- You must transition from focusing on traditional jobs to prioritizing employees’ skills to prepare for the future.
- Our latest product Talent Design unifies data, creates intelligent talent frameworks, and enhances decision-making in HR.
- Global organizations using a skills-based approach are seeing improvements in talent outcomes, internal mobility, and employee satisfaction.
It’s time to shift your focus in HR from filling jobs to matching people’s skills to work — and AI-powered skills data can help your organization do just that.
The problem is, it can be a struggle to get there. While 80% of talent leaders say that skills are a priority, under 20% of companies are adopting skills-based approaches to a significant extent across organizations. Outdated, disparate systems and expensive frameworks are barriers, along with a lack of real-time data points to drive effective decision-making.
“What typically occurs is when HR, IT, and other teams need to solve for specific projects, whether it’s assessments or performance management or succession planning, they bring in point solutions that help them get a particular job done,” said Xabier Ormazabal, GVP of Product Marketing at Eightfold during his talk at HR Tech 2024. “This results in siloed data. The data starts to live in many different places at once.”
If you’re ready to unify your data and become a skills-based organization, our latest product Talent Design is here to help. AI-powered intelligent talent frameworks are not just a tool — they’re a game-changer.
Talent Design brings all your skills data into one view, giving you a holistic picture of your entire workforce’s skills, including what you have, what you need, and your employees’ untapped potential to learn new ones. It also works for roles, helping you create a dynamic role library and consistent skills vocabulary that continuously updates with the latest market trends.
With skills and roles constantly updating, you’ll be able to move faster and be more agile with a talent framework built to strengthen and accelerate your talent operations.
Xabier Ormazabal, VP of Global Product Marketing at Eightfold, shares why organizations need to center decisions around talent and skills, not static roles, in his breakout session, “Design intelligent talent frameworks to strengthen your future workforce,” at HR Tech 2024.
Skills are the way to build your workforce
Creating a skills inventory and managing that data is complex and challenging. Enter Talent Design — a better way to build workforces through a skills-based lens with AI.
“When we think about the shift from jobs to talent and the flow of work, you really have to center things on talent,” Ormazabal said. “It’s about looking from the outside in and asking if you want to maximize exposure of your talent to as many opportunities as possible, such as full-time jobs, gigs, projects, or other learning opportunities.”
When you commit to a skills-based approach, it’s critical to think about how to execute it. Mapping out skills is not easy, and it constantly changes as skills evolve. You need to understand what’s possible with skills mapping in HR technology before picking a platform.
We continue to focus on bringing all the pieces together so your HR team can build an agile and flexible talent strategy in the era of AI.
A modern HR Tech platform should include AI-powered skills matching to:
- Unify and understand data: AI can gather and analyze skills data from diverse sources in one system.
- Organize and harmonize data: AI-powered insights can standardize and contextualize skills to create a clear and consistent skills vocabulary.
- Enhance and evolve data: AI continuously enhances the recency and relevancy of skills to drive talent and organizational goals.
“If your skills data is stale, it’s a rearview mirror,” Ormazabal said. “You’re looking at a snapshot of the past, and it’s not helping you get ahead of the curve. Think about what the competitive market challenges are that you’re going to have further down the road.”
Related content: Ormazabal explains why you need real-time skills data to make the best possible talent decisions in his session at HR Tech.
Talent Design gives you a complete view of skills
A skills-based approach is essential to building a workforce ready for anything. One solution that addresses all HR functions — recruiting, talent management, and resource management for project-based work — is ideal.
Talent Design delivers in all these areas of HR, seamlessly tying everything together in three key areas:
- Roles: Talent Design creates, calibrates, and dynamically updates roles with insights from AI to help HR leaders make better decisions faster.
- Skills: Unifying, designing, and standardizing skills vocabulary with a dynamic, self-learning framework to scale and personalize.
- Market insights: Understanding existing skills and roles, benchmarking against market trends, and building your future workforce.
“The benefits of Talent Design are greater agility and having a robust talent framework built to last,” Ormazabal said. “You can make data-driven decisions, and you can accelerate those core processes of hiring, ensuring the quality of candidates and employees, and driving more mobility for your internal employees.”
Talent Design also allows you to look at your data by HR function:
- In talent acquisition, AI creates strategic alignment between recruiters and hiring managers, while consistently defining skills between hiring and internal mobility.
- In talent management, AI allows employees to create career journeys, aids in succession planning, and helps measure and build strategic skills for the business.
- With resource management, organizations can align on the necessary skill sets to efficiently identify the right talent for projects.
“What’s interesting is thinking about how to apply Talent Design through the lens of different personas in your HR organization,” Ormazabal said. “If you think about talent acquisition, it drives a lot of strategic alignment between recruiters and hiring managers. It also helps you have a consistent definition of skills between who you’re hiring for externally and how you’re holding that same bar for internal mobility, so you have a much richer process across both parts of the organization.”
Talent Design in practice
With AI in place, Talent Design becomes a strategic approach that empowers organizations to build and manage workforces based on skills and capabilities.
“The way Eightfold has architected the solution of Talent Design is that we meet you wherever you are,” Ormazabal said. “If you’re an organization just starting and you have little or no role or skill frameworks, we’ll help you leverage your existing employee data and industry data to identify the actionable skills and trends that you want to apply.”
Talent Design helps your HR team move faster and be more agile with a talent framework built to last. With it, you can create dynamic role libraries and a skills vocabulary with the latest market trends. This helps you easily compare roles and skills against market insights to identify gaps, track trends, and plan for the future.
When recruiting, you can move faster and trust that you’re getting the right talent with the right skills at the right time. AI powers talent-centered strategies that enable you to enhance skills requirements for existing and future roles while matching opportunities with talent.
Internally, AI can increase retention and drive employee mobility — something the workforce is begging employers for right now. Creating an internal marketplace with the help of talent intelligence allows you to deliver hyper-personalized and impactful upskilling journeys for your talent with skills-based recommendations for new roles, projects, training opportunities, and even mentorships.
Success stories with a talent-centered approach
How do we know shifting to a talent-centered approach works? Because our customers are seeing success with the platform.
Vodafone, the largest mobile and fixed network operator in Europe, is seeing success in these areas:
- 101-point increase in candidate Net Promoter Scores (NPS) internally and externally.
- 50% decrease in cost to hire and time to hire.
- 14,000 employees with skill profiles in the organization’s Career Hub.
- 67% increase in learning hours per employee.
Coca-Cola Europacific Partners (CCEP) is seeing excitement around internal mobility, including:
- 80% of employees now have talent profiles.
- 70% adoption rate in the organization’s Career Hub across 30 countries and 42,000 employees.
EY, a global professional services network, is experiencing growth in the following:
- 80% adoption rate of talent management across key business units, many with 100,000 employees each.
- 3.5x improvement in productivity for clients.
- 26% reduction in employee attrition for clients.
- 2.5x improvement in culture changes for clients.
With success like this, now is the time to learn more about how Talent Design can transform your business.
Xabier Ormazabal is Global Vice President of Product Marketing at Eightfold AI.
