- Being a skills-focused organization is essential to providing the experience employees crave.
- Launching a talent intelligence program requires simplicity — you need to solve a specific business problem, then scale.
- Gaining recruiter buy-in is as important as leadership buy-in to ensure successful implementation of talent intelligence throughout your organization.
It’s time to make the employee experience better.
Bristol Myers Squibb is already ahead of the game. The company just launched a new talent intelligence platform called “MyGrowth” in response to employees asking for more opportunities to upskill.
The results: 1,000 profiles were created in the first two days, and in its pilot phase, MyGrowth provided noticeable reductions in hiring times while also sourcing better candidates.
“What already is beginning to fill me with pride over what’s happening is just that we’re changing the game for the employee experience at work,” said Melissa Keiser, Executive Director, Global Skills and Career Development Strategy with Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS). “Our people are impacting the lives of people everywhere with what they’re creating and inventing, and I want to give them the best employee experience I can.”
Keiser shares how BMS is working to boost employee engagement and more in the latest episode of The New Talent Code. Here are a few more highlights from that conversation, including how to infuse skills into all talent practices, how to define success, and top learnings from launching a talent intelligence system.
Related content: Melissa Keiser talks about how Bristol Myers Squibb has adopted a new talent intelligence platform and launched MyGrowth, a place for employees to take charge of what’s next in their careers.
Infusing skills into talent practices
Many organizations are striving toward becoming skill-based, which is essential to working with talent intelligence, but BMS decided to take that idea a step further.
“Instead of saying we’re a skills-based organization, I like to use that we are infusing skills into all of our people and talent practices,” Keiser said. “What we’ve been doing is taking a look at all of the different parts of our existing talent and or employee life cycle and saying, ‘Where does it make sense to have skills become an integral part of how we’re managing those practices?’ ”
BMS HR leaders started with a focus on recruiting and how they could evolve to look beyond experience and credentials. The goal was for recruiters to match relevant skills to openings, rather than looking for lateral or up-the-ladder moves for potential employees.
On the talent management side, BMS HR leaders built and launched a new platform called MyGrowth that puts employees in charge of their career paths by allowing them to pair their skills with open projects, new roles, or access to training opportunities.
“We even started to look at how the recruiters doing internal and external recruiting can tap our internal talent for open roles,” Keiser said. “We also looked at how we can foster more mobility and skill acquisition through short term assignments, like projects and tours of duty.”
Launching MyGrowth
One of the keys to successfully launching such a robust talent intelligence program was actually pretty easy: simplicity.
“Making this simple, of course, is one of the challenges in leading into this new space,” Keiser said. “There were so many unknowns. Not everybody had perfect answers to the imperfect questions that we were asking, so what we started to do was very simply look at what are the business problems that can start to be solved by taking a skills-based approach.”
Keiser and her team identified that leaders voiced concerns about hiring not happening quickly enough. There was also worry that people with the right skills and qualifications weren’t being hired.
With this starting point, Keiser’s team started redefining recruiting practices to be broader, more skills-focused, and look beyond degrees.
“Additionally, as we look internally, our employee surveys told us that people were frustrated with navigating career development internally,” Keiser said. “We took those two primary areas of focus to say, ‘These are where we’re going to start solving first — in the talent acquisition space and in the career development space so that we can have and respond to the voice of the customer.”
Defining success
Defining what a successful launch looked like was a bit more complicated.
“We didn’t really know what to expect, so thankfully we had business leaders who were willing to go on this journey with us,” Keiser said. “We set the expectation that this would be about learning and asking, ‘Do we think we can make a difference?’ ”
The answer: a resounding yes. During MyGrowth’s 16-week pilot, BMS saw reduced hiring times through the power of talent intelligence matching people to jobs. They also found new hires faster than before.
“The feedback coming from our employees leveraging the platform and from leaders using the platform to post projects and opportunities — it shifted the dialogue,” Keiser said. “It provided a different conversation than before because now you have a language around skills that gives you [answers to] ‘How do I navigate this discussion?’ when in the past it’s been very foggy and gray.”
Top takeaways from MyGrowth launch
Leadership buy-in is important for making purchases, but Keiser says recruiter buy-in was just as important to making the launch of MyGrowth a success.
“There’s our own internal change of behavior that we have to pick up as an HR function, and we looked at how we start to bring our recruiters along the journey,” she said. “How did we help them understand how to leverage this platform and a skills-based approach to consider candidates we didn’t consider before? That also fuels different conversations with leaders than before. I would say the behavior change you have to drive with the people doing the work and the processes to enable this is really key to then seeing different results if you start to leverage technology.”
Also essential to the MyGrowth launch: positive change management and open communication throughout the learning process. Some key questions asked were:
- What is the change we want to see?
- How does that change show up in our behaviors as leaders and employees?
- How does this shift conversations happening within your teams?
BMS gave their leaders a month to use MyGrowth before it was rolled out to employees to allow time for that feedback.
The understanding that the platform wouldn’t be perfect right away, but presented an exciting opportunity to upskill also made the launch a success for Keiser’s team.
“We positioned it as, ‘Let’s get in there. Let’s try this out. We probably can’t do any harm in the career development space. And, in fact, this can help us do a better job of giving you visibility into opportunities and having those important career conversations,’ ” she said.
How to gain leadership buy-in for talent intelligence
Keiser has practical advice for HR professionals looking to do the same in their organizations.
- Determine the business challenge or problem you are solving for.
- Demonstrate how skills are transferable between industries, roles, etc.
- Identify other business areas solving similar issues.
- Provide a proof of concept.
Listen to the full episode of The New Talent Code with Melissa Keiser on our website or wherever you listen to podcasts.