 2022

When Vijay Swaminathan, CEO of Draup, an AI-powered workforce-building platform, first visited the U.S., he decided it was the country he wanted to settle in for the rest of his life. But his decision was not precisely driven by the presence of baseball, jazz, or endless opportunity. For Swaminathan, it was the supermarket.

“Look at the modern day grocery store, and the grapes: Whether it’s summer or winter, they’re always there,” Swaminathan said in a thought-leadership spotlight at From Day One’s Atlanta conference. “That’s because they switch the supply chains. They source from California; from there, they source from Mexico, they go to Peru, they go to Latin American countries. They ensure a perennial supply of inventory.”

In observing the difficulties organizations are experiencing this year in hiring talent–a ManPower Group survey said 69% of employers are having difficulty filling jobs, up from 40% in 2016–Swaminathan hypothesized that an application of produce-section-style supply-chain diversification could serve as a solution. This can more readily be the case given industry’s need for digital talent, which, Swamanithan explained, “basically includes people who give the requirements; people who map out all the experiences, workflows, integrations and so on.”

Where can these supply chains be rendered exactly? Swaminathan provided a host of options.

In one heavily sourced slide, he pointed out that 24% of graduates from large talent-pool countries, including India, are ready for software-based jobs. Companies should also look toward female populations, as less than 20% of tech workers in mature economies are women, and they also account for only 14% of the workforce in cloud-computing ventures. Domestic companies are at a distinct advantage in this regard, with one in four women considering a change in job status.

Draup did some research of its own, including the tracking of 250 million job descriptions and examining 600 million résumés around the world. Among the conclusions the company was able to draw: Talent is blooming around the world in new places.

“Argentina and Brazil have done phenomenal work in education,” Swaminathan said. “About 20% of their GDP actually goes into education now. So countries are competing for global markets, they are creating such talent, and companies are going to these locations.”

Tech talent is spreading far and wide, domestically, as well. “The U.S. market, especially from a technology-talent standpoint, prior to the pandemic largely operated in bigger markets,” Swaminathan said. But smaller cities like Nashville, Indianapolis, Albuquerque, and Salt Lake City are producing tech talent, too. “So this type of disruption is happening within the boundaries of U.S. and companies are still kind of stuck in the previous rhetoric that the talent is available only in big cities,” Swaminathan said.

Corporations should also analyze individual office or outpost strengths and hire accordingly, or they can reimagine their locations and develop their workforce to fit local talent provisions.“What is it that you are doing in comparison to what the market is doing?” Swaminathan posed as a hypothetical. “Understanding that component is extremely critical in transforming your hiring process into a supply chain-based view.”

In a preview of coming capabilities at Draup, Swaminaithan said his company is developing what he called “experimental design” in recruiting. “What I mean by that is, there are certain factors that make you actually successful in certain markets; it’s not just talent availability from a macro perspective, but the employee value proposition may resonate better in certain markets in certain generational segments of the market,” he said.

Workforce developers can now examine their portfolio through this lens. Swaminathan said they should consider: “What are my top markets?” “What are my mature markets?” “What are my needs in markets?” “Where may I not have the best volume, but I have phenomenal speed at which I am making things happen?”

Such insights can inform hiring tremendously, he said, making company processes more efficient and effective.

Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this thought-leadership spotlight: Draup.

Michael Stahl is a New York City-based freelance journalist, writer, and editor. You can read more of his work at MichaelStahlWrites.com, follow him on Twitter @MichaelRStahl, and order his first book, the autobiography of Major League Baseball pitcher Bartolo Colón, at Abrams Books.

Related Stories

From Recruiting to Communication: How HR Leaders Can Leverage AI to Transform Their Work

