Staying ahead requires more than just new tools — it demands a mindset shift.
At Cultivate ’25, David Rafael Cervantes, Chief Talent Officer at Softtek, sat down with Theresia Hermes, a Customer Success Director at Eightfold AI, to share how IT services and consulting firm Softtek is embracing a skills-based approach to transform its global talent strategy.
With decades of experience in IT operations, Cervantes brings a pragmatic and passionate perspective to the conversation, reflecting on his journey of discovering untapped potential — both personally and organizationally.
This insightful discussion explores how Softtek integrated Eightfold Talent Acquisition, Talent Management, and Talent Intelligence in just seven months, building a connected ecosystem that empowers employees (or “Softtekians”) to drive their careers with clarity and confidence.
From designing career pathways and launching a talent marketplace to building a talent intelligence team focused on predictive workforce planning, Softtek is setting a bold example of how to unlock growth through AI and data.
If you’re looking to understand what it takes to build an agile workforce ready for change, this is a conversation you don’t want to miss.
David Rafael Cervantes, Chief Talent Officer at Softtek, talks about the challenges his organization faced ahead of becoming a skills-based organization.
David Rafael Cervantes: Let me share a story. I’m 52 years old, and I started to run seven years ago. I ran my first marathon in 2019. Now I have run three marathons. There are probably people in the audience that have run more than that, but for me, I discovered that I have the potential to run a marathon, and it changed my life completely.
Since then I’ve continued running, and I think that’s what potential means — when you discover something that you never thought you had, you can open new doors. Now that I am a Chief Talent Officer for Softtek and we have this skills-based approach strategy, I think this is awesome because [that’s how] I help Softtek. That’s how we call our employees to thrive — to continue growing their careers and obviously connecting their wishes for the future.
Theresia Hermes: I think it really resonates with us, helping everyone find their own career, right? A wise woman — my mom — once said, The greatest gift you can give somebody is to see their potential, so I love your definition of that.
A lot of potential comes out of the question of what problems that you had. My first question is, what kind of talent challenges were you experiencing before you implemented Eightfold?
D.R.C.: We didn’t know who our workforce was. We didn’t know what skills we were missing or what our strengths were. Our talent area was disconnected. We couldn’t implement a strong talent strategy to help our employees thrive. We had processes implemented, but we didn’t have good results. We were working in silos, disconnected.
One of the most important things that Eightfold provided and enabled us [to do] was to systematically integrate processes in our ecosystem, so we are now more connected. We are now able to integrate a better employee experience, helping [employees] with AI to improve their skills. That’s something that has changed the whole mindset in the organization.
T.H.: Speaking of bringing it all together, what is the potential of a skills based organization?
D.R.C.: We implement three full modules — [Eightfold] Talent Acquisition, Talent Management, Talent Intelligence — in seven months. We were told that should take at least a year, but we really thought the best idea was for talent to take a more strategic role in the organization. Having that cutting technology platform, powered by AI, helped us to reach those goals, so we were sure when we wanted that, and we were very committed.
We knew what we wanted, what our purpose was, and now Eightfold is helping us to focus on how we can integrate a skills-based approach. Now we have a career pathway that is defined, and we are working with the talent marketplace. We are able to identify adjacent positions and are able to discover skills gaps but also new opportunities.
The other day, I was looking at a CHRO survey that says career growth and development are one of the most important priorities. I believe that with Eightfold as part of our talent strategy based on a skills-based approach, we are going to be able to match that.
Cervantes discusses why Softtek created a talent intelligence team to facilitate the company’s talent evolution.
T.H.: Working with Softtek over the last few months, what has become clear to me is you have a very clear vision from leadership of what [this means] for the business. But also, you have a very clear vision for the end users, employees, talent acquisition practitioners. When I was visiting you in Mexico a few weeks ago, you walk through the doors in the office and you understand the energy. On every floor and in every room, there’s something about career. Even the minute you walk in and you go through security, on the elevator is a bold, colorful statement, and it says, “The next stop at new adventure,” and there’s a QR code leading back to the Career Hub. I think that is really what stood out for me — that clear vision of what’s in for the business but also what’s in for you as an end user, who we need to bring on that journey of a transformation.
That clear message to both parties allowed you to do a fast implementation but also resulted in 89% profile completions. That is an incredible insight of who you have in the organization. So my question is: with all that insight, how do you leverage it?
D.R.C.: First we created a talent marketing campaign around how you can try using the [Eightfold Platform]. The first message is how we can integrate Softtek [employees] to … be part of this strategy — what’s needed for me and how I can be empowered by AI.
I think something that was very important was to create a skills taxonomy. Once we had the skills taxonomy created and defined and Eightfold deployed, we were able to integrate the workforce. [Our employees] are experiencing things like Career Navigator, and they are able to be more future-fit and know what is going to be demanded in the future. In a dynamic company, it’s so rapidly changing, so everybody needs to be aware of that.
And talking about the managers, for them, it’s easier to understand and identify what they need to do to continue evolving their skill sets, what they need to be looking for, how they are going to evolve and change.
And finally, for talent, one of the most important things was focusing on talent acquisition. We improved our time to [hire], reducing the time to fulfill by 30%. We needed to first shift the paradigm of how to embrace AI and how to embrace this new skills-based approach.
AI will not resolve 100% of your problems, yet you can get time through using … tools. One of the most important things is the time that you save could benefit you to create more value-added solutions for hiring managers or for our candidates. That’s how we have been working on these three personas across tech.
T.H.: Let’s go back to the value proposition. I think often back to the stat the World Economic Forum put out that for 40% of the average workers, their skills will be obstinate by 2030. You spoke a lot about future readiness, and I think there’s a big question around that — helping them to understand what their skills are today and how they move forward with that.
Speaking of productivity and things are changing, I love to go back in my books and research and history, and there is a great paper written by Paul David who looked at the productivity gains realized from new electric engines over steam engines. Bear with me, it’s going to resonate with AI.
What he found was that productivity gains were not immediately met when electric engines came to the market. The business did not realize how to implement that in their businesses. What they did is they replaced their steam engine with an electric engine. And back then, the steam engine had to be in the middle of the production floor. It was a very cumbersome process. It took almost a generation of managers to understand that this electric engine could be much smaller and no longer needed to be in the middle of the production floor, which led to assembly lines and, of course, a lot of productivity gains.
His statement is that new innovations also need new skills — a new way of working and really thinking through the new processes. What I love about what Softtek has done is that you introduced and created a new team called the talent intelligence team. I would love it if you would share a little bit of what that team is, what the team does, and about the business outcomes.
D.R.C.: One of the very first things that I did was, coming from IT operations, I thought, “We need to leverage my experience with [our employees].”
The very first mandate that I asked of the talent intelligence team was to be a strategic area providing predictive, proactive, and prescriptive information for our decision-making process and drive the business outcomes of the organization. In fact, I believe that any talent area people or HR area needs to embrace this concept of talent intelligence and embrace AI and people analytics — that’s an evolution for them as well. We need to set aside our resistance and fear about AI tools and embrace it, because I’m pretty sure, as you mentioned, we will need new skills and new capabilities.
That ability will help us to be empathic with our people. In the end, this area is for the people, by the people, and managed by the people. Embracing this helps us to be better. For example, the talent intelligence team has made a lot of tools, like a chat mode to improve our talent experience. Now they are piloting something to integrate Microsoft Azure machine learning and Microsoft Power BI and create a predictive model for workforce planning and demand. It will be incorporated into the chatbot community, so we can share those insights with our manager.
Cervantes shares why Softtek created what it called Eightfold ambassadors as they launched talent intelligence within their organization.
T.H.: That is important because if you keep your employees competitive, [the business] also stays competitive. You talked through the journey of setting out this grand vision of talent intelligence, then implementing it very quickly, but bringing the vision together and helping everyone to understand what’s in it for them.
We talked a little bit about why that is important, but how do you maintain that? A skills-based organization doesn’t happen overnight. How do you maintain the adoption of the new vision, but also the tools [you] bring in the day-to-day to your teams?
D.R.C.: The very first thing that we did was designate some of the team members with the highest performance and contributions as Eightfold ambassadors. They helped us to spread the [word] and talk with the teams. It was easier for them to talk with their colleagues — they understood the questions because they were on the daily tasks, on the day-to-day operations, and that helped us a lot. At the end, they became influencers on how to maximize the use of Eightfold and agentic AI tools.
For me, that’s something that we needed to take into consideration. Change management cannot be overlooked. We needed to keep an open channel of communication to understand the concerns.
Another thing that is important as we maintain and continue keeping up with this strategy is to create development programs. You need to work with the team and give them the right tools to learn to integrate those capabilities if you are using agentic AI tools. For example, for driving interviews or improving your communications using generative AI, you would have the chance to save that time to learn. For me, that’s something [that is] really, really good.
[It also helps with] connecting the dots across the whole organization — with hiring managers, with people behind talent acquisition, improving the experience of the candidate, onboarding, everything. It’s a must that we need to embrace agentic AI. If we don’t take it, the problem is that your competitors will, and you will be behind that and in three or five years your business, probably, will disappear. That’s why we are very glad that we had the decision to integrate a platform like Eightfold that is helping us with all of this transformation of the business.
T.H.: I agree. I don’t think we have the luxury, as I said with the engines before, to wait for one generation. I think the adoption of AI is much, much faster here. And to your point, if you don’t adopt, I think your competitor is going to adopt, and your people will fall behind with that as well.
What is one of the big learnings you would share with anyone who would love to start the journey on the skills-based organization or has started but wants to go to the next level?
D.R.C.: The very first thing is that you need to take into consideration that this is a talent ecosystem. You need to integrate everything — talent acquisition, talent management — because that is going to drive you in the right direction to get the insight and the outcomes that [your] organization needs. It’s going to be very easy to get the buy-in of the C-suite because you are going to thrive getting the return on investment of whatever you do. And at the end, you are going to transform.
HR is crucial right now to really transform the area, but again, we need to embrace AI. So the very first thing is the talent ecosystem, and then knowing that HR is a strategic area for any organization.
T.H.: Very well said. The last question I have for you is, what’s next at Softtek?
D.R.C.: When I started this role, I defined a challenge strategy for three years. That’s usually my process, and we’re in the middle of that process now. This year we want to stabilize and achieve career pathways. We have already, as you mentioned, and even now, we are probably a little higher than 89% of our workforce integrated into Eightfold.
We’re planning to continue deploying and integrating Europe and South America. Then we are going to be able to continue the career pathways and talent marketplace, which I’m pretty sure is going to boost [internal] mobility. [We are going to] create better insights for learning and development to [develop our] skilling and reskilling programs.
Everything is around our people — to help them thrive, to help them continue growing in their careers. At the end, that’s a very important impact for their lives, and that’s why we are here. I believe that is going to be an outcome in the organization.
Watch the full Q&A from Cultivate ’25, available now on demand.