[00:00:00] LIGIA: Welcome to the New Talent Code, a podcast with practical insights, dedicated to empowering change agents in HR to push the envelope in their talent functions. We’re your hosts. I’m Ligia Zamora.

[00:00:19] JASON: And I’m Jason Cerrato. We’re bringing you the best thought leaders in the talent space to share stories about how they are designing the workforce of the future, transforming processes, rethinking old constructs, and leveraging cutting-edge technology to solve today’s pressing talent issues.

[00:00:34] It’s what we call the new talent code.

[00:00:38] LIGIA: So, if you’re looking for practical, actionable advice to get your workforce future-ready, you’ve come to the right place.

[00:00:48] JASON: If you’re wondering how to start your talent intelligence journey, today’s guest is here to inspire you. Melissa Kaiser is the Executive Director of Global Skills and Career Development Strategy with Bristol Myers Squibb. They are at the beginning of their journey with AI to identify talent in the demanding world of pharmaceuticals.

[00:01:05] In this can’t-miss conversation, Melissa shared some key takeaways, including how they’re infusing skills into all of their talent practices and also just launched a new career path initiative called My Growth, where employees have created almost a thousand profiles in just two days. Be sure to listen to our entire conversation with Melissa from Bristol Myers Squibb, starting right now.

[00:01:27] LIGIA: Welcome, Melissa. It’s great to have you on the podcast.

[00:01:29] MELISSA: Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.

[00:01:33] LIGIA: We are, too, a lot to cover, but before we get started as a way of introduction, we are fascinated by nonlinear career paths, and we’re firm believers that people can and should try new things in their careers so that they’re hired for their potential.

[00:01:47] So, with that, tell us a little bit more about yourself. How did your career start, and was this role what you always had in mind?

[00:01:55] MELISSA: I find that most people don’t have perfect linear paths and I fit that role as well. So I never dreamed that I would actually be an HR leading talent initiatives. And so I actually started out.

[00:02:12] And the financial services and played more of a business role. I was very nontraditional. I was working, going to college and doing that part time while I worked full time and found myself naturally gravitating toward how do I. help people develop? How do I help people grow? And through promotions over time, I became a manager and then eventually was asked to join the HR function in a talent strategy role.

[00:02:45] I’ve been in many different roles across all of HR, serving different capacities with the exception of benefits. When this role came up, it was funny. I had a conversation with my leader about my career aspirations. And I said, I don’t think the role I want has been invented yet. Sure enough, a year later, the skills and career development role was posted.

[00:03:08] And here I am today, the new journey embarking on a new frontier and learning a lot. And that I think has been part of my career journey has. Stepping into new territory and taking on the willingness to learn new things.
[00:03:24] JASON: I love that. And I think that’s a big part of why we’re here today. The reason why people enjoy the new talent code is because just as you’re learning, people are learning along with you.

[00:03:36] And we are all here to crack the new talent code in how we can. We think differently, how we operate differently, how we manage and measure differently in the new approaches to hiring and managing talent in the modern world, using a skills based approach. So can you tell us how you’re approaching hiring and managing talent today?

[00:03:57] How is that different from how recruiting and managing was done even just a few years ago?

[00:04:02] MELISSA: One of the passion areas that I’ve had is about the employee experience, and one of the things that all organizations experience is how do you start to do something at scale, and so the skills world was always a little bit ominous and daunting because we didn’t have the right tools to enable us to really understand the skills of our workforce.

[00:04:26] So now with these digital platforms and AI, we really have the ability now to better understand the skills of our people and to be able to help people navigate that from a career development perspective. So, how are we managing some of our talent practices today? Instead of saying we’re a skills based organization, I like to use that we are infusing skills into all of our people and talent practices.

[00:04:57] I like that. So what we’ve been doing is taking a look at all of the different parts of our existing talent and or employee life cycle, however you want to refer to it, and saying where does it make sense to have skills become an integral part of how we’re managing those practices. So we actually did start in talent acquisition, Looking at how we evolve our practices to be more skills-based instead of just looking at experience and credentials, the typical way that we’ve always done in the past, how are we allowing for those nontraditional methods of being able to develop skills?