“Automation has disrupted work for decades,” said Elise Furlan, president and chief people & legal officer, North America, for SICK Sensor Intelligence. However, with the rapid advent of AI tools in the modern workplace, she says companies need to be aware of them to avoid obsolescence.How can HR leaders engage with these technologies and use them to shift focus to higher-value tasks? That was the topic of an executive panel moderated by former KHOU-TV news anchor Shern-Min Chow at From Day One’s Houston conference.Furlan says that AI transforms the workplace by freeing people from tedious and dangerous tasks—though it can, and likely will, cause turnover.Good employers will pivot and help elevate their employees through structured development opportunities, but employees also have to engage in the process. “In my opinion, humans are brilliant and sensitive and creative and will not be replaced by AI. But if your job is highly redundant or administrative, you have to upskill, and you have to own it,” she said. Erinn McMahon, VP of career transition & mobility at LHH, also thinks that individuals need to own their career advancement, with mobility and upskilling support from their employers. Throughout the employee’s lifecycle, she says, companies need to “give them the opportunity to learn new skills, to be able to take what they’ve done and maybe pivot it into something new that will be valuable to the organization.” While AI-powered robots may reduce issues inherent to human workers in manufacturing, Chris DeVault, VP of HR for Daikin Comfort Technologies, doesn’t believe that they can match human nimbleness and discernment. Employers have a social imperative to “eliminate repetitive jobs and get [employees] to the point where they are doing things that are far more rewarding,” he said. Governance ProtocolsJill Zhang, global head of total rewards for SLB, spoke about the company’s very deliberate approach to AI adoption, which focuses on protecting employee and client data. All AI tools are pre-trained models connected only to approved data sources and trained on internal databases.“We want to increase AI literacy across the organization. But we are also quite intentional about doing this responsibly and ethically. So right now, we rely on enterprise-approved tools that are deployed within controlled internal environments for people to use as efficiency tools,” she said. Journalist Shern-Min Chow moderated the session about "How HR Leaders Can Leverage AI to Make Their Work More Effective and Fulfilling"Echoing the need for proactive AI policies and governance, Lynn Moffett, VP of HR at BMC, cautions that without approved tools, employees may use external tools like ChatGPT. “You need to have your policies in place, and you should also be providing the tools to your employees to be able to utilize your AI,” she said. “It is really important that companies help guide it in the way that they want for that governance structure to hold true.”Recruiting and Hiring Moffett’s team uses AI for candidate sourcing, assessment, and interview scheduling. She also partnered with BMC’s IT team to build an in-house tool that detects AI-generated resume content. “It helps with ensuring we’ve got additional authenticity and consistency,” she said.If a candidate’s resume is flagged for high AI usage, managers can query the company’s interview question banks to help them dig deeper into the candidate’s experience or request guidance on customized interview structures. Using these question banks, Moffett says, allows the company to “know that we’ve got our consistent corporate principles being applied, in terms of our overall leveling from a job perspective.”Daikin’s new cloud-based ATS easily integrates with AI tools to analyze and process a high volume of resumes, says DeVault, and AI-driven bot interviews are increasingly realistic. However, his staffing teams are not concerned about job loss due to these systems.“This is just the gateway to get the right people to them, so that they can get the right people to the hiring managers. And it’s really simplified their day.”Internal CommunicationCompanies use AI tools to streamline internal communication as well, such as analyzing employee survey comments and translating team-to-team language.“Using AI to help filter and sort through and understand comments, especially when you’ve got a lot of comments coming at you, is a wonderful use of the tool,” said Moffett. HR business partners at BMC use AI search tools to analyze thousands of survey comments, enabling them to better support their partner teams.With employees across more than 100 countries, Daikin’s use of AI translation tools has transformed internal communications, DeVault says. Not only have these tools helped teams communicate meaningfully, but they have also boosted frontline engagement by allowing Daikin’s interpretation team to “go on the shop floor and actually work hand-in-hand with folks versus sitting on endless [video] calls.” The Future of WorkDeVault says “We are in a machine learning era, and we have to be better than the machine.” He tries to ensure that his team is upskilled and ready for the next challenge, aided in part by Daikin’s continuous internal development programs and advanced skills training. “There are things that will never be able to be done by machines, even from a machine logic perspective. And for those employees that have an interest, there is an infinite amount of training that we're giving them every day.”While we don’t yet know precisely how workplaces will change and what the jobs of the future will be, McMahon says it’s essential to promote curiosity and confidence while offering psychological safety. She urges leaders to “create an environment where people are curious enough to want to try something new and feel strong enough about their capabilities to try new things.” Jessica Swenson is a freelance writer and proofreader based in the Midwest. Learn more about her at jmswensonllc.com.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)

Jessica Swenson February 24, 2026

Powering the Future of Work: A New Perspective on Designing Connection That Scales

