- Top company cultures prioritize performance, action, and a commitment to customers.
- Employees want visibility and more internal opportunities, which AI-powered talent marketplaces provide.
- You don’t need to have your job data sorted to get started with talent intelligence. AI turns on insights right away, helping you determine what skills you need and who to hire.
Would you rather watch “Breaking Bad” or “Love Is Blind?” “Baby Reindeer” or “Boss Baby?”
Netflix customers know that when they sign into the platform, it will instantly serve up intelligent recommendations based on their interests, preferences, and past activity.
This smart, engaging, and delightful experience is exactly what Liz Wamai, VP of Global TA at Netflix, and Jennifer Galbraith, VP, Digital HR Transformation, Internal Careers and Talent Marketplace at Salesforce, strive to give employees through their companies’ AI-powered talent marketplaces.
In this discussion from Cultivate 2024, Netflix and Salesforce HR leaders joined moderator Sona Manzo, Managing Director of Human Capital at Deloitte, for an inside look at what makes their company cultures unique, and how they use talent intelligence to unlock employees potential.
See how Netflix started working with AI to improve their employee experiences.
Talent intelligence supports company culture
With a résumé that includes Meta and Bloomberg, Wamai is no stranger to high-performing companies. She says that Netflix’s culture is unique, which stems from its four internal principles.
The first is all about building a dream team by hiring top performers with high expectations of themselves. The second is “people over process.”
“For somebody who’s in TA, I love a good process,” Wamai said. “I find it really hard not to say the ‘p’ word, but people over process is about treating people like adults: give them directions and goals and expect them to do their best work.”
Netflix’s third principle is “entertaining the world,” or “holding the bar high in terms of how we thrill our audiences and we thrill our members.”
Finally, Netflix believes success comes from making big bets: “It’s really about leaning into the discomfort and constantly seeking what’s best,” Wamai said. “We have something we say at Netflix, which is, ‘Netflix sucks right now compared to what we’ll be doing tomorrow.’”
For Galbraith’s team at Salesforce, customer success forms the core of their culture. “How does everybody in the organization, whether they’re actually customer-facing or not, focus on customer success?” she said.
This mindset has affected the organization so much that the HR team is called the employee success team. “Customer success is at the core, but trust and innovation are very much wrapped around that.”
An equally important part of Salesforce’s culture is a bias for action: “We’re not going to sit around and think for a long time whether [something is] right or wrong,” Galbraith said. “One of the things we say at Salesforce is tactics dictate strategy. And so, sometimes, we’re going to go experiment and run at it and focus on solving this problem — maybe before the problem is even fully understood.”
For both companies, dedication to employees and helping them succeed led their talent leaders to Eightfold.
Talent intelligence elevates internal talent
Aligned with Salesforce’s ethos to act fast, Galbraith went head first into building a talent marketplace.
“I don’t know that we knew what problem we were trying to solve, but when I leaned in, we were listening to our employees,” she said. “They were saying that it was easier to get a job outside than it was inside [our company], that we tended to over rotate on external talent versus internal talent.”
Later that year, the economy collided with Salesforce’s new initiative. “A lot of the tech companies hit some restructuring obstacles and our growth changed,” Galbraith said. “We weren’t going to be on this massive rocket ship of growth. We were going to be doing more targeted growth.”
With this new focus on developing internal talent, Galbraith had to rethink what Salesforce’s career mobility looked like.
“Part of what careers looked like at Salesforce for many years was you’ve been in your role for 12 months, and you’re doing a good job, so you get promoted … but that wasn’t going to be sustainable,” she said. “So we had to really take a step back and say, ‘OK, we have to redefine careers.’ … What does it mean to have a career at Salesforce? It’s not about the constant promotions, it’s about the business need. What are your interests and your opportunities? Are you performing?”
Wamai and her team experienced the same strategic refocusing at Netflix.
“I very much resonate with what Jen is sharing about the journey is where you’ve come from, this rocket ship. And prior to 2022, you’ve been hiring. If you have a need, you’ve got a head count. You go to your TA team, and you do a ton of the hiring. 2022 happened, and [hiring became] a different landscape.”
So Wamai and her team at Netflix started the search for a solution that would help them develop employees in a way that would sustain Netflix’s expansion.
“We’ve got a huge initiative around Netflix now, which is about growth — how do you make it easy for people to find opportunities?” Wamai said. “If it’s easier for them to find an opportunity externally, then we’ve got a problem. … The No. 3 reason [employees] were joining was because of career growth. But if it’s the No. 1 reason why they’re leaving, then we’re doing something off, especially if those opportunities are available, but we’re not making it easy for them to find.”
Netflix’s HR team wanted a platform with a fluid user experience that gave employees exactly what they wanted.
“We went through that assessment of the best platform and what the best space for us to open up connections and mentorship opportunities — to advertise our own [roles] — and [we] landed at Eightfold,” Wamai said.
Hear how Salesforce started with talent intelligence.
Early benefits of an AI-powered talent marketplace
With Eightfold and Deloitte’s help, Wamai and her team rolled out a talent marketplace pilot in 2023, selecting four functions to participate.
“We’ve had really good adoption — about 66% of the folks from those functions have created the profiles,” Wamai said. “Sixty-eight percent are coming back and signing on after the initial login. We’ve got projects posted, mentorship opportunities, [and] roles that folks are applying for. … But overall, we’ve seen that there’s been quite an appetite across the four functions.”
In the next step of its go-live strategy, Netflix plans to fully embrace its ethos for freedom and responsibility.
“We have functions that are opting in for mentorship opportunities or ERG opportunities,” Wamai said. “For the rest of this year, 2024, it will be functions that are opting in based on the opportunities that they see on the platform. And then, 2025 is when we intend to go with the enterprise-wide launch.”
This shift is helping the HR team finally see the full talent ecosystem — understanding the skills of internal applicants in a much more precise and productive way than was possible before.
For Galbraith and Salesforce, choosing a team for their pilot wasn’t as straightforward.
“I feel like when I was a lot younger and there was a line outside the club,” Galbraith said. “Everyone wanted to get in — there was a lot of demand. We’re kind of having to turn people away because everyone wants to be part of this.”
Ultimately, her team decided to run the Eightfold pilot with a group in India for two reasons. One, because India is a high-growth area, and two, because they identified a group of employees that had high attrition with low internal mobility — in other words, trapped talent.
“They had very good technical skills, but they weren’t even given a shot internally,” Galbraith said.
After one of the talent leaders did a kick-off session in India for their second pilot, an employee came up to him in tears.
“She’s a single mother, and she’s trying to figure out how to support her family,’ Galbraith said. “For the first time, she felt hope that she would actually be able to grow her career and really start to gain new skills and have more opportunity.”
Start unleashing employee potential today
Some organizations may want to get all their data sorted before they start with a talent intelligence solution, but for Galbraith and her team — like usual — tactics dictate strategy.
“We didn’t wait. We just ran at it,” she said. “We had a hypothesis that the AI would actually help us figure out what our job architecture and skills look like and it has.”
After running Eightfold’s pilot, Salesforce found that the people they hired matched the scores from Eightfold. “It worked, and we didn’t do any calibration; we didn’t do any architecture,” Galbraith said. “We uploaded our workday data, so that’s out of the box.”
“We have learned so much just by going out and doing this pilot and getting started,” Gilbreath added. “I think that would be my advice: obviously, think about it, but don’t belabor it. Don’t get paralyzed with all the details. You just got to run at it because the employees want this, and I think they’ll help you figure it out.”
Watch the full on-demand session: “Unlocking human potential: Putting skills at the center of the employee journey.”