[00:05:42] Additionally, in our talent practices, and we’ve just launched this week with Eightfold around what we’ve branded internally as My Growth, this is a way to foster individual and tailored career development paths. So understanding the skills of our workforce and then being able to look at how do we align that to opportunities through open roles.

[00:06:08] So even starting to look at how we can. Tap our internal talent for open roles, the recruiters doing internal and external recruiting. And then how do we foster more mobility and skill acquisition through short term assignments like projects and tours of duty?

[00:06:27] LIGIA: I love this whole infusing skills into your talent strategies and your processes.

[00:06:32] As you thought through, all right, where do we start? I think a lot of people struggle with where do I start and how do I sell it? What was your strategy? Was it more demand based? So the different functions came to you and said, all right, let’s start here. Or did you guys have an overall plan of how you were going to go about it?

[00:06:52] MELISSA: What we’ve been able to bring to life is something that is really about how have we been solving a business challenge and a business problem. Our actual first pilot about a year ago was a result of a business area, cell therapy, a key area for BMS, saying that they were facing the need of having people hired more quickly.

[00:07:19] And developing skills because self therapy is an emerging area of science and There are many transferable skills to that area. And so how did we start to look at people who can be potential skill development into cell therapy? And so that is really the burning platform that enabled us to start going down this path.

[00:07:46] Additionally, we found that business areas were. trying to solve this problem without technology, starting to take inventory of the skills of their people, starting to create their homegrown project banks like SharePoint and other platforms to leverage. And so we partnered with them on a proof of concept and a pilot, which we’re pleased to say now we are launching globally this week, in fact, so exciting.

[00:08:18] Thank you.

[00:08:19] JASON: One of the questions that we often get around where do I start is even if people know where do they start, how do you avoid this becoming a science project right? And becoming overly complicated. Part of this was around talent attraction, but also highly competitive talent acquisition landscape.

[00:08:39] So in that landscape of competing priorities, how do you focus and keep the car on the road?

[00:08:45] MELISSA: Making this simple, of course, is one of the challenges in leading into this new space. There was so many unknowns. Not everybody had perfect answers to the imperfect questions that we were asking. So what we started to do was very simply look at what are the business problems that can start to be solved by taking a skills based approach.

[00:09:12] We have Business leaders saying we’re not hiring people fast enough and we’re not getting people with all of the right qualifications. So let’s start with looking at that practice first, because that was more of where the push was coming from. And so we look to how do we redefine some of our talent acquisition practices to be more broad and start to include the skills and experience versus just those degree requirements.

[00:09:42] Thank you. Additionally, I think as we look at internally, our employee surveys told us that people were frustrated with navigating career development internally. And so we took those two primary areas of focus to say, these are where we’re going to start solving first in the talent acquisition space and in the career development space so that we can have.

[00:10:11] And responds to really the voice of the customer.

[00:10:15] LIGIA: How did you define success when you first set up this pilot with the business? We

[00:10:20] MELISSA: didn’t really know what to expect. So thankfully we had business leaders who were really willing to go on this journey with us. And we set the expectation that this would be about learning.

[00:10:33] And seeing do we think we could make a difference. So in the 16 week pilot that we ran, we did end up seeing time to fill reduce and that was through just the power of the matching technology and the capability and being able to find people that we weren’t finding as fast before. Just the feedback coming from our employees and leveraging the platform from leaders and, and using the platform to post projects and opportunities and how it shifted the dialogue and it provided a different conversation than before, because now you have a language around skills that gives you how do I navigate this discussion where in the past it’s been very foggy and gray.

[00:11:23] JASON: I love that. We talk a lot about how when you reframe the process and you reframe the decision and that creates different outcomes, right?

[00:11:32] MELISSA: That’s right.

[00:11:32] JASON: Were there some aha moments in uncovering untapped audiences or transferable skills that you weren’t looking at otherwise?

[00:11:41] MELISSA: Some aha moments have happened throughout this journey as we are looking at how do we apply skills to our different talent practices.

[00:11:51] There’s our own internal change of behavior that we have to pick up as an HR function. And really, how did we start to bring our recruiters along the journey? How did we help them understand how to leverage? this platform and a skills based approach to consider candidates we didn’t consider before. That also fuels different conversations with leaders than before.

[00:12:22] When we say, how do we focus on what are the most critical skills for success versus everything, it helps us really narrow the pool and it helps us to find those right candidates faster. I would say the behavior change you have to drive with the people doing the work and the processes to enable this is really key to then seeing different results if you start to leverage technology.

[00:12:52] LIGIA: You started tapping into one of the topics I really love, which is big and hairy, which is change management. So talk to us a little bit about how much effort you put up front. What’s the scope?

[00:13:05] MELISSA: You cannot. Under index on the change side of this equation. And again, what I would say is that open dialogue with our business partners were really key.

[00:13:18] We are going on this learning journey together. And what is the change we seek to see and how does that show up in our behaviors as leaders and employees? So we did start first with leaders and preparing the landscape of what is the role, how does this shift, how will this shift the conversations you’ll be having with your team?

[00:13:42] And we gave them about a month headstart on using the technology and the platform Before we introduce this and brought employees into the platform and then again, we tried to also say. This is new, but it’s in response to hearing your feedback. So it’s not going to be perfect. It’s AI, AI was definitely something that everyone in our organization is trying to get better awareness of and even upskilling in.

[00:14:15] And so we positioned it as. Let’s get in there. Let’s try this out. And we probably can’t do any harm in the career development space. And in fact, this can help us do a better job of giving you visibility into opportunities and having those important career conversations. Now, what I will say, and I’m really excited about how we approach this is after we did the pilot, and we knew we were going to continue investing down this path.

[00:14:45] of the skills journey. We started offering early access opportunities to the business, which really allowed us to partner with the business based on what was the problem that they were trying to solve. So we had our IT function who was expanding in India. And so we worked with them to say. Hey, if you’re wanting to build your workforce faster, let’s look at how we leverage this platform and the skills based approach to do that quicker.

[00:15:16] So a lot of things where, even though it’s a common platform, we found all of these different use cases to spotlight. Partner with the business and anytime the business is coming to H. R. saying they want in, that’s a great position to be in.

[00:15:32] JASON: Now, Melissa, we’ve had a lot of guests on the podcast that have talked about how transformational this really can be.

[00:15:40] A lot of the leaders like yourself have been talking about in order to do this right. Everything is on the table. You have to talk about culture. You have to talk about process. You have to talk about policy. You have to talk about leadership. So as you’ve been rolling this out and driving some of these conversations and these decisions and building this demand for your capability within the organization, what are some of the other things that you’re looking for?

[00:16:07] Implications and discussions that you’ve had across the organization. Have there been policy changes and process changes and cultural outcomes as a result of this?

[00:16:18] MELISSA: Yes. And yes, so this is not for the weak stomach, right? This has actually been really hard. To get started, because it can feel very overwhelming, because when you realize what you’re talking about from a skills journey perspective, you realize and discover that you’re really transforming the whole HR operating model.

[00:16:47] Which is not usually where you start out at, because I don’t think anybody would just say, yes, I’m agreeing to go shift our entire HR operating model. And skill seems harmless at first, when you talk about it, it makes sense. But then when you think about you have ingrained processes and practices that have built up over a period of almost a hundred years of how we’ve managed the workforce, that takes a lot of untangling.

[00:17:16] And so when I paint a picture of it now to people, I say, remember when everyone was converting to work day and we talked about how big of a list that was and people hired consultants and people hired teams to come in and look at your process, redesign them and make those changes and get them ready for the digital platform.

[00:17:40] I compare this very similarly in terms of how do you look at your talent practices with intention and say, where does skills make sense? It doesn’t make sense everywhere. Right. But it does make sense to put it into key processes around our people. And then we have to say, what’s the pull through so that.

[00:18:03] The language of skills can talk all across our processes. Now, the great thing that’s different with this than like a workday transformation is we have the AI, we have the technology that is making this a lighter lift, but you still can’t underscore the partnership that you have to have across the HR operating model to.

[00:18:29] Agree on what’s the first step we’re going to take and because this is a I, it allows us to go on this very iterative journey. So what we’ve taken on as work for this year is we took a 1. 0 step and every part of our HR operating model to start to bring skills into the vernacular, into the language of how we’re managing our processes.

[00:18:54] So I think that’s the part I’m really excited about and so proud of our HR team is that we’ve all locked hands on what’s our part in committing to this journey because my team is only three people, right? And we weren’t in a position where in the past, right? We’re bringing hundreds of people in to do this work.

[00:19:16] We’ve got AI helping us. So how are we leveraging that? And how are we leveraging the partnerships across our COEs to really lock arms on how we’re going to progress this work?

[00:19:28] LIGIA: How did you and your organization come across Talent Intelligence? It sounds like you were doing some of this infusion of skills or skills analysis manually.

[00:19:38] How did you discover that talent intelligence existed? Figure it out. Whether it was a fit for you and then sell it internally.

[00:19:47] MELISSA: So I would say we’re still on a journey around talent intelligence, but we have a vision, right? We have a vision of how do we start to bring holistic insights around our workforce.

[00:19:59] And when we think about skills as data about our people, then that’s going to help us make better decisions in the long run. Like a LinkedIn platform Might have more knowledge about the skills of our workforce than we do That is a call to action our own skills of our workforce. Let’s also understand what are the skills that we need to be developing more of to lead in the marketplace as an organization.

[00:20:36] And then how do we proactively help our workforce to close those gaps? And we know all the value propositions around developing your workforce engagement retention. This is a key enabler of how we do that better going forward. So that’s been our guiding principles.

[00:20:54] JASON: Now, I love words and I’ve been paying close attention to the words you use and you’ve talked about platform and continuous and journey and holistic as you’ve been on this journey and build out this holistic view of talent.

[00:21:10] You recently mentioned how you’re growing and evolving and recently come online with talent management. Some of the learnings that you gained from starting with talent acquisition. to then prepare for talent management.

[00:21:24] MELISSA: We launched both with talent acquisition and talent management at the same time.

[00:21:31] What we did though is we just had different kind of use cases and selling points that we use depending on the audience we were interacting with. So I would say holistically we learned about internally when we have internal employees that are expressing interest in a role. Sometimes that’s met with fear.

[00:21:53] That they don’t want to tell their managers that they want to apply for a different role. And so what we had to do was help people get comfortable with that from a change perspective of talking about what does talent hoarding look like and how does it benefit the organization if we actually encourage people to pursue opportunities that they’re interested in.

[00:22:17] And so I would say that would be one area where we had a lesson learned. I think. Again, change management is a huge, you can never do it. Perfect. We always continuously evolving and adapting our change approach. And then of course the leadership and sponsorship of this effort, their support of how this is critical to driving business needs and our commitment to developing our people has been central to this work being successful.

[00:22:49] JASON: What about the onboarding and kind of guidance for managers to make them aware of what you’re now providing to employees?

[00:22:59] MELISSA: So we’re actually doing that right now. We are having manager forum sessions as we have launched this week. What we’re calling is a soft launch. Everything that we’re doing from a change perspective is very intentional where we’re saying these are options.

[00:23:15] These are new tools and resources to enhance what you’re already doing today as a leader. And then we’ve been having manager forums where it gives managed safety to ask their questions, not in front of their employees, and be able to give us real time feedback. That’s a gift. Right. And sometimes they’re catching something that maybe we didn’t solve for because we’re solving for a hundred other things as we were preparing for lunch.

[00:23:44] One of the things that we’ve decided to do is these projects and tours of duty. There’s a lot of gray and managing that. It’s more about how are we putting the keys to the kingdom out there and then saying, here’s some initial guardrails. Help us figure out what additional guardrails will lead to this being more successful as we mature in this space.

[00:24:08] And so we’ve been using QRG codes and things like that for people to be able to provide feedback. And we have a whole support group in our HR team who fields questions and sends that over to us as our COE role to be able to navigate that additional feedback.

[00:24:26] LIGIA: So I’m curious, Melissa, what advice would you have for our listeners who say, sure, that works for you.

[00:24:33] That’s BMS. You guys are a large company with a lot of resources and a lot of money, or you’re in the sciences, so therefore you’re going to be trying things out. If you were to give of advice, what elements in a company or in a culture make it possible for something like this to be able to come to fruition and have a successful outcome?

[00:24:55] MELISSA: If you would have asked me three years ago if I would have thought BMS would have embraced this type of approach, I don’t know that I would have said a resounding yes, because it’s change, and that’s hard for any organization. I think the universal truth here is, That the landscape of the workforce has changed.

[00:25:18] The people that we are looking at for opportunities have different expectations than generations before. And so I think the way that we are embracing. Technology and new capabilities like AI help us to fear it less. It actually helps us to realize that, hey, if AI can make something better for my quality of life in the roles that I play in an organization, then why not?

[00:25:46] When we can start to share those success stories and we say somebody has stepped out onto the frozen over lake and says, I’m ice skating now come on over and join me, that’s really powerful. And it gives people permission to keep stepping out of their comfort zone and embrace What is the possibility?

[00:26:08] This is an optional thing that we’ve rolled out to our organization. And just through early access over 20 percent adoption. And our numbers from the first day of launch to today, which was our second day of launch. We’ve had almost a thousand profiles created just in these two days through an email launch.

[00:26:27] I just encourage anyone who’s thinking about getting started. Skills is definitely something that’s not going away. And so the sooner you start, the better.

[00:26:37] JASON: You mentioned the incremental approach with kind of the 1. 0 and the 2. 0. What do you know is next on the plan? And then what would you like to see next for the organization?

[00:26:51] MELISSA: What is next on the plan is how do we start to really. Rationalize the skills information. We plan to help our people talk about proficiencies. So how much of a skill do we need? Those are always some critical questions. Where do I see myself with a skill? Versus where does my manager see that and how do we make sure we’re on the same page?

[00:27:17] That’s part of our evolution And then I think we’re going to continue to learn from Our employee base as we’ve launched with the project marketplace. I think we’ll have to continue to get better and more fluid around these agile ways of working and moving Toward different structures in the workplace where they’re not always linear and functional, but into these kind of cross functional teams with the right skills moving forward the right pieces of work.

[00:27:50] And so I think that’s what’s ahead. I think this fuels us forward and being able to navigate through that more seamlessly.

[00:27:59] LIGIA: Great. We always end the podcast with any practical advice, but I feel like you’ve done the whole episode of practical advice, so I’m going to end it in a different fashion, which is, let’s say it’s five years forward, five years from now, or at some point in the future, you’re looking back on your experience at BMS and this transformation that you drove.

[00:28:23] What would you point back to with pride? What would make you feel like this was a true success? If you had something that you’d point back to and say, yeah, we really hit it out of the ballpark. What are you looking to attain?

[00:28:35] MELISSA: What already is beginning to fill me with pride over what’s happening is just that we’re changing the game for the employee experience at work.

[00:28:47] And when you can give people a conversation that creates a level playing field, our people are are impacting the lives of people everywhere with what they’re creating and inventing. And do I want to give them the best employee experience I can? Absolutely. I want them to be able to feel like they’re seen for the skills that they bring to the table.

[00:29:12] They’re valued and they have new opportunities to create more innovative medicines. And I think that’s what makes me get up and go to work every day. And that’s what I’m excited about.

[00:29:24] LIGIA: That makes me want to go work for BMS. I love it. Thank you so much, Melissa. I loved it.

[00:29:31] JASON: I’ve got goosebumps. I appreciate you.

[00:29:32] I appreciate you sharing your story. Yeah, it’s great to hear the intent of the approach and the journey and where you want to go with it, but also tying it back to what you’re trying to accomplish for the people within BMS. So happy to be a small part of it, but really excited to see where it goes.

[00:29:51] Thank you everyone for listening to this episode. It was a wonderful conversation of BMS and their skills journey. Thank you again Melissa for sharing the story and that’s a wonderful episode. Thanks again.

[00:30:03] LIGIA: Thanks for listening to the New Talent Code. This is a podcast produced by Eightfold AI. If you’d like to learn more about us, please visit us at www.eightfold.ai, and you can find us on all your favorite social media sites. We’d love to connect and continue the conversation.