“How do we scale connection? How do you support growth, recognizing and realizing that growth is redefined and defined by every individual on a one-on-one basis?” asked Matt Garrett, COO and CMO of Augeo Workplace Engagement. The answer, says Sarita Parikh, SVP of product at Augeo Workplace Engagement, starts with understanding what engagement actually looks like in daily work. It’s not the large, scheduled events that define culture, but the small, repeated interactions that signal whether someone is seen, supported, and developing.Garrett and Parikh spoke during a thought leadership spotlight about “Powering the Future of Work: A New Perspective on Designing Connection That Scales,” at From Day One’s Atlanta conference. The session focused on a central tension in modern organizations: culture is expected to be deeply human and highly individualized, yet it must operate across increasingly complex, hybrid, and time-pressured environments. AI, in their view, becomes useful not when it replaces human judgment but when it makes meaningful moments more visible and easier to act onTo illustrate, Parikh shared the story of “Sammy,” a high-performing data analyst eager to grow into a more client-facing role. Her manager Max was genuinely invested in her success, and their initial conversation was energizing. But a week later, overwhelmed by competing priorities, Max lost the thread. The breakdown wasn’t about intent or capability, says Garrett. “It’s not on Max for failing to do his job, it’s really just about the system that broke down,” he said. Those missed follow-ups, the lost context between conversations, are precisely where AI can help, by surfacing what matters at the moment it’s needed.A Flywheel for BelongingTo make culture more repeatable, the speakers introduced what they called a “cultural connection flywheel,” built on four reinforcing elements: recognition, connection, participation, and growth.Matt Garrett, COO & CMO and Sarita Parikh, SVP of product at Augeo Workplace Engagement, spoke during the session in Atlanta Each fuels the next. Recognition strengthens connection; connection encourages participation; participation creates growth; and together they generate the momentum that produces a shared sense of belonging.“Culture doesn’t scale through programs,” Garrett said. “It actually scales when we’re using systems that ultimately support this idea of human behavior.” That shift, from one-time initiatives to continuous, behavior-based systems, reflects a broader change in HR’s role. Instead of managing tools, leaders are increasingly designing experiences.What Actually Drives EngagementThe second framework focused on individual motivation. Drawing on decades of loyalty and consumer-experience research, the team identified five core drivers that influence how employees engage: purpose, belonging, growth, connection, and well-being.These drivers don’t appear all at once or remain constant. They shift from day to day and person to person, requiring managers to respond in ways that are both consistent and highly contextual, a task that becomes nearly impossible at scale without technological support.AI’s value, Garrett said, is that “the best AI doesn’t necessarily make decisions for people. It makes these moments more visible.” For a manager with double-digit direct reports, or, in one client example, a ratio of one to 127, that visibility is the difference between treating management as a math problem and practicing it as a human one.But the speakers emphasized that AI must be used carefully. Poorly designed systems can create a sense of surveillance, reinforce bias, or over-rely on quantitative signals that miss emotional reality.“AI can tell you all kinds of numbers,” Parikh said, “but it can’t tell you the context of what people are feeling.” That limitation reinforces the central principle of their approach: AI should reduce friction and surface insight, while people make the decisions and build the relationships.Scaling the Human Side of WorkUltimately, the session framed HR’s future as a design discipline. The goal is to ensure that employees and managers encounter the right prompts, opportunities, and recognition at the right time—not through more programs, but through systems that support human connection continuously.For someone like Sammy, that might mean being alerted to a new mentorship opportunity aligned with her goals. For her manager, it might mean walking into a one-on-one with the relevant context already in hand. Those small interventions, repeated across an organization, are what turn engagement from an aspiration into an operational reality.The real objective is not just scaling work, “but more importantly, scaling the human parts—scaling the belonging at work,” said Parikh.Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Augeo Workplace Engagement, for sponsoring this thought leadership spotlight. Chris O’Keeffe is a freelance writer with experience across industries. As the founder and creative director of OK Creative: The Language Agency, he has led strategy and storytelling for organizations like MIT, Amazon, and Cirque du Soleil, bringing their stories to life through established and emerging media.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)

