SOPHIE: I’m the lobal head of talent acquisition for Vodafone, and me and my team have been responsible for the processes, the design of the systems, the governance, the KPIs, employer brand, and obviously the implementation of Eightfold.

RUSHTON: So my role at Vodafone is the global learning operations and technology manager. My team look after all of the things that underpin our products and specifically one of the things we do look after is our learning technology and platforms.

ADRIAN: So I’m a senior global product manager, which fundamentally means I manage a group of product owners.

SOPHIE: Vodafone is a telecoms provider across Europe and Africa.

ADRIAN: We had ambitious goals and we needed a vendor, a partner really, to work with us to deliver those. So we were looking for unified technology that brings skills together with one definition of skills, one place for us to understand what skills we have beyond our job architecture, and we needed a partner who really would leverage AI to help us deliver that.

SOPHIE: I think we’ve changed for the better by having Eightfold because we’ve become more of a global talent acquisition function that’s working together and all pulling in the same direction.

We’ve seen a lot more efficiency by having Eightfold as part of our ecosystem. We’ve reduced our time to hire by 50%, but we’ve also been able to improve the candidate experience quite significantly.

In that transformation, We realized that skills was the common language across HR that we could all speak, which helped us connect the dots more for our employees.

RUSHTON: The first thing is all of our employees create a skills profile that then enables Vodafone at the macro level to look at where we have skills and to what level of proficiency, which then helps inform where we need to bring in talent or crucially develop and retain talent.

That skills profile also feeds our learning Experience platform, and it makes sure that all of our employees develop their skills and help unlock careers to grow with Vodafone.

ADRIAN: For us, eightfold stood out for the AI engine for the clarity in terms of how they use AI and the ethical consideration for it, and thirdly, for the willingness to be able to work with us to evolve the product.

SOPHIE: I think it’s also enabled us to think about biases in the process, and actually by having eightfold and matching skills to jobs, you are removing some of the bias. It naturally creeps into the process. So actually because the AI is doing the recommending, it’s recommending the people to the jobs, but it’s also recommending the jobs to the people. It is bringing more people into the talent funnel that wouldn’t have been applying for jobs before or even considering a move. So we’ve definitely seen that Skills has opened that up for us and created a lot more visibility of talent across the organization.