- Looking internally is often the best — and easiest — place to find talent.
- A skills-based approach gives you a deeper talent pool to access at any time.
- Aligning skill sets and aspirations with new opportunities improves employee experience and meets business needs.
To say that employees value growth opportunities is putting it mildly.
For many, it’s the deciding factor when asking themselves, “Should I stay or should I go?” The American Psychological Association’s 2023 Work in America Survey found that a staggering 91% of respondents believe it is important to have a job that provides consistent opportunities to learn.
Luckily, people like Victoria Myers are there to put all that into action. The Global Head of Talent Attraction at Amdocs, a company specializing in software and services for communications, media, financial service providers, and digital enterprises, Myers is working to develop employees and help them carve out their desired career paths.
In this episode of The New Talent Code, hosts Ligia Zamora and Jason Cerrato talk with Myers about how her passion, with the help of talent intelligence, is helping Amdocs fill 48% of new positions with internal talent — an impressive stat for a global tech company with over 30,000 employees.
Read on for highlights from the episode, including insights into Amdocs’ internal mobility program and how they gained employee buy-in into their skills-based transformation.
Related content: Victoria Myers, Global Head of Talent Attraction with Amdocs, shares her insights on internal mobility best practices, benefits of a skills-based approach, and how talent intelligence connects it all together.
The law of talent attraction
For Amdocs, the pandemic presented immense growth opportunities when the world turned to virtual work arrangements and digitized business operations. The organization, a leader in software and digital transformation services, found itself inundated with new projects.
The boom in business quickly revealed a need for new ways to attract and develop talent. Myers and her team got to work brainstorming an ideal solution.
“Some of the things that we discussed and dreamed about led to wanting to have a proactive sourcing arm [and] proactive candidate engagement,” Myers said. “We needed a CRM. We needed a way to reach the talent — millions that were already in our database, but it was very difficult to find and reach [them].
“Yes, we are tracking [and] filling open positions, but we’re not being reactive to open positions. We’re trying to think ahead of that. … We wanted to break that mold or that cycle of being an order taker and being reactive,” she continued.
Myers’ first move was changing how they thought about finding new talent.
“That is something that I have to be very vocal about when I’m in meetings and try[ing] to help everyone understand that talent attraction is not just an external focus. It includes an internal focus,” she said.
This shift cultivated a proactive, skills-based approach to talent, one that aligns with Amdocs’ goal of supporting existing employees and nurturing their growth. Amdocs made the decision to develop a program to better map employees’ career aspirations with the needs of the business — they call it “Harmony.”
Working in harmony
The inspiration for the Harmony project is quite simple — keeping a mindset of continuous growth.
“We’re people-centric as an organization,” Myers said. “This is our focus as a company, and the employee experience, obviously, is very important to us. It’s all about giving the employees that ability to dream of their futures and providing them the tools and the capability to reach it.
“Once you’re an employee, how do we ensure that we’re supporting you and your career growth and aspirations? How are we still supporting what the business needs are? That’s the whole idea about Harmony,” she continued.
With Eightfold, Amdocs identified existing skills in its workforce and pinpointed gaps where upskilling and training were needed. Emphasizing a skills-based approach in this way and giving employees greater input into their career trajectories has allowed the organization to better meet its goal of cultivating a rewarding employee experience.
On top of that, it creates an accessible pool of talent to draw from at any time — a benefit their business sees immense value in.
Data backs C-suite buy-in
Fortunately for Myers and her team, this re-evaluation of talent attraction and the creation of Harmony flowed so naturally from Amdocs’ ethos that leadership didn’t require much convincing. But she was ready to address any C-suite concerns about the value of AI to better understand their data.
“To have the speed to analyze the data or use the data, you really need an AI system,” Myers said. “Being a tech company and at the head of innovation, [it was] another easy win because you go to our leadership, and you provide exactly that — we had a massive amount of data. Also, keep in mind we were hiring in extreme mode. We want to be able to have all of the data and use it to service the business needs. It made sense.”
For the program to be successful, it was important that employees — those using and benefiting from Harmony — also had buy-in. Myers knew they needed to have a say in its development and deployment.
“The employee is always at the forefront of every decision,” Myers said. “We’re also receiving the feedback from the employees and trying to incorporate that into what we do, whether it be policies, practices, or programs.”
A key component of getting this messaging right and encouraging adoption was the implementation of pilot programs within business units.
“At Amdocs, you say it’s a pilot [and] people sign up,” Myers said. “That helped bring the employees who got exposed in the pilot to whatever that initiative was, get their feedback, get them excited about it, knowing that this was coming and would be rolling out later.”
Advice for getting started with AI
Myers recognizes that making the leap to a talent-centered approach using AI may seem daunting, but she wants to encourage anyone considering the shift to, “dream big and don’t be scared to pursue it. Yes, it can be a change, but that’s actually what makes it exciting. So surround yourself with a team from across disciplines, and then really tackle whatever those challenges may be — but you can achieve it.”
To hear more from Victoria Myers, listen to the full episode of The New Talent Code on our website or wherever you listen to podcasts.