Christopher O'Keeffe February 19, 2026

How AI Is Reshaping Talent Acquisition and the Candidate Experience

While much fuss has been made about the negatives of AI, its greatest benefits, like research, speed, and data processing, are aligned with the needs of an HR department overwhelmed with information during the talent acquisition process. “The AI sweet spot is gathering, synthesizing, and summarizing information, stopping short of decision-making, but certainly helping recruiters, hiring managers, and talent acquisition professionals get to know the inputs on their candidates a bit better,” said Craig Ellis, Ph.D., head I/O psychologist, HighMatch. This information includes skills alignment, level of experience, cultural match, and even the candidate’s desire for the role. Ellis spoke on an executive panel discussion at From Day One’s Atlanta conference about making talent acquisition more efficient and inclusive. “Where I’ve seen AI really show efficiency gains, particularly in the talent acquisition space, is around areas where we can infer at a large scale. So, think screening candidates, resume reviews, scheduling interviews, even communication with candidates. AI is helpful in making that a very efficient process,” said Emily Clark, VP at BlackRock. It can even help boost diversity in hiring by automatically removing or hiding identifying characteristics like names, addresses, or graduation years, eliminating the natural temptation to make assumptions. AI can not only sort applications but help with more proactive headhunting for executive-level positions. “AI helps us to radically identify the right candidates faster, because it allows us to have access to information that used to take 10 minutes to get. We can get it in a few seconds,” said Bert Hensley, chairman and CEO of Morgan Samuels Company. “If we’re looking for a candidate that's going to be a CFO of a certain size business in a certain market segment, we can find those companies and know how to sort them by the size of the business and how much they’ve grown, versus taking so much time to find each one of those [criteria].” He cautions that HR still needs to do its due diligence in vetting, but can use AI to at least generate lists and identify appropriate candidates for further human review.Salvador Ortega, global VP of HR at Newell Brands, says HR professionals need not fear being replaced by AI; instead, AI can augment their work. “It's more about how we elevate our value as human beings,” he said, citing research that has shown that AI has already taken over approximately 50% of most talent acquisition tasks. “So, the main question for us is, what are we going to do with this 50% of our time that is free now? And that's where the magic is going to come.” Panelists spoke about "Making Talent Acquisition More Efficient, Inclusive, and Personalized"That magic, in part, comes down to human intuition. “AI doesn't have the ability to use instinct as humans do, connecting the right person with the right job,” said moderator Leon Stafford, senior business journalist. “Do you have concerns that AI could overlook great talent because a candidate doesn’t quite fit the bill in areas that you could obviously see in a one-on-one interview?” Panelists agreed that one of HR’s key roles is helping organizational leaders articulate not just the kind of candidate they want, but also the type of candidate they need. This is a type of complex, intuitive thinking and level of communication, often relying on more than just printed words, that AI cannot accomplish on its own.“[AI is] not able to look at nuances. It’s not able to have the empathy that we’re looking for or the context [for] what the situation might be,” Clark said. For example, AI cannot identify potential in a person’s resume. “That’s where human interaction is required in the hiring process. And as with implementing any other technology, staff must be trained on how to make the most of AI. That means pushing hiring managers to clearly articulate the exact kind of candidates they need and teaching them how to write highly specific, accurate, and informed prompts. In terms of hiring for C-Suite roles, Ellis says, “AI makes a really good co-pilot. It makes a really bad pilot.” In other words, while it can support the C-suite hiring process, it cannot properly evaluate senior-level candidates. “People are complex, and C-suite jobs are complex, and the intersection of those two things is exponentially complex. That human side of C-level evaluation is incredibly valuable: that judgment and that nuance and that ability to ask follow-up questions and probing questions.” AI Best PracticesWhen employing AI in your hiring practice, transparency and boundaries are essential. Clark suggests letting candidates know up front whether AI is being used to parse resumes and match them to job descriptions, which, in turn, gives them permission to use it as well. But boundaries need to be set for when the technology needs to be put away. “I recommend that you tell the candidate, ‘It’s totally reasonable and understandable if you want to use AI to look at questions that we might ask during the interview [and] prep for responses. We do not allow you to use AI in the interview itself,” she said. The signs of a candidate using AI during an interview are usually clear, such as reading off the screen, looking to the side, or having an AI agent on the Zoom call. It tends to be recent college graduates who rely on it the most, Clark says, because they’re so used to it. HR managers should prepare interview questions that deliberately undermine a candidate’s ability to use AI, forcing them to respond in real time if they are not already doing so. “You, as an organization, have to design your interviews to test what AI cannot do. You’re going to want to design your interview questions to look at real-time judgment, critical thinking, communications, and rationale through ambiguity. AI cannot do any of that with ease.” Ellis notes that follow-up questions that deliberately encourage rephrasing and reflection can also force a candidate to go “off-script,” since AI often cannot remember its previous responses.In seeking out future HR leaders themselves, companies should focus on hiring for critical thinking, human intuition, and data analytics skills—competencies that align with an increasingly AI-dependent industry. “You can do more today in really helping your CEO and your organization be proactive instead of being reactive,” Hensley said. Katie Chambers is a freelance writer and award-winning communications executive with a lifelong commitment to supporting artists and advocating for inclusion. Her work has been seen in HuffPost, Top Think, and several printed essay collections, and she has appeared on Cheddar News, iWomanTV, On New Jersey, and CBS New York.(Photos by Josh Larson for From Day One)

Katie Chambers February 18, 2026