Impressionist paintings are mesmerising enough to keep you lost in the details — but when you take a step back, the brushstrokes blur and you can see the artist’s big vision.

When you step back from a fragmented hiring process, all you can see is a team moving in four directions at once.

Picture this: The EMEA team has one set of HR tech for their hiring process, but the team over in Singapore has a few regulatory quirks so they use their own specialised software. No one knows what the team in Latin America does because they’ve just joined from a merger, and the HR tech stack they have over in the United States needs to account for state-specific hiring regulations.

It’s exhausting, confusing, and unsustainable.

So why isn’t it changing? Because they’re investing elsewhere. 29% into HR automation. 27% into talent acquisition. 17% into standardising their global hiring processes. They’re focusing on speed first, and then they’ll join the dots and hope for a masterpiece.

Not fixing the foundations is costing you time, good talent, and money. In fact, a third of businesses have experienced hiring delays from inconsistent processes in the past two years. And another quarter could have prevented duplicated costs if they’d reviewed their strategy sooner.

You can probably read the exhaustion in that sentence, and maybe it resonates with you. Kicking off a transformation project feels like starting with a new canvas: full of limitless potential. But soon enough, all the colours blur together and you’re left with muddy brown (or, in other words, operational chaos).

“It’s also really hard to maintain as your company scales,” Jade Mill, Strategic Consultant at Greenhouse, pointed out. “You have to build a system that standardises the fundamental processes — like using a scorecard or interview kit — while giving teams flexibility in how they conduct interviews.”

Jade Mill

Strategic Consultant

We’ve seen firsthand how much M&As impact the businesses we speak to. One HR systems manager had to onboard 80 new employees “all at once”, and another CPO ran us through their to-do list on day one: “We’re going to send everyone a link, redo their right to work, potentially redo the DBS and also do a lot of qualifications checks as well.”

And that fragmentation doesn’t just create operational chaos. It’s a regulatory nightmare. When you acquire 80 new people in one day, everything gets more complicated overnight.

Most leaders will agree: fragmentation = bad news. What they don’t agree on is why they’re not fixing it.

Local employment regulations are the top barrier at 36%. But after that, legacy HR systems (35%), budget constraints (29%), technical integration (29%), existing supplier contracts (22%), and regional teams pushing back (21%) are all very real challenges.

When you look at who’s actually investing in standardisation in 2027 (just 17%) you start to wonder if the real issue is that standardisation doesn’t feel urgent. It feels like maintenance work pulling you away from the real problems.

But that’s only until you’re onboarding dozens of new employees in a new market and your systems don’t talk to each other, or until your investors start asking hard questions.

You have two choices: You can keep going as you are. Acquire more companies, layer automation on top of broken processes, and hope that candidate fraud doesn’t slip through the cracks. Or, you can decide that in 2027, you’re committing to one big vision for HR and talent as a strategic, impactful business function.

“TA is very siloed,” said Jade. “What you want to be thinking about is how TA connects to all these different avenues within your organisation. How do you get all those parts of your process talking?” The teams winning global hiring aren’t the fastest, they’ve just made deliberate decisions about what they won’t compromise on. They have a core palette, space for artists to experiment, and expectations for how paintings fit together in the gallery. And then they do something about it.

If you’re in the 55% who see fragmentation as a concern, it’s time to move from worrying to doing. Make HR and TA fragmentation a strategic function in your business, with the authority to contribute to decisions about process, people, and long-term priorities.

‍Establish your palette. What are the three core elements of your hiring process that define your risk profile or your employer brand? Find out what brings the theme together before making decisions about where you need to flex.

‍Commission one masterpiece. Standardisation doesn’t limit creativity. It makes it better and keeps your process fast and clear. “Global consistency and local variation can co-exist,” said Jade. “As long as teams can identify what must stay standard and where a controlled exception is needed. Localise at the narrowest useful level, rather than trying to tailor everything to everybody’s needs.”

When we dive deeper into the data, we can see that flexing is the standard. Across companies running checks through Zinc, over 99% of requests use tailored settings rather than out-of-the-box defaults.

We also see it in how our customers are using their checks through Zinc. Each customer can make unlimited custom checks packages, tailored to the roles they need to run background checks for. Organisations with less than 50 employees tend to only build up to three distinct packages on average. Companies of 501 to 5,000 run between 10 and 17 packages. If you don’t have that kind of flexibility in your processes, you end up compromising.

Frame it in a way leadership understands. The phrase “process standardisation” puts everyone to sleep. Put the outcomes first to paint a picture of what they can expect. Talk about faster onboarding post-acquisition, a thirty-day reduction in hiring time, or one single source of truth for compliance to show your team the business impact as a whole, not just the mundane details.

