- Talent professionals are looking for tangible outcomes and actionable advice to bring back to their organizations after this HR event season.
- Executives are pushing for the use of AI, but it needs to be adopted with purpose.
- In a period of business transformation across industries, it’s critical to remember not all change looks the same.
If you’re a forward-thinking HR leader, you know it’s conference season.
Our Talent-centered Transformation Team is on the road attending HR Tech, UNLEASH, and more to gather insights, talk with talent leaders about successes and challenges, and help everyone in HR see the possibilities. When people align with the right technologies to solve their toughest problems there are great opportunities ahead.
Here are the HR conference season’s top eight takeaways from our team:
Related content: Watch Jason Cerrato, VP of Talent-centered Transformation at Eightfold, discuss workforce transformation with Anthony Abbatiello, Leader of Human Capital Consulting Business at PwC, from HR Tech.
The future of work is here
Jason Cerrato is VP of our Talent-centered Transformation Team. He often talks with CHROs and other talent leaders about how to enhance their talent strategies to better serve their organizations.
The time for transformation is now
HR Tech wasn’t just about AI, new technologies, or skills. It was about transformation.
Across the sessions, talent leaders emphasized one common thread: the need for organizations to undergo broader, deeper change to stay ahead. Transformation was at the heart of every conversation.
At the event, I sat down with Anthony Abbatiello, Leader of Human Capital Consulting Business at PwC, to discuss their latest Workforce Radar report. In this report, PwC identifies five workforce signals that, when acted upon using specific levers, can empower business leaders and CHROs to drive enterprise-wide transformation and achieve desired business outcomes.
One thing he said to me that really stood out was: “If you look 10 years ago, the average number of changes that an employee went through per year was about one. Today, it’s over 10.”
With PwC reporting that 45% of CEOs believe their organizations won’t be economically viable within the next decade, clearly it’s time to think about doing things differently.
Just how talent teams work to redesign work is still to be determined. The future of work is not something off in the distance—we are living through it and designing it in the moment.
Outcomes are essential
There was a lot of talk and focus on outcomes.
HR leaders want to know how new developments in technology, including AI, are being applied across leading organizations. How are they using it? What have they achieved? How will they continue to drive adoption?
We’re two or three years into this discussion and the time is now to start showing how using the right technologies—along with undergoing broader transformation efforts—can drive real business impact.
HR leaders are more focused than ever on showing the outcomes from their initial investments—and using that information to determine where to focus next.
AI is expanding in HR
Many HR leaders were focused on how they could potentially use AI for compensation, pay equity, and real-time compensation analysis.
We saw many vendors, especially in the startup area, with offerings for culture and team-building, especially with hybrid and remote teams.
The next evolution of learning experience platforms and learning management systems is here. We saw several platforms that look similar, but are focused on team-building culture and trying to quantify, recognize, and gather culture.
We’re also in favor of adopting a skills-based approach to workforce planning and incorporating new ideas, like paying for skills, to improve employee experiences. Tools like AI can help HR leaders start aligning their actions to these new workforce and culture improvement goals.
Leadership wants AI adoption now
Jenny Cotie Kangas is a Director on our Talent-centered Transformation team. A former TA and talent leader turned HR tech strategist, she’s known for tackling tough challenges in talent transformation.
Do more with less
There is increased pressure to do more with less. Especially the pressure to optimize experiences, specifically for hiring managers and recruiters.
This means cutting down on time to hire and reducing the number of solutions that recruiters use to accomplish those goals.
Anything that technology can do to help them take out time-consuming manual work or streamline the process is greatly needed, opening up the door for automation to free HR pros from routine work and focus on the good stuff—recruiting and hiring people.
Leadership is pushing for AI
I had several conversations in which HR leaders are now mandated by their leadership to use AI.
We need to be sure that we’re not just implementing AI in HR for AI’s sake. We must shift the conversation to help them understand there are many different types of AI—and that will implicate how it’s used and impact their results.
We’ve found that the most successful adopters of AI in HR are the talent and business leaders who use it to address specific problems. They’re using AI to work faster and looking at how they can deliver results differently.
Change is not one-size-fits-all
Many HR leaders want to chase universal outcomes that are transformative, but transformation in HR is not one-size-fits-all.
What’s transformative for one organization is not the same as what’s transformative for another.
To get change right, you have to identify where you are and where you want to go—what problem do you want to solve? What does good look like? What results do you seek? The delta between those two points is the transformation you seek.
More practical advice and tactics for HR
Rebecca Warren is a Director with our Talent-centered Transformation Team. She is passionate about helping HR leaders transform their talent strategies, especially in attracting and retaining top candidates.
HR teams want actionable advice on skills
HR leaders know skills are important. They are asking: how do we get started?
For many, this begins with first uncovering current skills in their organizations—and then determining the skills needed for the future so they can upskill, reskill, or add to their workforces.
Leaders are looking to tech to make this transformation easier. Most have job descriptions. Some have role descriptions, some have static competency models, some have employee skills in a spreadsheet or LMS, some have a taxonomy (classification/organization of skills) or ontology (knowledge/relationship modeling of skills), and they are looking to AI and talent intelligence to help them create a framework that can be aligned with organizational goals.
For many, the biggest struggle is getting internal alignment on the processes, tools, and resources needed to start the journey.
Identify outcomes, then explore how tech can help
At our booth, we started conversations with the questions, “What is your organization trying to achieve? What problems are you trying to solve?” The response we often heard was, “We want to be better/faster/more efficient.”
The next question I asked is, “Why?” This led to more intentional and meaningful conversations focusing on what was driving their need to transform and innovate their HR processes and practices.
When leaders dig down and discover the real problems or challenges underneath the symptoms, they can create meaningful outcomes (potentially using AI or tech), which then can connect to strategic business drivers.
Focusing on outcomes gives a more holistic understanding of the end result that’s expected. It allows a more targeted approach–incorporating data-driven insights- to drive better resource allocation and promote sustainability and longevity.
Leaders can make more strategic, effective, and sustainable decisions that lead to lasting improvements by using an outcome strategy to start their transformation, instead of choosing tech for tech’s sake.
Unsure where to start? We can give you a self-guided tour based on your needs or a live demo today.
The Eightfold Talent-centered Transformation Team is dedicated to helping organizations initiate their skills-based transformation journey. We help highlight the art of the possible with talent intelligence, and help organizations develop strategies to drive success amid unprecedented industry and organizational change.