The webinar, hosted by Brandon Hall Group and sponsored by Eightfold, discussed the transformation of HR from talent management to workforce advantage through AI. Key challenges identified include data overload, accelerating skills transformation, workforce expectations, global talent competition, economic pressures, and inclusion equity. Eightfold’s AI-driven talent intelligence platform unifies HR data, enhances skills visibility, and supports talent acquisition, management, and resource management. Case studies from Bayer, Amdocs, and Eaton highlighted significant improvements in candidate screening time, internal mobility, and hiring efficiency. The session emphasized the importance of starting with pilot projects and aligning HR strategies with business needs.

Overview of Brandon Hall Group

• Brandon Hall Group is described as a leading research and analyst firm with a global reach of over 10,000 clients and 30 years of experience.
• The firm’s vision is to inspire a better workplace experience, and its mission is to empower organizations through research and tools.
• Brandon Hall Group Moderator mentions the impact of Brandon Hall Group on over 10 million employees and executives and invites participants to join research studies.

Introduction

• Brandon Hall Group Moderator thanks the webinar sponsor, Eightfold AI, and describes their talent intelligence platform.
• Eightfold AI engages with candidates from the moment of interest, screening, interviewing, and selecting top talent.
• Each employee’s digital twin accelerates onboarding, amplifies productivity, and surfaces real-time insights.
• Brandon Hall Group Moderator introduces Jacqueline Juan, VP of Product at Eightfold, and David Forry, Senior Vice President at Brandon Hall Group, as the panel members.

Discussion on talent management challenges

• David Forry outlines the key challenges in talent management, including data overload, accelerating skills transformation, workforce expectations, global talent competition, economic pressures, and the inclusion equity imperative.
• David Forry invites participants to select their biggest challenge in a poll and encourages them to share their thoughts in the chat.
• Jaclyn Zhuang provides insights from Eightfold customers, highlighting the challenges of AI in HR, and the importance of strategic workforce planning.
• David Forry shares the poll results, indicating that accelerating skills transformation is the most significant challenge for many organizations.

Evolution of talent management and introduction of talent intelligence

• David Forry discusses the shift from reactive talent management to proactive workforce advantage, emphasizing the role of AI in providing predictive insights.
• Brandon Hall Group defines talent intelligence as a data-driven approach leveraging AI and analytics to optimize the talent lifecycle.
• David Forry outlines the three key components of talent intelligence: collecting and unifying data, using AI to turn data into actionable insights, and adopting a skills-based approach.
• David Forry highlights the importance of aligning workforce strategies with business needs, citing a study where 91% of organizations prioritize this alignment.

The Eightfold AI Talent Intelligence platform

• Jaclyn Zhuang explains how the Eightfold platform unifies HR data with public data to provide a comprehensive view of employees’ skills and potential trajectories.
• The platform includes deep worker intelligence and work intelligence, enabling better decisions about talent, teams, and transformation.
• Eightfold’s solutions cover talent acquisition, talent management, and resource management, using AI to deliver personalized career paths and streamline project-based work.
• The platform includes autonomous agents to assist with tasks like phone screens, performance review summaries, and career development guidance.

Case studies of talent management success

• Jaclyn Zhuang shares case studies of Bayer, Amdocs, and Eaton, highlighting their success in implementing Eightfold’s talent intelligence platform.
• Bayer transformed from a traditional hierarchy to a skills-based organization, reducing candidate screening time and scaling their talent marketplace rapidly.
• Amdocs improved internal mobility and retention, reducing time to hire for specific skills and increasing internally filled positions.
• Eaton modernized their talent acquisition process, seeing significant improvements in hiring efficiency and effectiveness.

Practical steps for implementing talent intelligence

• David Forry outlines a blueprint for implementing talent intelligence, starting with assessing skills, data readiness and picking a pilot area.
• The blueprint emphasizes the importance of building cross-functional alignment, defining success metrics, and starting with what is available.
• Jaclyn Zhuang shares examples of how organizations like Bristol Myers Squibb and Fortive have successfully implemented talent intelligence platforms.
• The discussion includes practical tips for overcoming challenges like budget constraints, competing priorities, and change management.

Q&A and closing remarks

• David Forry and Jaclyn Zhuang address questions from the audience, discussing topics like AI bias, skills validation, and the integration of existing ERP systems.
• Jaclyn Zhuang highlights the importance of planning for the future and the need for quick adaptation to changing business strategies.
• David Forry and Jaclyn Zhuang thank the participants for their engagement and encourage them to reach out for further questions and support.

Brandon Hall Group Moderator 0:04
Hello everybody, and thank you so very much for tuning into today’s webinar, “AI in action: Transforming HR from talent management to workforce advantage.” Thank you to today’s webinar sponsor, Eightfold. Eightfold talent intelligence is evolving into talent advantage, an end-to-end system that not just analyzes Eightfold AI, engages with candidates from the moment of interest, screening, interviewing and selecting top talent. Once hired, each employee’s digital twin accelerates onboarding, amplifies productivity and surfaces real time insights from across the organization with a unified platform for internal mobility and growth. CHROs can now lead a workforce that is engaged, adaptive, self improving and, most importantly, productive. Eightfold AI is a patented, deep learning and generative AI platform available in more than 155 countries and 24 languages, enabling cutting edge enterprises to transform their talent into a competitive advantage.

Brandon Hall Group Moderator 3:37
Now let’s go ahead and meet today’s panel. First up we have Jaclyn Zhuang. She is the VP of product at Eightfold AI, where she leads global teams developing Eightfold Talent Management and research management solutions with a background spanning Atlassian, Zoom, Meta and Google. Jaclyn has built and scaled BTV and BTC SaaS programs used by millions worldwide. Her expertise is a blend of business strategy and firsthand experience building high performing teams, the right people on the right work, driving both businesses and talent outcomes at scale. Jaclyn shares her passion for empowering organizations to unlock human potential through technology. Moderating and leading today’s discussion is David Forry. He is the senior vice president at Brandon Hall group with a rich background in human capital management since 2010 during his several years with the company, he has been instrumental in shaping sales and marketing strategies, driving growth and nurturing key client relations, relationships. Now, without further ado, I’m going to pass things off to David.

David Forry 4:53
Thank you. So today we’re going to be talking a little bit about the shift of talent management, everything that’s going on. I think this conversation is really important to all of us. I think there’s a lot of different factors going into the talent space, whether it’s talent management, talent acquisition. We’re gonna give you some insights into how to do those more effectively, how to get the most out of your data and really understand what’s happening in your workforce. So we’re going to show some of those solutions and actions, give you some real life examples, as well as set you off with the blueprint of how to get started and or how to improve where you are currently. So let’s, let’s jump right in. So just to kind of set the stage, these are some areas that, through our research at Brandon Hall Group, we are seeing as some of the critical challenges that organizations are facing. So this really sums up, you know, some of the talent management approaches, in my opinion, that are going to become obsolete. So you know, first, you definitely have the data overload and processing crisis. Organizations are drowning in talent data with multiple systems, but they can’t process it effectively. A lot of people are using traditional tools that simply weren’t built for the volume of data that we’re currently collecting. Accelerating skills transformation. Skills requirements are evolving at an unprecedented pace, and technology is both eliminating certain tasks and creating entirely new types of jobs. The half life of skills is shrinking rapidly, and we’re all needing to adapt quickly. Workforce expectations. Of course, employees want meaningful growth, clear career paths and work that matters. That’s something we’re really seeing more even from the younger generations that are entering the workforce, really driving these points home, also global talent competition. So with the collaboration software that we have, more companies are really leveraging low cost talent markets and distributed teams. So you know, being able to walk down the hall and meet with somebody just isn’t effective anymore. Obviously, we have the economic pressures and productivity demands that everyone’s facing, probably on this call with the unsteady macro economics environment, means everyone is expected to do more while keeping their head count consistent, or, in fact, even lower, in some cases, six the inclusion equity imperative, there’s increasing pressure for genuine workforce inclusion, not just checking the boxes, but creating a real opportunities for diverse talent to thrive. And these aren’t HR challenges, their business challenges that are directly impacting, impacting your organization’s ability to compete and grow. Now I see some people dropping into the chat about their location. Would love to also hear if you’re impacting seeing any of these as a top driver. So we actually created a poll that we’re going to launch, basically asking these same six, so it’s going to be hard for you, but we’re asking you to select one your biggest challenge that you’re facing right now based on the six that I just outlined. And of course, if you’re seeing something completely different or want to add additional comments, feel free to drop those in the chat as well. We’d love to hear from you what you’re seeing and facing while everyone’s doing that.

Jaclyn Zhuang 9:04
Just providing some perspective on what I hear from our customers at Eightfold, I would say the number one challenge we’ve been hearing is about AI. What should, how should the HR function respond to it? What do we do about this? Is this a partial job replacement? Is this a full job replacement? If it’s partial, you know, how do we think about someone’s partial job, and how do we combine parts of different jobs to form full jobs? How do we help upskill our people? How do we think about agents as being part of HR and being part of our overall talent management strategy, versus just an IT asset, and then linked to that very closely, of course, is strategic workforce planning, which has always been, you know, the holy grail for any HR professional. But this is coming up again because of these really quick shifts. We’re moving from not just doing pure resource management, but really thinking very broadly about how technology is disrupting the industry and how to plan for the future.

David Forry 10:11
Yeah, that’s great insight. I don’t know if we’re going there. Hopefully you all are seeing the results now, but what did we get from the audience? 16% are saying data overload is the key driver. 41% are saying accelerating skills transformation is the key driver. 14% are saying workforce expectation, global talent competition, actually didn’t get any or the DEI imperatives. And then 29% of people said the economic pressure and productivity demands. So I think Jaclyn, you know, several of the items that you mentioned, you know, we’re certainly hearing it from our clients. When we’re meeting with people, there’s some real pressures and real concern over the talent space right now.

Jaclyn Zhuang 11:01
Yeah, I could definitely see that around the skills transformation. And if anyone wants to add more color, you know, in chat or talk about it live, feel free to jump in, please.

David Forry 11:09
So we’re witnessing a fundamental shift in the research that we’re doing on how leading organizations approach talent. It’s a move from reactive talent management to more productive workforce advantage. Hence, you know the conversation that we’re having today, and I’d like to paint the picture of this evolution. In the past, we’ve had basic applicant tracking systems and HRIS platforms over here that were essentially digital filing cabinets. They store data, but provide very little insight. And today, we’re really seeing AI platforms that don’t just store data, they’re providing predictive insights. They can tell you who’s likely to leave, what skills you’ll need in the next six months, and where your talent gaps are emerging, but where we’re headed is even more transformative. And of course, AI is speeding this along. It’s really comprehensive decision support that spans the entire employee life cycle or talent life cycle, and it’s really what we call talent intelligence, and what Eightfold calls talent intelligence. So if you’re not familiar with that term, Brandon Hall group defines it as a data driven approach that leverages AI and analytics to optimize every stage of the talent lifecycle, from recruitment to retention and workforce planning. This isn’t just about having better technology. It’s about three key components working together. First, you need to collect and unify the data from both internal and external sources, bringing together information that was previously siloed. The second is using AI to turn that data into actionable insights and drive real business outcomes. And third, shifting to a skills based approach that ensures the right people with the right capabilities are in the right roles, and the bottom line is, 91% of organizations cite aligning workforce strategies with business needs as their top priority when we asked on our HCM outlook study, and talent intelligence isn’t how you actually achieve that alignment, or Sorry, talent intelligence is how you can achieve that alignment. Sue, can you go in a little bit and share a little bit about how you do that?

Jaclyn Zhuang 13:56
Can talk a little bit about how Eightfold Talent Intelligence Platform helps with this, and really designed to be a system of intelligence to set context completely agree for everyone, there is an abundance of data, both internal and external, out there, and with AI, we’re really making sense of that data to drive HR decisions is becoming easier, and this we are seeing the impact that our customers have, not just on HR goals, but also business goals. So let’s go through this. It’s a pretty dense slide here, starting from the bottom. What Eightfold does is first collect your data, unifying your HR data with bi directional syncs to your legacy HCM, enriching the HR data with public data for context. So for example, company details that you would get from Crunchbase or LinkedIn, and then from our global metadata set with over 1.5 billion talent profiles and 1.4 million unique skills that are constantly being refreshed and updated to drive realtors. Time insights. So all this data in conjunction with our customers, powers the intelligence layer. So there’s deep worker intelligence on the right hand side, really understanding people’s skills, potential trajectories. And then there’s work intelligence on the left hand side, which are really insights on how work actually gets done across the business. And now with this, you get a more complete picture, enabling better decisions about talent teams and transformation. So we’ve got the data layer, the intelligence layer, and what this powers is Eightfold solutions of Talent Acquisition, Talent Management and Resource Management. On the talent acquisition side, we deliver an unbiased, AI, powered candidate and recruiter experience that’s based on skills and potential. So removing the bias, increasing diversity and ultimately reducing time to fill by matching candidate skills and potential not just to one job, but all jobs that they have the potential to be successful in. So that’s the acquisition side. Then with the talent management side, the intelligence is inwards and really focuses on the employee and experience. We’ve got three main use cases here, so employee mobility, reskilling and upskilling, as well as succession and workforce planning, and this solution really uses AI to deliver personalized career paths that unlock each individual’s potential and align, really helps align their career aspirations with the business strategy, with where they put their efforts in in terms of career growth, and then finally, on the resource management side, this helps businesses streamline project based work with a skills first approach, so there’s a transparent view to all resources across the organization, their availability, the skill set, and really helps organizations intelligently match the right resource to the right project. Now, across all these applications, in the middle, we’ve got autonomous agents, the AI interviewer, employee manager agents and resource management, management agents to really assist and act so conducting tasks like phone screens, drafting performance review summaries or surfacing career development guidance. And overall, this really helps employees, managers, HR function, recruiters, to focus on higher impact and strategic work.

David Forry 17:35
We got one comment in chat. How do humans supervise this platform? You know, obviously this is a technology centric look, but how does the employee work with the data?

Jaclyn Zhuang 17:54
So the employee has full and HR function too, has full control over their data. So, for example, within talent management itself, whilst Eightfold, through our AI model, provides an initial set of skills and skills that the employee has, the employee has full control to update those skills. Same for the HR function, and it’s not just skills as well. We believe this is the first step. Proficiencies is another piece too, that we provide through our platform, where whether it’s through certifications that are linked to our platform, or it’s through manager and peer reviews, the different an employee’s proficiencies per skill level is also set within that and there’s full transparency that these upfront data and information then drives the downstream recommendations of career paths fit with internal jobs for mobility areas to upskill, and then suggestions for and recommendations for business Leaders and HR practitioners around potential successes when doing succession planning.

David Forry 19:04
Thanks. Jaclyn, thank you. Now keep the questions coming. We do have another poll, maybe that’ll spark some new ideas as well. What is your organization’s biggest talent priority right now? So you have a couple of options here, reducing time to hire, improving talent mobility, building a more diverse, inclusive workforce identity, and closing the skills gap. And then, of course, you have all of the above options as well. So we need help everywhere. I do know that there are some people out there that are looking for help at each one of these levels. So we do try to hone in on one particular choice as your biggest talent priority.

David Forry 19:52
We could share the results and yeah.

David Forry 20:00
Yeah, okay. 31% are saying all of them. Then the highest one is actually identifying and closing critical skills gaps. That’s not surprising. Jaclyn, you did bring that up early on as a conversation that you’re having constantly. 22% said improving internal mobility and retention, and a couple of people said reducing time to hire, and a couple of more people said building a more diverse, inclusive workforce. So again, if you want to drop in any feedback into the chat, I’m sure others would love to hear from you. But Jaclyn, if you could kind of share some solutions to those I think you have a couple of slides on some common solutions to those questions.

Jaclyn Zhuang 20:45
Yeah, I really want to share a little bit about how some of our most forward leaning customers have tackled the challenges that we’re all talking about today. So with Bayer, they were facing business challenges across their farmer crop science and consumer health decisions, including the need to refill their farmer pipelines, refine their crop sign strategy and return to volume based growth amid some ongoing litigation. So to overcome this, they undertook a transformation from a traditional hierarchy to a skills based organization under their new dynamic shared ownership model. And really the goal is to enable large scale talent flow by improving skill visibility and matching employees to the right internal and external opportunities, especially those within Bayer who are affected by restructuring. So they implemented Eightfolds talent acquisition, talent management and workforce exchange solutions, and partnered that with programs in house right, including redefining skills as a new currency for talent development, integrating these skills into processes like career progression, staffing, learning, networking, scaling, the AI supported talent marketplace of Eightfold, and really doing data driven workforce planning by combining Eightfold skills data with power BI dashboards, enabling real time analytics and strategic decision making. And so outcomes of this, you know, one of it, you see on a slide, 90% decrease in candidate screening time, but also they scaled their talent marketplace very rapidly from 16,000 200,000 employees within eight months, they launched an external talent exchange to support employees impacted by structural changes in Germany, and really successfully staffed over 260 projects using this new model. We’ll move on to the next slide and share a different story here. Now, Amdocs is a global provider of telecommunications, software and services with 30,000 global employees, and so for them, finding and retaining talent is super crucial. Their goals were specifically to find untapped talent pools, promote internal mobility and harmonize employee aspirations with business needs internally. They called this program harmony. So Amdocs implemented Eightfold Talent Acquisition, Candidate Relationship Management and Talent Management Solutions and really configured the intelligence layer, or job intelligence engine, to their needs. One thing that was super crucial for Amdocs is having talent acquisition and talent management on a single platform to really break down the silos between recruitment and development and then employee career aspirations. So in terms of outcomes, since implementing Eightfold, Amdocs has seen these improvements, so 20% reduction in time to hire for specific skills. As caught up on this slide, you know, 40% growth in internally filled positions, and they now have access to over 2 million candidates in their database, reducing the reliance on agencies. So overall, you know, a full has helped M docs in two really major ways. One is becoming that skills driven organization, optimizing employee capabilities, fostering agility to mobilize talent internally effectively, and then driving that employees centricity, enabling that mobility, proactively offering career opportunities. I’ll go through. Give you one last example on the next slide, with Eaton. So they were looking for a way to modernize their talent acquisition process. They hire about 15,000 people a year’s really dozens of systems and processes, and really need to streamline, to improve hiring efficiency and effectiveness, and this is where their talent leaders turned to AI. So after implementing the Eightfold talent intelligence platform, they’ve seen a big improvement, a big impact on business. So four times growth in their talent networks are called out, but also a 30 to 40% in. Increase in candidate velocity, double digit increases in all their recruiting metrics. So this is like time to market, time to present, time to offer, and then a 13% increase in overall recruiter satisfaction in executing on their jobs. And from Ethan’s point of view, they’re now strategically positioned to win top talent in a really competitive market. Over to you David for the next slide.

David Forry 25:28
All great examples, and I love how all three of them had a component of utilizing the current talent pipeline that’s available. You know, you hear horror stories of organizations that need new skills, so they just get rid of their staff and bring in new people, and instead of trying to re-skill them and teach them new things. And, you know, I certainly want to focus in on the skills based revolution, because this is one of the foundations of, you know, everything that we’ve been discussing, and our HCM outlook research shows that having the right skill set is five times more predictive of a candidate success than their educational background or their work history. So just because they have 10 years of experience doesn’t mean they really know how to do something. So you know that that number really is five times more predictive from the research that we’re seeing, and these insights come directly from our 2025 Excellence Award winners as well. If you are familiar with our awards program, we’re making announcements next week, and we have much more data to come from the award winners, and it all matches up with exactly what we’re talking about, which is five times more predictive. But you know, here’s what some of our award winners are doing differently. They’re shifting from that rigid job description to more of a dynamic skills portfolio. They’re moving from degree requirements and capability validation. They’re looking at the potential, the adaptability, rather than just past experience. So a few key themes that we saw across our award winners is, first, they map skills directly to business outcomes, not just the roles. They ask what capabilities drive revenue, not just what skills does this job need. Second, they create transparent skill frameworks that every employee can see, you know, no more black box of, you know hiring, or you know what skills get you to the next level so people know exactly what they need to develop themselves for their next move. The third thing we’re seeing is the use of AI to identify adjunct skills and hidden talent. That person in accounting might be the perfect skills for your open data analyst role, but you never know it without that AI powered skills matching. The fourth is they build career paths based on skill progression, not tenure or relationships. So I think Jaclyn talked a little bit about unbiased understanding. You know, Eightfold allows that unbiased look at where skills and people might come from. So our award winners are saying remarkable things. At 40% higher internal mobility, 30% better retention and significantly faster time to productivity for their new hires. The skills based revolution certainly isn’t coming. It’s already here, and our award winners are showing exactly how to make it work. So I’m checking the poll, sorry, checking the chat, and we have another poll here. Thanks. I really like the concept of mapping skills to business outcomes that feels more significant and a very worthwhile one. So hopefully everyone can also do that. You know, that’s something that we can get started on right away. Speaking of getting started right away, what is, I guess, preventing you from, you know, looking at things kind of like the way we’ve outlined. Does it come down to either budget constraints or completed priorities, lack of executive buy-in or sponsorship, change management challenges, technical complexities or unclear ROI or business case?

David Forry 29:29
I know one that sometimes we see is that, you know, just not knowing where to get started, or trying to boil the ocean Jaclyn, right? You always hear people thinking they have to have everything lined up before getting started. So if we want to shift over to the answers and Jaclyn, feel free to share some of your stories of what you’re saying.

Brandon Hall Group Moderator 29:49
Yeah, it looks like the poll results are out. We’ve got budget constraints and competing priorities as the top blocker. Sure. And then change management challenges and resistance. Would love to hear some color on this from folks in the room.

David Forry 30:10
Sometimes those might be the same as well. You know, you’re getting change management or resistance from stakeholders because they feel there’s a different priority, you know that we should be looking at and, you know, sometimes we also see that not understanding, you know, where talent intelligence comes from, could be something that prohibits people from getting started.

Jaclyn Zhuang 30:34
Yeah, I totally agree. I think the notion of skills and a skills transformation may not be 100% understood by business leaders sometimes and in the flurry of activity and trying to meet like today’s business goals, that gets lost. But I think the piece that we’ve seen you know our customers successfully highlight and drive these transformations within their companies is the need to plan for the future and they need to be really quick about it, given how macroeconomic winds are changing, and companies have to pivot in terms of strategy and focus areas to really thrive. And when you pivot your business strategy quickly, you really need to be able to identify the people to work on these specific areas fast, and that’s where having that foundation and skills and conducting a skills transformation, really understanding employees is necessary.

David Forry 31:34
Yeah, I see a comment from Marilyn, how are employers committed to skill development. And, you know, often we hear how our employees committed to skill development, like, how do we know the person really wants to be developed or learn something new? The employers, what we often see is they have gaps in their understanding, whether it’s, you know, let’s say we want everyone to learn how to use AI, or we want our sales people to learn how to be better negotiators, you know. So a lot of times, those are more of like a top down directive of something that we’re seeing as a shortfall. But then, on the other hand, there are skills taxonomies of, you know, those people that are career driven, they know, and hopefully your organization has mapped out things that we expect you to know before getting into that next role, you know. So if you want to go here, you know, here are some skills that you should learn and develop and put in practice before you get there. Jaclyn, do you see it a different way, I think, very similar to what you’re just mentioning, David, some examples, I would additionally give it.

Jaclyn Zhuang 32:41
We have some customers who are very much focused on skills across the entire company. And these are large enterprises, for example, they’ve identified five to 10 skills that every employee should have. There are dashboards around those metrics and then learning everything associated with that. So that’s sort of one end of the spectrum. We’ve got other sets of employees, employers who are thinking about how to increase business productivity by focusing on skills for a select group. So for example, one of our customers has identified a number of sales people, top sales people, who they actually want to upskill even further to tackle a certain segment of the market. And they’re using a false talent management platform to do this, putting them in a community group together, giving them specific access to courses and mentors to help them up skill and then hopefully drive that whole group towards a particular business outcome, like a segment of the market that they want to tackle. So these are two different examples of how employees are really thinking about skill development.

David Forry 33:57
I’d love to hear an Eightfold approach. What is the experience with AI helping to illuminate skills from available data, like job descriptions, resumes or other existing sources of data, without a project to structure, gather and consume data about skills?

Jaclyn Zhuang 34:23
I assume, Jeffrey, when you say project to structure and gather the data, this is like putting data in very structured formats. But the beauty of AI is that we can combine all this data structure and unstructured and produce the intelligence out of that. So we’ve got to the end. Price data side, all the data from HDM. And there’s a bi-directional flow piece there too, which gives you the job descriptions, the resumes and your existing sources of data, and then we bring in market data from public sources as well to feed into that. And really last one the user interactions is this is user interactions with our platform itself as well, and with the help of AI, really being able to bring the data together in a model to drive the intelligence and the insights out of that. Hopefully this answers your question, and this is me making assumptions on what you mean by your project to structure it and get the consumed data.

David Forry 35:41
Perfect. Yeah. And we can, of course, connect with Jeffrey offline to answer more questions, because that’s a great one, one where we see a lot, so appreciate all of the comments that have come into the chat thus far. You know, I’d like to get practical with the skills a little bit further. I know we’ve been talking a lot about AI, we’ve been talking about technology, you know, to get practical, and some things that you could get started with right away. You’ve seen the challenges and you understand the opportunity. But you know, how do you actually get started? This blueprint comes directly from our research on how organizations successfully overcome the barriers that we discussed today. First of all, it’s, you know, you gotta set the foundation, and that really does start with skills. So assess your skills and data readiness. What skills do you actually have today in house? You know? What do you know about your organization? Don’t worry if it’s messy or incomplete. All you need to know is where to get started and then the next I always recommend picking a pilot area. Don’t try to boil the ocean on the first take. Maybe it’s, you know, you want to focus on your tech roles. Or maybe it’s just one department. Maybe it’s just internal mobility. You know, pick something that’s manageable that you can show your team. Quick wins. Step three, build cross functional alignment. This cannot be an HR only initiative. The partnership between IT and HR is absolutely critical. Our award winners always emphasize this. And then step four, define your success metrics upfront. So be very specific. Is it reducing time to hire by 30% or is it increasing talent mobility? Pick one or two metrics that matter most to your business. And then step five, start with what you have, the perfect is not the enemy of good. So every organization wishes they had better data, more resources, cleaner systems. You just kind of got to get started. So before we go on to some more examples. Jaclyn, I know that we’ve had conversations about getting started as well. And you know, people try to wait, wait, wait until everything’s perfect, and then all of a sudden, the market shifts, or the goal posts have shifted. You know, now we’re focusing on something else, and because we’re waiting for perfect data, we missed our opportunity as HR executives to jump in.

Jaclyn Zhuang 38:15
Yeah, I would say, you know, in speaking with Bristol Myers groups, Melissa her feedback to everyone was, just start you won’t have the perfect data. You won’t have the perfect job architecture there, but you have to start somewhere and evolve from there. We’ve also worked very closely with fortify Linda winbergen, who’s the VP of HR technologies and services transformation, and her advice to implement the product, quickly learn about it and grow with it. So what fortified did with Eightfold was turn on the features as needed. So for example, they turned on courses a month after the initial implementation, when they felt ready and really just launched it and were iterative, because the product story is changing. AI is evolving really quickly, and at least for us at Eightfold, the product team works really closely with customers to help them get going and really solve needs. But start somewhere, just jump into it, just get going, and you can figure that out. Yeah, I saw the questions around AI bias. So for Eightfold, we conduct AI audits with third parties. We publicly talk about adherence to evolving laws around this, and we have an AI Ethics Council, as well. There is quite a bit in here. So what I’m going to do is just share our responsible AI website so that you can take a look and really dive into and think about how building responsible and unbiased AI works.

David Forry 39:57
That’s great. Yeah, we always get those questions. I was hoping that you would jump in on that Jaclyn, because I wanted to hear how Eightfold handles it, you know, for the sake of this conversation, and you know this blueprint, you know, you can use it a little bit without sophisticated systems. But if you really want to get the magnitude, or get to scale, or, you know, really try to make the most impact. You know, a platform like Eightfold is absolutely critical to scale that across your organization. I’d love to show some more examples of some more award winners that overcame some of those exact solutions. So, you know, budget constraints are something that came up earlier. We had an organization that started with a pilot. They proved the ROI, and then they used those results to secure funding and scaling. One winner showed a 50% reduction in time to hire, and their pilot and the CFO immediately approved that expansion so they are able to scale on that front. And I think that’s similar to some of Jaclyn’s stories as well. The Change resistance is also one that came up big in our results, and we’ve seen that they focused on showing quick wins and celebrating the early adopters and getting behind those people that are adopting at those groups and departments that are the early adopters, and when employees saw their colleagues getting promoted based on skills rather than tenure, adoption is going to certainly accelerate technical complexity. One organization phased their integration using APIs to connect systems gradually rather than attempting a massive overhaul. So again, start where you can extract value quickly and then unclear ROI. An organization picked one metric, first, whether that was time to hire retention or talent mobility, and then they focused relentlessly on moving that number and, of course, broader benefits followed. So I think that the key message that we’re seeing from our award winners is, again, get started. You don’t need to have everything perfect to get started. You just need clear focus. You need executive support, the willingness to learn as you go. Every one of our award winners that implemented systems like this started exactly where you are today. The difference is they did take the first step. You know, I’ve seen, you know, some stuff about the life of learning new skills. You know, on LinkedIn a lot. And the thing that I saw, I think, this morning, was when you’re 80, you know, and you look back and you see 30 years ago, you know, when you didn’t know something. The difference is you just got started. So hopefully in this solution, you can also get started. I see some more action in the chat. So wanted to, okay, yeah, we’re going to circle back to that on another call. So I think the next slide here is Q&A, and I know some people have already been dropping comments in the chat. If anybody has waited until now to ask some questions, get some more understanding. We’d love to answer any of your questions that you might have on how to get started. You know, really overhauling that talent management from a reactive approach to more proactive.

David Forry 43:49
yeah, a fun quote. Don’t worry about getting it right. Just get it started. I like that. Thanks, Robert.

David Forry 44:16
Here’s one for you. And here comes the chats. Thank you everyone for bringing them in.

Brandon Hall Group Moderator 44:26
Yep, I’m going to try and get this HR and talent are separate functions or the partnerships are lacking. How do you create a bridge between them?

Jaclyn Zhuang 44:41
I think you can have a project management office, but that’s for me, from what I’ve seen, is more on the execution side. I think the first step is really to bring together the two functions to talk about what they cover and how they see the future, and really start drafting that share. Shared goal. And once you have that shared goal and and really talk, you know, better understand the linkages between talent, especially acquisition, and the ongoing employee development pieces, which is so crucial, like I mentioned with the Amdocs case, and then you can start talking about how you want to execute on those joint goals. And this is where then perhaps a project management office might come in one step ahead.

Jaclyn Zhuang 45:31
I guess I did have to respond to you, glad you’re on a good path there.

Brandon Hall Group Moderator 45:39
Christina, I’m just going upwards in chat with Nicole, working on higher ed, tenured professor unions are a real point.

Jaclyn Zhuang 45:50
That’s true. Skills versus tenure is something I think we also have seen amongst honest consulting companies, where when you think about deployment of consultants that has generally come from networking. And you know, who knows whom to get which projects. And what’s interesting is that our customers were consulting companies and global consulting companies. They really want to shift to a skills based approach because of two things. One, their employees are telling them, Hey, I need to understand how my career growth is taking place here. And it’s hard with a distributed, global workforce to completely depend on networking to do that. And two, this comes down to some of the economics around things where some of our customers are starting to think about, you know, how can I bring in the right people, the right skills so that I can move the existing people out of the knowledge into other serving other clients, and drive greater drive greater utilization across the board by fulfilling the client’s needs across the board more quickly. So it’s, again, a more skills based approach, but I totally get the constraints you’re facing with this. You know, the professors and higher ed and the unions that is tricky

David Forry 47:18
and Nicole you might be looking at advancement or promotion, or, you know, pay, or, you know, something of that nature. But also, you know, try to use it to identify skills that they may need to improve. Focus on those areas as well. You know, even if they do have tenure, and you know, you can still support them, you know, using, you know, talent analytics to identify some areas that they need improvement on and focus on those areas to shorten those gaps. So, you know, sometimes, yeah, I also think it could be applied to succession planning.

Jaclyn Zhuang 48:00
Absolutely, completely agree. So succession planning. So we have a module on that within talent management that’s really skills based, and it takes a global approach, and some of our customers have used that module to report up to the CEO and board, especially for listed companies on their succession plans. Some of our customers in the retail side, where you know the store manager is so crucial to the functioning of our different stores, have had deep succession plans with multiple successes. And some of our customers have even gone to the extent of telling their employees, hey, if you’ve been identified as the successor because of your skills, not that you have the full set of skills, but you’re on your way there. We’re going to give you an extra 3000 euro to upskill or re skill, because you identify as high potential based on your current skills and proficiencies, and we want to see you get there.

Jaclyn Zhuang 48:59
Okay, sorry, I was scrolling up, and I got caught up. When more chats come up, I see Shiraz eight, full integrator of existing ERP systems. Or is this a standalone that needs to be implemented? So right now, most of our integrations are focused on hrs, HCM systems. I think we can get back to you on the technical on these technical integrations piece, we are thinking about further integrations with more ERP systems, but I would encourage you to join the live demo session to to learn more here.

David Forry 49:44
Yeah, thank you. Anne, any best practices on skills, capability and validation? Obviously, that’s an important one, one that a lot of people are looking at, you know, that kind of goes back to, you know, just because somebody said that they’ve been in a job for 10. Years, did they actually learn anything or, you know, how do we really show that a skill that people say they have, you know? How do we validate that, you know, what type of you know, obviously, there’s assessment platforms out there, but in my opinion, before you jump in Jaclyn, it really depends on the organization, because it means something for every organization. Means something different for every department that you’re working in. Obviously, you get into some of those data roles and people that are in tech, the tech space, you know, those are very specific skills that might need to be learned and known. And then you get into some other things that might be, what some call soft skills, or, you know, those are other areas that need to be measured and understood and validated.

Jaclyn Zhuang 50:49
Yeah, I would say within the Eightfold system itself, we have manager and peer assessments of capabilities, you know, proficiencies, including your own employee assessment. So for example, we could see in a sliding scale, here’s where I think I am. Through our AI models, we can provide a benchmark of where you should be, and then your peers and managers can also provide an assessment of where they see your skills are at. For some of our customers, particularly in the medical or banking industries, I think it’s a legal requirement for some of these assessments and accreditation to come from specific providers. So we actually have integrations with them where they do these tests. You know, the assessments externally, and that information gets fed into the Eightfold system, and they’re not allowed to tweak that assessment on where their proficiencies lie. One other aspect that we’re building out today is really understanding the work you do on an ongoing basis to get that more objective, up to date view of your skills as demonstrated through your everyday work, as well as the proficiency of your skills, which is mapped against companies for each job functions, their growth profiles. So these are some of the ways we’re thinking about it. Hopefully this helps.

David Forry 52:13
Thank you, Jaclyn, you’ve provided a lot of great examples, and I always love the details when somebody’s going through something really understanding, how can I do this? And I always like to also hear how somebody else has done this, you know, gives me a little confidence to go into the solution. So I think the chat has kind of quieted down here. I know that there’s one more, there’s that raffle, Shea, if you want to do that, and then I’d love to Jaclyn will end with you and hear your closing thoughts on talent, intelligence.

Brandon Hall Group Moderator 52:49
Thanks, David, and thank you to everybody who’s hung around to the very end here. So to announce our raffle winner, I’m excited to announce the very lucky winners. So winning 50% off the 2026 excellence conference this year is Michael mama and then winning a free submission to our excellence in Action Program is Nicole Todd. So congratulations, Michael and Nicole. We will be sending an email afterwards with some additional information.

David Forry 53:32
Thank you all for joining us. This PDF will be sent to you as well as recording within the next 24 hours. Jaclyn, thank you so much for your time and all of your wisdom.

Jaclyn Zhuang 53:43
Thank you for having me here, David and Shay and thank you everyone for your questions. Very happy if you have more questions just to follow up and dive deeper into your needs, around skills, thoughts, AI best practices and so forth.

Brandon Hall Group Moderator 54:03
Thank you, everyone.