Don’t let 2028 be the year you’re scrambling to pull it all together. The best HR teams are doing the work in 2027 so that when regulations shift, or when the next acquisition lands, they have systems in place to make sure they’re not hanging new paintings in a gallery still under construction.

If GDPR was the masterpiece that changed how we think about data protections, the patchwork of regulations coming in 2027 is more like different artists all painting their own rules on the same canvas.

With regulations around data privacy, hiring, and AI, there are some constants. Most countries have some form of data protection laws. But there are also places racing ahead with legislation designed to solve emerging problems: the EU AI Act, for example, or EU pay transparency directive that passed its deadline June 2026.

Which, if you’re a hiring team trying to do anything globally, can be a bit of a pain.

One Global VP of People trying to scale across the UK, France, and the US at the same time described the chaos: “With the current onboarding process, it was taking us eight weeks to get the contract out. The statutory needs are very different, and we had people in France who didn’t understand what we needed to do in the US and the UK.”

Eight weeks for a contract means eight weeks of lost productivity, and more delays as your new hire gets up to speed.

But honestly, regulation isn’t your enemy. It’s actually your strength, if you can get all those painters working on the same picture.

Not every piece of legislation is a unique work of art. Some are copies. Take the EU pay transparency directive. It’s not the first of its kind at all: Sweden’s pay transparency laws actually date all the way back to 1766. More recently, New York's pay transparency laws have been in place since 2023, giving teams plenty of time to build best practices and predict how candidate behaviour is going to change.

“Lucky for us, we actually had a blueprint — particularly as it relates to our technology, recruiter behaviour, and ways of standing up salary transparency that we could plug and play in Europe. That doesn’t stop the complexity, though.”

Rebecca Oldham

VP of Talent Acquisition

While sharing cross-team learnings doesn’t solve all your problems, it can give you a head start on what’s coming. But that’s only half the answer. The other half comes from looking outside.

When it comes to regulation, 62% of teams plan to spend more on external legal or specialist advice in 2027. For cost-conscious companies, that might seem like a loss. But an increase in legal spending signals that companies see the problem and want to invest. “Leaning on external and internal counsel to both interpret the directive, but also make sure that we are understanding it in good faith as well, is really important,” said Rebecca.

Part of that external support comes from the things you’re already paying for: your HR tech stack. At Zinc, we work with our customers every day to help them understand their regulatory responsibilities. And it’s likely your ATS or HRIS partners can help, too. “Lean on your ATS partners,” advises Rebecca. “They’ve done this in multiple other regions, teams, and organisations. They’re very likely going to have an answer for you.”

“While customers always own their own policies and final decisions, our product and technical teams are kept in the loop on regulatory changes so we can help. We’ll give guidance and best practices, and we have features that they can leverage, so customers can add it to their own internal plans.”

Jade Mill

Strategic Consultant

You don’t have to solve regulation alone: your global teams have seen it before. Your vendors have seen it many times over. Use them.

You probably know the gut-drop feeling of reading a headline about new legislation that’s totally going to ruin your Q4. Take, for example, the EU pay transparency which came into effect this year.

Hamraj Coakley-Gulamali, Zinc’s General Counsel, puts it plainly: “You’re talking about a cultural behavior change. The reputational risk of getting this wrong is really going to become apparent.” And it’s not just reputational. “Pretty soon candidates and employees aren’t going to want to work with companies that have bad pay transparency standards.”

The risk of doing the bare minimum for regulatory compliance is greater than the effort of going all-in and holding your team to the best practice standard across the board. “If you abide by best practices and set yourself a high bar for compliance, even when it’s not necessarily mandated, you’re covered when it becomes mandated,” said Emma Costello, Zinc’s Legal Counsel.

A typical large financial services customer with Zinc screens in nine countries, which means nine different standards to track. Going off best practice and tackling country-specific outliers as they come up is easier than trying to figure out what the bare minimum is for every country you hire in.

At GoCardless, Kristiāna Semikina, Director of Talent Acquisition, puts this idea into practice. When it came to pay transparency, they were compliant atleast a year before it went live.

“We're actually being transparent across all of our markets, we take local differences into account, but we try to have a centralised approach.”

