- When organizations align human outcomes with business outcomes, they see a more meaningful, sustainable impact.
- In Fortive’s transformative HR journey, AI technology solutions are enhancing internal mobility, improving employee engagement, and boosting business outcomes.
- When adopting new technology, it’s better to get started and learn as you go rather than over-planning for the perfect moment to launch.
Good things come when organizations find alignment between their business outcomes and their human outcomes.
That was the message of Kyle Forrest, a Principal with Deloitte, who presented Deloitte’s latest Human Capital Trends report at Cultivate earlier this year.
“This is not a HR report. These are not HR issues,” Forrest said. “These are business issues that business leaders are tackling to drive outcomes for their business and the humans within their business, whether that is the workers or their customers.”
Forrest went on to explain that when an organization accepts that business and human outcomes are intertwined, they’re able to drive impact and value for the enterprise and turn tensions into triumphs.
To bring the report’s findings to life, Forrest, along with his colleague Sona Manzo, Deloitte’s Managing Director, Human Capital, spotlighted the HR transformation of Fortive, a portfolio company made up of 18,000 employees and about 20 operating companies.
In full-circle-fashion, it turns out that transformation journey actually began two years ago, when HR leaders from Fortive attended Cultivate and made connections that would go on to change the way the organization manages and acquires talent.
Read on for a closer look at what Fortive needed, what they found, and what they’ve learned along the way.
Fortive’s Kara Beeler talks through the use case the company identified to begin using talent intelligence to benefit internal mobility.
Business use case: connecting employees with opportunities
Until about two years ago, Fortive’s HR team was working hard to reconcile some disconnects, said Kara Beeler, Fortive’s Vice President, Talent. Namely, Fortive’s businesses were demanding better insights into talent, faster hiring and more predictable outcomes of their hiring.
At the same time, employees wanted more visibility into how to grow their careers quickly. Based on internal data, Beeler said talent leaders knew that internal mobility was a benefit to the company and its employees.
The data showed that when talent moved into a new role, they thrived, and that in turn could drive better business outcomes. But they didn’t have a system that would allow them to integrate those practices in any kind of scalable way, she said.
“It always happened through terrible things, like Excel spreadsheets and phone calls and emails, which is not a great way to proceed for 18,000 global employees,” Beeler said.
That led Linda Nguyen Bergin, who is Fortive’s VP, HR Technologies and Services Transformation, to attend Cultivate in search of tech solutions and vendor partners.
There, Bergin connected with Eightfold and forged a partnership that would rapidly change Fortive’s talent management and talent acquisition processes.
“We had this aggressive timeline that we wanted to make sure that we can continue to support our business and change it as well,” Bergin said. “It was an ambitious goal, and we delivered.”
Beeler shares some of their stats on the use of their career hub in less than a year of use.
Data-backed change in under a year
At the time of the recent Cultivate presentation, Fortive was about 11 months into the transformation. Beeler said the technology solutions have already helped significantly with efficiency as well as effectiveness.
The numbers she shared speak for themselves.
“Our recruiters fill more than two times the number of roles every month as they did before our transformation,” Beeler said. “And the rediscovery hires from within our own talent network are up 70%. About one in three roles today are filled with internal talent. That’s the power of technology.”
As more time passes, Beeler added that the AI continues to improve as it learns more about the organization and can calibrate and match roles better.
Internally, two-thirds of the people who visit the career hub return to it and externally, the number of people who apply after visiting Fortive’s site is nearly two times the industry average.
In any transformation, cultural shifts can be critical
It’s one thing to talk about the importance of internal mobility. It’s another thing to make it easy and scalable.
Fortive did the latter by creating an open talent marketplace, which enabled employees to search for opportunities that would allow them to grow based on their capabilities and aspirations, regardless of their current position.
“I describe it as our internal LinkedIn,” Bergin said. “You can network with people with jobs that you didn’t know existed and find matches that aren’t related to your role. We’re opening it up and leaving it in the hands of employees and managers. Overall, it has had a high success rate.”
Initially, the creation of an open talent marketplace demanded a shift in thinking, said Bergin: if you recently hired someone, why would you want them to take an entirely different position, potentially in a different department?
It’s taken a cultural shift to understand that offering up these kinds of opportunities benefits employees, and because of that it could also be better for the business. After all, if employees are engaged, their performance is better and they may stay with the organization longer.
Beeler shares how Fortive is tracking progress using talent intelligence to boost hiring and internal mobility.
Pursuing progress, not perfection
New technology can be stifling if employees are afraid of a misstep or a mistake. At Fortive, the longstanding culture is one that encourages employees to strive to be better every day, and that’s been helpful in adapting to change.
“It gives us permission to not be perfect,” Beeler said.
That’s especially important when working with AI, which naturally gets better with time.
“With AI, you have to give it data,” Beeler said. “You have to let it learn you, your organization, the skills you hire for, in order for it to get smarter. You have to lean into it and keep working with it, and that’s how you really see some accelerated progress.”
The most important step is often the first one
When it comes to this kind of undertaking, getting started is often the hardest part. For organizations who haven’t yet begun their tech transformation, Bergin offered this advice:
“It’s better to be on the other side and see it live,” she said. “The more you spend time designing and theorizing and planning change management, the world is moving past you, and in that time you can be learning.”
For organizations ready to transform their talent strategy, Fortive’s experience can serve as a trusty map. From their path, it’s clear that aligning business and human outcomes are important; embracing technology is essential; partnerships are critical; supporting cultural change is helpful.
And the most important thing an organization can do to launch their transformation is just that: get started today.
Watch the full session from Cultivate ’25, available now on demand.