- Smart HR leaders know that AI is here to stay, and adoption is critical to overall talent strategy.
- HR teams blazing the AI trail have already seen the positive impacts it has on talent management.
- Organizations that have already adopted AI have reached a maturity where they can share lessons learned for the next generation of companies ready to onboard.
For forward-thinking HR leaders, AI-powered technologies are no longer a futuristic idea — they’re here now. Whether the organization is implementing an AI strategy or experimenting with use cases, AI needs to be a part of the talent management conversation.
According to Aptitude Research’s research, 69% of organizations seek to increase investment in AI, and 33% believe that AI has the potential to make talent management more human.
HR teams well into this journey have blazed the trail for others and are already sharing their lessons learned as they reach maturity in understanding and speaking the language of AI.
Madeline Laurano, Founder and Chief Analyst for Aptitude Research, researches the HR tech landscape and helps talent leaders understand the role it plays in the workplace. Laurano interviewed two leaders who are far along on the AI path, Victoria Myers, Global Head of Talent Attraction at Amdocs, and Jennifer Sharp, Vice President Talent Acquisition and Talent Development at Symetra, to share:
- How they’ve made progress with identifying use cases.
- What they’ve done to navigate compliance and regulatory policy.
- Where they’re already seeing the benefits of AI-driven talent intelligence.
Victoria Myers, Global Head of Talent Attraction, explains how AI-powered talent intelligence has helped improve talent acquisition for Amdocs.
Zeroing in on talent intelligence use cases
Since the pandemic put HR in the hot seat for rapid digital transformation, many organizations have spent considerable effort identifying the best use cases for AI.
For Amdocs, a company that specializes in technology for communications, media, and financial services, the first few years coming out of the pandemic were fueled with unprecedented growth. Myers said that expansion was the catalyst for looking at ways that AI could improve HR processes, systems, and efficiencies.
“We ran internal projects to look at talent acquisition and sourcing to really understand what we were doing, what was our vision for the future, and what were the gaps between those two,” Myers said. “In that process, we decided to use AI in support of talent acquisition and talent management to identify candidates within our ATS database of 2 million candidates and better match capabilities to those open roles.”
For Symetra, a financial services company offering annuities, life insurance and employee benefits, the focus was on internal mobility. Sharp shared that entry-level customer service employees weren’t able to easily move into individual contributor or managerial roles despite heavy training and development.
“That was the genesis of our early use case around [talent intelligence],” Sharp said. “Looking at how we identify what skills our employees have, and then identifying skill adjacencies. If I need somebody who’s a developer in Python, I might be able to find somebody who is an associate developer who doesn’t have Python yet, but they have skill adjacency. We had absolutely zero insight into any of that.”
Jennifer Sharp, Vice President, Talent Acquisition for Symetra, explains how talent intelligence helps remove unconscious bias in talent acquisition.
Navigating compliance and regulations
As with any new technology, compliance and regulations can be a nebulous area, so it’s an important piece to consider early. Sharp highlighted this point when her team at Symetra were far along in their AI implementation.
“I got an email from our legal department that said we had to hold off because they had to revise our privacy policy on our website,” she said. “This landscape is changing so quickly, and even our internal folks didn’t have that expertise. In hindsight, the advice I would give my past self is to get somebody engaged who at least has some of that expertise and can point out that this has the potential to impact your privacy policy.”
For Amdocs, Myers said the team was looking at putting an AI policy in place since they knew they had to keep employee and candidate data privacy at the forefront.
“We were focused on proactive sourcing, proactively adding people to the Eightfold system,” she said. “We set up a four-part email sequence to let them know that we have their information, and we’ve put them into our database. We also request that they opt into our privacy statement. If they do not opt in within 45 days, we’ll purge their information.”
Both Sharp and Myers said compliance and regulations are areas they are continuing to review with their legal teams to ensure transparency, inclusivity, security, and privacy as they look at new use cases for talent acquisition and talent management.
They also agreed with Laurano when she said that compliance is a partnership with internal stakeholders and Eightfold.
Related content: Learn more about compliance and governance with our guide to Responsible AI at Eightfold.
Driving organizational outcomes with talent intelligence
Now that Sharp and Myers have a few years of experience with AI, they are more focused on supporting organizational outcomes. With the talent intelligence insights they’ve collected, they are more prepared for what’s ahead.
For Amdocs, Myers said there’s been a 40% improvement in time to source, a 20% improvement in time to hire, and that since implementation, internal mobility has also improved.
“In the beginning we simply wanted to give business units a view of the skills of their employees,” Myers said. “Now, we can look at what projects employees have worked on and how skills they’ve developed from working on those projects enable them to move through the organization.
“We took our internal mobility from 38% to 48% and implemented internal mobility policy changes to make it easier for employees to move internally … all of that is only possible through talent intelligence,” she continued.
At Symetra, Sharp said the company made the decision in 2021 to become a remote-work organization. The employee population of 2,600 workers are now distributed throughout the U.S. She added that having talent intelligence is critical with this organizational model.
“This [AI-driven talent intelligence] platform is giving us insights that we might not otherwise get with such a distributed workforce,” Sharp said. “As more information goes into the system, it learns about Symetra and will continue to get smarter. It’ll serve up better recommendations for employees about what their next career path could be, and how to close those skill gaps.”
Watch the full panel discussion, How to speak AI: Transforming the way you think about talent and AI featuring Amdocs and Symetra, on demand now.