Kristiāna Semikina

Director, Talent Acquisition

Everyone remembers when GDPR came into effect in 2016. Even though it wasn’t a global standard, it was one of the strongest privacy laws to date, and teams worldwide had to adapt. Today, it’s still a masterpiece of best practice. And even though legislation like the EU AI Act is one of the first of its kind, there are strong signals that other countries won’t be far behind. Using it as a benchmark for your global compliance process helps you get ahead of the panic and turn regulation from a messy patchwork to a perfectly planned gallery.

All this to say: why is getting regulation right in 2027 so hard? Because fragmentation makes dealing with regulatory change worse. It’s hard to standardise if each region has wildly different rules.

But when you lean on your people, work with your partners or external counsel, and set a high bar for best practice, you’re not just solving the regulation problem. You’re solving the fragmentation problem underneath it.

And once you’ve done that, you’ll be able to layer AI and automation tools alongside the process to help you create your masterpiece faster.

Unfortunately, I don’t have eighty million pounds to buy Edgar Degas ballet masterpiece The Dance Class. But what I do have is a postcard print hanging on my wall that I bought on my first trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for $4. Thanks to automation, anyone with a printing press and just four colours (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black) can bring beautiful paintings straight into their home.

Automation and AI are fundamentally changing HR and talent roles. But if they’re not implemented thoughtfully, you might be left with a cheap imitation of something that should be priceless: your team, streamlined and efficient.

One-third of HR and TA leaders rank AI adoption as their top 2027 priority, followed closely by HR automation at 29%. The shift is well underway: 30% of leaders have automated some part of their background screening process, and when we analysed conversations the Zinc sales team had in September 2026 with HR teams, AI and automation came up as a business goal for 43% of them.

But there’s a problem. “AI is coming up more and more with customers,” said Jade, in her experience with Greenhouse, “but part of the challenge is that they don’t know what it is that they want or need. They want to save time, they want to do more with less, and they see AI as the thing solving that.”

Automation’s been around for decades, and it’s built into your HR tech stack already. Ever auto-sent a candidate a rejection email, or set up a rule to trigger background checks as soon as an offer is accepted? That’s automation. Although it can be incredibly complex, you’re in full control.

AI and agentic AI tools are the new tools that HR and talent are still adapting to. They analyse patterns and make decisions based on what they’ve seen before. Finding the balance between streamlining and keeping people at the heart of HR and talent is one that every team is going to have to reckon with.

“Companies are looking for AI to cut the corners, and we always have to remind them it’s not replacing human judgement. It’s giving you the information you need to speed that part of the process up, but the decision should always still lie with the human on the other end of it, and you should always validate the outputs to make sure that the data is accurate.”

Jade Mill

Strategic Consultant

“We did an exercise at the beginning of the year just to see what type of tasks we could automate, and then we thought about the risk and the cost, and we've decided some things we still want to do ourselves.”

Kristiāna Semikina

Director, Talent Acquisition

Automation keeps you in control, where AI requires you to trust the machine and verify the output. Most successful teams use both, but they’re clear about where they’re willing to hand over control and where they’re not.

Stepping back to think about your goals, what the problem is, and what your internal capability is for actually implementing new processes is key for making sure it’s successful.

Then, it’s about fit. Layering new AI and automation tools overtop of your existing HR tech stack can help you work more efficiently. But it can also turn a simple palette into clashing colours.

Working with the partners you already have helps you streamline and make your existing processes and tools more efficient. Most platforms, including Greenhouse and Zinc, are doing extensive research into the best ways to layer AI and automation on top of their products to help you do your best work (and they definitely want to hear your ideas for what they should build next). Instead of trying to become an expert on your own, find efficiencies by leaning on features you already have access to.

But before you implement anything, you need to get alignment inside your organisation. If other teams in your company are running AI adoption pilot programmes, get involved. Don’t sit as a siloed function when you’re meant to be empowering people and processes across the company (and critically, bring legal and compliance into the conversation early).

One of the biggest barriers to AI adoption is the legal sign-off process. Regulations like the EU AI Act, for example, mean that many teams have to tread carefully when adopting new tools. “Because of the nature of HRISs and ATSs, a lot of these tools are going to fall into that high-risk category,” said Hamraj.

“Even simple things like having an AI-assisted score next to your candidate profile are probably going to bring the tools into the scope of the high-risk provision.”

Hamraj Coakley-Gulamali

General Counsel

Then comes the AI business case, and back to the problem you’re trying to solve. “You have to show value,” said Jade. “You start with the business need: why do we need the investment?” Every case you make should be backed up with data from what you’re seeing internally and in the market.

And remember: the risk isn’t just the balance sheet. “The true risk for TA and HR isn’t just the bottom line,” said Hamraj. “It’s going to be felt in the ability to attract and maintain the right talent.”

Finally, know where you are on the adoption curve. Early adopters have been going all in since 2023, but for many the legal, compliance, cost, and knowledge barriers have been too big to overcome. If that sounds familiar, focus on doubling down on automation in 2027 while the AI conversation sorts itself out.

If you’re an early adopter, congratulations — this is your team’s strength. Reporting on the return on investment, time to hire, and company-wide impact is your big goal for 2027. Every week brings new tech to experiment with, and continuing innovation makes sure that you stay on the early adopter portion of that bell curve.

In 2027, AI and automation will become the norm. But for many companies, it’s just the start of the journey. To avoid cheap imitations of what a talent or HR function should look like, think about the big problem that you’re trying to solve, and lean on your internal and external partners.

At the same time, it’s important to go in with a risk-first mindset. AI adoption and HR automation are the top two priorities leaders have for 2027. But candidate fraud prevention sits all the way down that list at just 19%. All the AI in the world isn’t going to stop the business risk if you let a forgery slip through the cracks.

Deciding which one is authentic and which one is a fake requires an expert eye. If you saw a really good forgery hanging in a gallery on its own, chances are you wouldn’t realise anything was wrong.

The same AI, automation, and agentic tools that are helping you streamline your process and work more efficiently are also being used by candidates to conceal, bend the truth, and in some cases, act with malicious intent. If your team is fragmented by distance and regulation, and doesn’t have one big plan for dealing with global candidate fraud, your risk factor goes up even further.

‍Only 19% of leaders included candidate fraud prevention in their top three priorities for 2027. That puts it eighth on the list, behind priorities like AI and automation, background screening, systems consolidation, and even learning and development. Those numbers don’t make candidate fraud seem like a big problem. But our conversations with people about their on-the-ground reality revealed a shocking truth: The risk is larger than most teams realise.

The survey results suggest that the big problem is overconfidence in their current processes. 87% of leaders rate their screening as effective at catching candidate fraud consistently across every hire, although only a quarter say it’s “extremely” effective. But only 30% run their global hiring standard consistently, and 76% run two or more screening providers. If a new starter slipped through without the right checks, 15% would rely on a manager noticing or only find out once something went wrong.

Candidate fraud is the wild west of talent acquisition. It’s shifting so rapidly and new technologies come out so often that it can be hard for teams to keep up or even enter the conversation. If you haven’t thought about it yet, maybe it’s not a problem. Or maybe it’s just waiting for you in 2027.

Even if you haven’t seen fraud levels rising, you’ve almost certainly seen an increase in applications for open roles.

“Over the last nine months I’ve just seen a huge spike in application volume, withstanding anything else that a candidate is using from an AI perspective, it’s purely the volume of applications we’re now receiving. Recruiters are probably dealing with three times the volume of candidates before they even start a process.”

Rebecca Oldham

VP of Talent Acquisition

And to be clear, the vast majority of these candidates aren’t malicious. They’re just responding to the current state of the job market, in the same way that talent teams are leaning more heavily on AI and automation to deal with the influx of applications. But the sudden rush of applications can make it harder to spot the risk, which is spread out across a spectrum:

Those examples above can be scary for a talent team to read, especially in the face of dozens of other priorities. Bringing your global team closer together and sticking to best practices is the best way to prevent risk.

Nearly eight in ten HR and TA leaders say that inconsistent screening increases their exposure to candidate fraud, and seven in ten expect more focus or investment on fraud in 2027. But if investment and prioritisation are mis-aligned, you could end up wasting your budget. With so much unknown and new technologies and techniques emerging every week, keeping investment where it matters can stop your team from making expensive hiring mistakes further down the line.

What actually works on-the-ground is building a risk-first team. Rebecca put it this way: “We’ve spent an awful lot of time getting into the recruiter capability space. How does a recruiter understand security risk? What should they do if they identify a security risk? How do we work with our security operations teams to ensure that we’re flagging some of these instances?”.

“We're not worried about it, but we're aware of it,” said Kristiãna. “We've had some experience already there, but we're equipped enough to monitor those red flags and to eliminate them right early on in the process.”

In the end, spotting forgeries and fakes all comes down to your recruiting process. If you have a global framework flexing in response to local needs, you can provide standardised training and figure out where you need to up your candidate fraud prevention efforts.

Jade added, “It might be that background checks happen before an offer stage, or in some locations they happen after,” and when it comes to scaling fraud prevention, “you have to build a system that’s going to allow you to do that over time, rather than having to reinvent the wheel.”

And so we’re back where we started: stuck on the little details, instead of looking at the bigger picture.