If you didn’t include dollars for talent intelligence in your budget for the next fiscal year, think again.
“Waiting a year puts you really behind,” says Andrea Shiah, who led global talent acquisition at American Express, and now heads up Talent Strategy and Transformation at Eightfold AI.
A Talent Intelligence Platform changes the way you hire, promote, assign people to projects, move people internally, and match people with courses and mentors. It changes all of those processes from an outdated, informal approach, reliant on who knows who, and who is located near who, to one based on who’s got the right capabilities.
These platforms rely on a massive amount of data: more than a billion profiles of people, representing much of the working world. By applying AI to that data, the technology can predict the potential of each person to move to a future job, and a job after that.
“Skills and potential are the building blocks for all talent priorities,” Shiah says. “Companies have the ability to know the skills and potential of all their employees, candidates, and contingent workers. Those who take advantage of this capability sooner will have a big advantage over those who don’t, especially because the competition for the same skills will continue for years to come.”
These platforms also plug into HR databases like applicant tracking systems. Companies integrating a Talent Intelligence Platform with their ATS’s have found that millions of past applicants, ex-employees, employee referrals, and even current employees were going untapped.
Larry McAlister is the Vice President, Global Talent, for NetApp. He recently reflected on his company’s move to a Talent Intelligence Platform.
“I told my CEO staff, I guarantee you that without an AI recruiting tool, I won’t be able to get you A players. So if everyone’s cool with B players that are, you know, secondary, that’s where we’re headed … if we wait another year to bring in AI technology to recruit, I’ll be three years behind.”
This isn’t just an urgent recruiting issue. It’s a talent-management issue. A record number of people are quitting. Often, they’re leaving for opportunities elsewhere, when they could have found new roles internally. With a Talent Intelligence Platform, each employee uses a “Career Hub.” Employees indicate the role they’d like next. Artificial intelligence is used to show the employee any skills they need to add to get to that role. It also shows them projects and classes they can take on to gain those skills. It continually shows employees internal jobs that match their potential and interests.
We’ve seen many companies successfully make the case for including a Talent Intelligence Platform in their talent budget. Let us know if you’d like help making the case.
Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash
