Talent intelligence is having its perfect storm moment.
Purpose-built AI changes everything, organizations are leaning into skills to fully leverage talent, and HR knows it needs a more dynamic understanding of talent in the context of work in order to deploy a ready and durable workforce. Making conditions ripe for AI-driven insights about where skills exist or need to, how the business can better fill gaps, and what’s really stopping us.
Mercer’s Jess Von Bank is joined by Eightfold AI’s Jason Cerrato and Rebecca Warren to explore Mercer’s latest research: whose job is upskilling, what’s stopping the workforce from attaining in-demand skills on their own behalf, and how can better insights and access to real career mobility help?
Key topics:
Watch this on-demand webinar to decode talent intelligence, understand the correlation to skills and development, and learn how to examine talent through a deeper lens so you can help your people–and your business–grow.
Rebecca Warren, Jason Cerrato, and Jess Von Bank discussed the shift from a leaky talent pipeline to a healthy talent portfolio, emphasizing the importance of talent intelligence. They highlighted the need for agile, skills-centric strategies and continuous learning. Key metrics included 75% of HR leaders feeling confident about providing resources but 82% of employees actively seeking new jobs due to perceived disconnects. They stressed the importance of aligning talent goals with business objectives, breaking down silos, and using technology to map skills and career paths dynamically. The conversation underscored the necessity of designing work for people and ensuring continuous communication and engagement.
Rebecca Warren 0:03
Hey everyone. Thanks so much for joining us today from wherever you are in the world and whatever time it is in your space. Super excited to welcome you all to our webinar on breaking down talent intelligence, how the right insights can help you shift from a leaky talent pipeline to a healthy talent portfolio, and we’re going to have a little fun with that in a few minutes, a few housekeeping things as we get started, if you look towards the bottom of your screen, you’ll see some widgets that you can use during the event there is potentially related reading in the resources section, feel free to ask us questions in the Q and A. If we can’t get to your question during the webinar, we may answer it after the session ends in a follow-up message in a LinkedIn post or maybe a blog post. So as we get started here, I would love to have our folks introduce themselves. I’m going to kick it over to Jason and then to Jess. I’ll then introduce myself, and we’ll get going. So Jason, tell us who you are.
Jason Cerrato 1:10
Thank you so much. Rebecca. Jason Cerrato, VP of Talent Center Transformation, here at Eightfold AI, I get the chance to work with Rebecca every day on our transformation team, helping organizations on their town intelligence journey. I’ve been with Eightfold now for almost three and a half years in a variety of roles, because I have a bit of a hybrid background. I’ve been working on the product here at Eightfold for some time. I’ve been an industry analyst in this space, and also been a talent leader for a Fortune 50 so from that time, I’ve had a chance to work with Rebecca. I’ve also had a chance to work as an analyst with Jess in the past. So excited to be here for this session and for this conversation. So thank you, everyone for joining us, and with that, I’ll hand it over to Jess.
Jess Von Bank 2:02
I like the way you posed the question, Rebecca, it feels like I should have a spiritual answer. Tell us who you are, or I don’t know if anybody else does this every year. I remember at some point in the year to update my bio slide, since we have to give our bio to a few people along the way, and every year I change the number for how many years I’ve been in the industry, about to change it to 22 which is crazy, because I am 22 right? I love it. 22 years in the industry. I started as a recruiter way back in the day, and worked my way through practitioner, corporate recruiting ranks, and then went to the vendor side, because I was rather obsessed with how we create and sustain the right candidate, recruiter, employee, employee experience for everybody. So went around the vendor space and then joined Leap Gen now Mercer as an analyst and advisor, still working with vendors, but also helping on our HR transformation side of the business. Essentially, I’m a storyteller at heart. I don’t think we do a good enough job of connecting the dots between the solutions and experiences we just design and try to sustain for people and the impact and value for business. And we have lots of work still to do in that space, so I guess I still have a job for years to come.
Rebecca Warren 3:36
I think we all have much to discover on this journey of HR, TA, talent intelligence, all of the things that are coming for us. So awesome. Rebecca Warren, as Jason said, I am at Eightfold. I’ve been here coming up on four years, similar beginning to my career in talent acquisition, starting out in recruiting, working my working my way up to leadership positions, worked in restaurant, retail, CPG, now at Eightfold, started in customer success, helped build up the team there for the last couple of years, and now super excited to be able To work with Jason and our small but mighty team on talent center transformation, where we help folks think about moving to talent-focused work as opposed to jobs. So with that, let’s take a look at our agenda, and I’m going to tell you a little story as we think about what this looks like, so you can see some weather-related, ocean-related themes here. And before we jump into our first slide, I’m going to do a bit of a dramatic reading. So you all get ready. I’ve been watching it. Um, episodes of Vikings over the last couple of weeks. And so this is where my head went when we talked about setting up the session. So ready for a dramatic reading from Rebecca? I am ready. Okay, here we go. Just imagine a band of determined Vikings gazing out at the endless ocean, dreaming of new lands rich with opportunity. These lands are not just destinations but symbols of a profound desire for exploration growth and the chance to reshape their communities into something stronger and more vibrant. We’re not going to talk about the pillaging piece so building a healthy talent pipeline is much the same understanding the potential inside your walls, seeking out new and diverse talent to complement your team, and crafting a future where every individual is able to contribute to the success of your company on the basis of skills, rather than holding a place On an org chart. So join us as we journey together through charting the course, navigating the waters and discovering new shores, all on today’s episode of breaking down talent intelligence, how the right insights can help you shift from a leaky talent pipeline to a healthy talent portfolio.
Jess Von Bank 6:22
All right, I want a trailer. I want to chat and make a trailer to go with that.
Jason Cerrato 6:30
This is why we love you, Rebecca, and I have goosebumps.
Rebecca Warren 6:33
I have goosebumps. My husband told me to use a Viking voice. I’m like, I don’t know what that means. I don’t think I can do that. A Viking voice.
Jess Von Bank 6:40
Well, I’m in Minneapolis. Probably have some horns around here. I could have gone.
Rebecca Warren 6:45
We talked about that, right? The Minnesota connection. Since that’s where I used to be, that’s where you are, too. Jason was like, Is this a Vikings Minnesota thing? I’m like, it could be.
Jason Cerrato 6:55
I’m really glad that that’s the show you were watching and it wasn’t the sopranos or something. I really like dramatic storytelling to kick us off on this discussion today.
Rebecca Warren 7:07
So as we do that, right? So what I wanted to start with first is when you think about right, when the Vikings were trying to figure out what is their next step, it looked like they weren’t saying, Hey, let’s go next door. They’re like, we want to go someplace we’ve never been and we don’t know what it looks like, right? It’s a distant land that somebody saw in a vision or an idea that something is out there. When we think about skills, we think about talent, intelligence, we think about where we want to go as a company, we’re looking to go someplace that we haven’t been before, right? So we’re discovering those new shores, and we have to figure out where we want to go before we can decide how we want to get there. So I want to start our conversation today talking about discovering those new shores, like when we talk about a leaky talent pipeline versus a healthy talent portfolio. I want us to spend some time talking about what is a healthy talent portfolio before we talk about what that map looks like, or that course, looks like to get there. So we’ve got some things to think about here as we talk about discovering new shores. We’ve got a poll here that we’re going to ask you to take. We’re looking at the question of, how would you rate your organization’s talent portfolio today, and that’ll help us kick off some of the conversation. We have some loose ideas of what we want to talk about, but it may shift based on what we hear back. So we’ve got options for exceptional, strong, average or weak. So once we start seeing those responses roll in.
Jess Von Bank 8:50
I love this analogy. While people are answering having kind of grown up in this industry, in the talent acquisition space, first, once a recruiter, always a recruiter. So I can say this. I know this to be true, and I also love talent acquisition as a discipline, but I will say it is the most reactive, transactional discipline of business, and we’ve done it to ourselves. It’s no one’s fault in particular. But when we think about, you know, I love this adventure analogy and sort of navigating new territory, we’ve put the talent acquisition, the entire talent discipline, anybody involved in putting programs and policies and strategies together around talent probably feel like they haven’t had much of a map. And that’s right, you know, intelligence, like you’re literally trying to navigate territory without much directional, you know, sort of insight and navigation. We have done this to ourselves as a business, and I think that this talent. Intelligence conversation is really critical to have, because that literally is the navigation we need to align talent to the business. And so I can’t wait to see how people are rating themselves.
Rebecca Warren 10:13
We’re kind of pretty solid in that middle there, aren’t we? So we’ve got some folks who have said strong, some have said, average. I don’t know if it’s good or bad that we haven’t had anybody polarizing on both of the extreme opposites, but we’re all somewhere along this journey, right, trying to figure out, what does that what does a healthy portfolio look like? And then how do we get there? So how do we determine what that distant shore looks like when we think about a healthy pipeline? Jason, let’s talk to this slide a little bit, and I’m actually going to load it, and I want to talk about the right side, as opposed to the left side first. So what are we talking about when we think about these portfolio strategies and what we’ve got showing on the screen here with not just linear paths, but work that happens on the dots and in between the dots.
Jason Cerrato 11:11
Yeah, I think this is around reframing the conversation and reframing the exercise and the activity. When you start to organize around talent and what people are interested in and capable of and potentially able to learn, dealing with an uncertain future for where we’re all headed, working with AI, reshaping our companies, moving in new areas, you need to build agility in your workforce, in your organization, to respond to a variety of potential futures. So if you think about it, you know I’m saying this as another recruiter on this panel right where I always refer to myself as a recruiter by trade, and it’s embedded in me. That’s the way I look at the world, and I was responsible for developing critical skill pipelines and diversity pipelines, but pipelines are called pipelines for a very specific reason, right? They’re aimed in a specific direction for a specific purpose that, by definition, is not necessarily agile. Right? When you start to aim for agility. You need to create a process that is designed for a variety of potential futures, and to understand that, you need to understand, what do people want to do, what are they capable of, and what does that lead to, and that could lead in a variety of different directions. So the conversation around skills helps open up that discussion, and it also requires organizing around people rather than organizing around jobs, because it reframes the discussion. And the other reason why that’s important is because the roles of the future and where work is headed, increasingly sits in between the jobs that exist today. They’re increasingly becoming hybrid roles that are combining functions and jobs that exist today for these things that we don’t necessarily know what they are yet their job titles that don’t necessarily exist. There was just an article that I grabbed today that one of the newest roles is this chief transformation officer. What is that? It’s a variety of things from a variety of disciplines. So, you know, these new roles aren’t necessarily the circles on that right hand chart. They’re going to be circles that sit in between those circles. They’re going to be roles that are a mixture of finance and operations and it, or maybe this transformation officer is a mixture of HR, and you know it, and you know some other function, maybe AI finance, who knows? So the whole point of this is by understanding your talent and what skills they have and maybe what’s happening in the market, or what capability they have to learn things quickly, it creates agility to mix where they want to go and where the business is heading, to Create the greater likelihood that those two things can potentially meet at the same place in the future. I see Jess reacting to that.
Jess Von Bank 14:28
We all tell agility. Agility is such a buzzword, but the opposite of agility is rigidity, and what you described is exactly right. Jobs are too rigid. Required experience, education, previous work experience is way too rigid and narrow and again, reactive. It’s rear view mirror stuff. It’s not forward looking. It’s also not inclusive. This is you guys. This is a die strategy as well. It doesn’t have to start that way, but trust. Me that it checks that box. This is a more inclusive, flexible, adaptable, yes, agile way of thinking about people, so you can flex them for the needs of the business. And guess what? People want to be flexed. They expect to be nurtured, developed. They expect you to move them in the direction of the business, so they can continue to have impact and make contributions, so that pay and promotion will follow that impact and contribution. People want this kind of expectation. It’s really good for business. It’s also more inclusive, like, this is such a good thing for everybody?
Rebecca Warren 15:42
Okay? So defining in a loose way what a healthy talent portfolio looks like. I heard agile capabilities focused on people inclusive and flexible, very kind of morphing with needs and with expectations and interests, not only of people, but of the business. And how do those two things come together? Does that sound like we’ve got sort of a definition, or at least some keywords, on what that could look like?
Jess Von Bank 16:16
That actually sounds like the mandate that every CEO is giving every CHRO.
Rebecca Warren 16:24
That’s right, that’s right, activating it.
Jess Von Bank 16:26
Like CEOs say, people are their number one asset, number one asset. We hear that all the time, people are my number one asset, but they have a hard time making people their number one strategic value adding asset, because it’s all in the activation. So, yeah, I love all of those words that you just repeated back. Sounds like a pretty good HR mandate.
Jason Cerrato 16:50
I just read a couple different it’s, you know, it’s the time of the year where everyone’s talking about the top priorities for 2025 and I just read a couple different studies where, you know, what we just listed out were number two, number three, number four, for top priorities for 2025 but when I was a talent leader, what we just listed out were the top priorities of our CEO and and I’m Talking about 2013 2014 2015 right. We’ve been trying to do this now for quite some time. It still is an issue, right?
Rebecca Warren 17:27
But now consistent, yes, but now executed on.
Jason Cerrato 17:32
You know, we just did a session with some of the organizations that are incorporating some of the new technologies like talent intelligence, and one of the things that they’re saying is the technology is here, but you need to redesign processes, you need to think differently, and you need to transform how you’re actually operating to unlock some of this capability.
Rebecca Warren 17:56
That’s right, like, how does talent intelligence and the skills conversation come together. How do you put those pieces on the same playing field?
Jason Cerrato 18:06
Yeah, it’s not. It’s not about doing what you’ve always done faster. It’s about putting everything on the table to actually unlock and empower some of this capability.
Rebecca Warren 18:16
Yeah, okay, so we have the vision. We understand what that distant shore looks like, what’s the gold standard, the North Star that we’re heading towards? And now we got to chart the course. You know, you had talked about just that. We’re trying to, sometimes, do this without a map. We’re trying to figure out where we’re going. How are we going to get there? So what kind of things should we be considering as we’re charting the course, and right now we’re calling those sometimes we’ve got some leaky pipelines, so let’s look a little bit about what that could be. And I’ve got another poll here. We’re going to ask folks to tell us how confident you are that your employees have the resources they need to succeed in your organization? That’s a big question we’ve given for options, extremely confident, moderately confident, slightly confident, and not confident at all. And I think we’ve got some research coming up that shows a little bit more about this. But would love to hear from the audience on where you feel your organization is in terms of providing resources to your employees, or maybe how you feel as part of your organization. Got some responses coming in. Floating loading, where do you all think we’re going to land? We were pretty solid in the middle of the first poll. Any predictions on where you think we’re going to land on
Jess Von Bank 19:56
This one resource is. A broad term. It’s one thing to tell people. I think there’s a couple of things here, aligning people to the business, knowing what they should be focused on at any given time, where the business is going. If you’re making decisions every single day about the most impactful work you could be doing, focusing your energies on the right things. I mean, that’s sort of a constant exercise. I think we all do every day, and having that like top down messaging and alignment is also a constant exercise. And I think organizations struggle with that. If people know, what are the skills you need for me, what’s the impact and value I can be providing every day. What is the highest value work I can be focused on right now, if we like kind of don’t forget that part. I think people are self driven, we’re motivated, we’re smart and intelligent, but we sort of forget that communication gap, and then the resources can follow. Make sure people have the tools and the ways of working and the mentorship and leadership support their managers know what conversations to have with them, that stuff can follow, but sometimes we kind of forget the alignment and communication piece that comes ahead of it. So these results don’t surprise me. Everybody’s kind of meh. I’m interested in, like, why? Like, what’s the actual gap that’s missing? Yeah,
Rebecca Warren 21:25
Well, so let’s talk about that a little bit. When we think about these stats here, 75% of HR leaders are confident. This comes from a survey that we just did in AI and HR at Eightfold. 75% of HR leaders are confident they have the tools and resources for employees to grow in their roles. However, 82% of employees surveyed said that they are actively looking for new jobs like whoa. It’s exactly what you just talked about. Where’s that disconnect that’s happening?
Jason Cerrato 22:01
We just did this research survey in August of this year, and we surveyed 500 HR leaders that were either the VP level or CHRO from companies with 5000 employees or more across six different countries. And then we surveyed 1200 employees that were fuller part time in the same six countries, and that’s where this data came from. So when we’re talking about kind of the disconnect and the misalignment, and you know, some of this leaky bucket, there’s the effort on one side, and then there’s the expectations on the other, and what’s happening that’s potentially causing this disconnect. So this is in the grand scheme of things, relatively fresh data, where all of the best intentions aren’t generating the impact they’re trying to achieve.
Rebecca Warren 22:55
Does this look like the ship is sinking from these?
Jess Von Bank 23:02
It looks like there are a lot of opportunities for this. The 82% doesn’t surprise me at all this. This has never changed over the course of time. You guys know me, grow me. That’s what people want when it comes to work. Pay me fairly all of that stuff too. But know me, grow me. And people will leave if they don’t feel seen, if it’s not easy for them to be valuable, to do good, cool work. And if they don’t see a future, and they don’t see how, how they fit into that future, they’ll leave for an opportunity to grow and evolve. Fair pay, certainly, you know, good manager support, certainly, but, but this has never changed over the course of time, and this is kind of a perception thing. The HR leaders and all these people leaders might think, Well, wait a minute. We do a survey and we listen to you, and we ask for feedback, and look at all these tools and resources and all this stuff. We put in your benefits plan like I thought we were doing all of the things if employees don’t know you. I mean, you guys know as much as I do. Sometimes it’s hard for employees to actually know and understand everything that’s available to them, because it’s not in the flow of their work. The communication plan didn’t make it all the way to them, or it’s not natural and intuitive for them that you might make one announcement, send one company email, or bury something in your intranet, or some landing page of a portal somewhere. I don’t go there. That’s not where I am. Like we’re sort of missing the mark. And so if we can think a little bit more like consumers consume more consumer marketing, consumer behaviors. Somehow, Instagram manages to convert me every time they show me an ad for that thing I really do like we do know how to get and how I understand what they want before they even. Know they want it. We know how to do this stuff. You guys, this is the biggest marketing opportunity of our lifetimes. That’s probably what this is. We probably are putting the right things in our place for people, and maybe those are the things that people need and want, but like, there’s a huge disconnect in between. I’m guessing that’s a lot of it. I’m just guessing.
Jason Cerrato 25:22
And maybe this is part of the magic of this session. I was having this discussion earlier this week. A big part of change management is people are getting fatigued. Employees are faced with so much change that even when it’s minimal change, they don’t want to change at all. And right now, they’re faced with more change than ever. And a key, a key part of being successful at it, is successful storytelling. Yes, and we just saw a wonderful example of dramatic storytelling that brought us all in and got us engaged. Yeah, and, but this isn’t a joke, like, that’s needed. Like Rebecca gave us goosebumps and got us excited and brought us in to entice our ears to listen. And I often talk about, during the pandemic, leaders over communicated and really became very transparent, because they had to. And then once things kind of normalized, we went back to our kind of closed, sheltered self, and we really need to go back to communicating and storytelling. Agree, because even though the pandemic’s over, we are still facing a lot of uncertainty, and we’re transforming, and there’s a lot of change, so there really is a need for storytelling and engaging people in a lot of ways. To your point, Jess, because the message isn’t getting through, and there’s so much that’s vying for people’s attention, and
Jess Von Bank 27:00
Even though I hear that too all the time about change fatigue, I don’t know if it’s changed. Like, if you asked 100 people, do you want things to be better tomorrow than they are today? 100 people would say yes. But if you asked 100 people, are you ready to execute change today? Like everybody, be like what that sounds like. And so I think we have friction, fatigue, change fatigue. Everybody loves change. Everybody wants things to be better than they are. Everything wants things to move in a positive direction. We don’t expect to stay static and stagnant or go backwards, even worse. So we all want forward, moving positive, and, you know, change and reinvention, and you know, we sort of want and expect that I would think, but the friction fatigue is when we make it hard, when we forget to tell people that they’re impacted by something, when we expect them to adopt a new system that we rolled out to them, instead of being like Jess, you know, that thing you told me that you wanted, or the thing that gap we have, or that problem that, guess what, we fixed it. Here it is. And make it easy and intuitive. Put it in the flow of my work. Put it in front of me in my day, where I spend my time. I don’t know. I’m not an expert adopter of a single app on my phone. No, I didn’t get a user training guide. I didn’t need to go to any FAQs. There was no adoption required. It helps me do something that I do every day. It’s easy, intuitive. So guess what? I use it. If it’s not easy and intuitive, I don’t delete it. We’ve got to think that way in terms of our workforce solutions.
Rebecca Warren 28:51
Yeah, and where does the investment comes in? Right? Is it? I love what you said about it needs to be incorporated into my flow of work. It has to come continuously as well, right, in different mediums, maybe from my manager. It has to come from, you know, leadership. It has to come from different ways to see why it makes a difference as well. I think, you know, we talk about that, that friction or that change. If I don’t understand, like I’m an, I’m a distant shore person, if I don’t understand how it ties to the distant shores. I’m not going to navigate the waters because I don’t understand how it all ties together. So you don’t give me that, that end result, I’m like, tapping out. Like, no, you know, like, I don’t, I don’t want to do it. And so I think it’s where the resources are available and who they’re available to, and what that connection is, what that dot connection is so so…
Jason Cerrato 29:43
Getting to your comment, Jess around the need to know me, grow me. I like that phrase. This came out of that same research study and the feedback from employees, and it’s a bit of an eye chart. But the point of this is, when we asked. Advise the employees to provide feedback on what tools they were given and what tools their organizations were investing in, and which ones were of most importance to them, but which ones they were the most satisfied with. The ones that were the most important to them were the ones that were also the least satisfying to them, and they also corresponded to the ones that were correlated to promotion, mobility, and growth. So you can see here opportunities to pivot and transfer and promote and move across the organization so this, know me, grow me, move me. Mobility are all the areas where they’re of the most importance and they’re the tools that provide the least satisfaction or the least effectiveness.
Jess Von Bank 30:55
We did a similar study. We call it the HR Tech Impact on the workforce, all these tools and solutions we give people to do their work or to provide services to them, part of our workforce experience. How do workers themselves feel about them? And we saw almost the exact same thing. We place a lot of value and importance on the stuff that matters to us, like how we get paid, recognized, promoted, but they’re also the most stressful, the least satisfactory to us. They’re not fun, but we lean into them because we think that’s our path, you know, forward, or our way of getting personal value. It’s really unfortunate that we do people do that to people. We make performance reviews super stressful, but everybody says, hey, they motivate me, and that’s what gets the paycheck done. I think we can. We can make them more enjoyable as well, more you know, we can make sure that there’s there’s there’s that it has the right impact, that it’s not stress inducing.
Rebecca Warren 32:06
On that topic, we were talking about that this morning, in another conversation about, how do you make them less time bound, right? Oh, it’s mid-year. Review, it’s time for the end of the year. Review, how do you make them continuous and engaging and self driven, right? That immediate feedback from your leaders? This is where we want to go. You have then that instead of being reactive, here’s all the things that happened more about hey every day. Here are the things that I want to do, if it’s more than interactive, proactive connection with your leaders and with the business. It feels very different. So when you get to that end of the year, you’re like, hey, we’re tracking. I get it. It’s not a two times a year process that we wait. That’s the way we’ve always done it. It becomes an interactive engagement, because I’m learning and growing, and my job is shifting and changing, and I’m continuing to change with it, instead of being surprised when it comes to mid year and you’re like, What do you mean?
Jess Von Bank 33:06
Yeah, I think we really need to figure out how to shift our mindset to human behavior, not process driven transactions inside you know, these aren’t we’re not business processes. We’re people who behave, act, feel and do we want everyday coaching and feedback? Yeah, and it doesn’t need to be stuck in a rigid process for that to happen, but we also don’t want to miss the opportunity to capture the fact that it happened, the data behind that so that we’ve got something kind of iterative that we can track and understand. Are we moving forward or backwards? So you don’t want to be stuck in a tool or a process, but you also kind of need the tool or the process to capture it in the moment, the fact that it’s happening. Did it? Was it valuable? The fact that we have, I mean, performance evaluations are a great example. The other one is learning days like, you know, some companies like today are learning days. Go on and tell us what you did. People are learning every single day. They’re self taught. They’re learning from their peers. They’re swapping, you know, tips and knowledge and like that’s happening every single day, because we’re dynamic creatures, and we’re figuring out how to get stuff done every day. How do we let that happen more organically? How do we support it at scale? And how do we use a tool or a system to actually kind of capture that in the moment when we talk about talent intelligence, capture what’s happening in the moment, capture that organic, dynamic human behavior and leverage it to, like, Yes, more of that. Oh, that’s not working. Okay, we’ll do less of that. Like, that’s where humans and technology make magic, in my opinion. Agree.
Rebecca Warren 34:58
Now we’ve got a couple of. Slides here, just that I think you have done some work on skill gaps and where they’re widening and where they’re narrowing. So you want to talk a little bit about that.
Jess Von Bank 35:12
Yeah, this one is perfect. This is from that same body of research that I just referenced when we were asked about the impact of stuff that we’re providing to and giving to the workforce to support them. It was a little surprising, but I guess not, when we think about it, that executives and people in leadership, similar to the stat you just shared, HR leaders are like what we’re doing, all of that, we’re giving you everything. And employees are like, Yeah, I don’t see it, or it doesn’t mean anything to me. Executives are almost twice as likely to think, to agree that it’s easy to understand the opportunities that abound in the organization, especially when compared to hourly workers. By the way, the divide between frontline and executives is vast. Executives also think two and a half times more likely to agree on career pathing and mobility, and again, all of the options that are available for you to move up and grow in the organization are super obvious to me if I’m a leader than if I’m part of the frontline or an hourly worker. They also think that learning is super personalized. I have, like, everything tailored to me, of course, like when your purchase is higher, everything is better, right? But people in the front line and in hourly positions don’t see that individualized career and learning opportunity and that kind of thing. And they also don’t see that material growth will follow, that pay and promotion will follow learning and development, because it may not be true, or the dots just aren’t being connected for them. And if you want to go to the next slide, this is really, I mean, I guess it makes sense, right? If you’re in the rooms where strategy and growth and forward movement of the company are, you’re in those everyday conversations, then you’re naturally also understanding what roles and skills and sort of what the future workforce needs to look like. It’s more apparent to you. So again, back to that communication gap. You need to make all of that apparent to everyone in the workforce, especially people at the frontline and in hourly positions, because frontline workers and hourly workers are also less likely to feel a sense of permission to learn on the job. They punch a block they work a set number of hours every day, and they’re paid an hourly rate over time if they go over that, and they don’t necessarily feel a sense of permission, Maybe nobody’s we maybe we forgot to tell them that learning and improving yourself skill attainment is part of your job description. So not only are these the things that we want you to do, to learn and grow, here are the opportunities you could grow into. Here’s how pay and promotion follow, but take time to do that while working, or that’s part of your job description. We don’t actually extend that sense of power or privilege or that, you know, we don’t make it an expectation that learning and growing is part of your job. So that’s a huge gap that needs to be addressed in skill attainment and skill advancement. Frontline workforce is 80% of the world’s workforce, and if they don’t know that they should learn on the job, and they don’t know which skills are actually important for them to pursue for their own development. We’ve got nowhere to go, like we’re we’re going nowhere fast, and so we really have to know and understand this gap, and not only flow down the communication and the marketing and the like, good HR is good marketing, you guys, we need to flow that information down to everyone in the workforce, and then we need to extend permission to learn and attain skills on the job so you can be advanced and developed within the organization.
Rebecca Warren 39:13
Yeah, and I think that has to be a shift, especially with the hourly workers, because the managers a lot of time are focused on command and control, right? Like, don’t go over. You have to get permission to do overtime. Very rarely does an hourly worker say, Hey, can I get permission? Can I get two hours on the clock of overtime so I can take this course or learn this thing? So there has to be that shift inside the organization as well. If this is worth the money. This is time and dollars allocated to help you not just do your shift, but also be better, whether it’s a course that’s assigned or whether it’s a self driven opportunity, I think there has to be the space held for them to do that as well.
Jess Von Bank 39:56
And think about like, think about the topic you guys. Talking about leaky talent pipelines versus healthy talent portfolios. I know we hate to call people assets and capital, like we were trying to shift away from human resources, like we’re people, but just for a second, just humor me. Your people, your workforce, is an asset. If you invest, you understand the value of assets and putting a portfolio together. Everybody wants their portfolio to increase in value. You want appreciating assets, not depreciating assets, unless you understand these skill gaps, these learning divides, unless you create time and provide resources for people to appreciate themselves, appreciate themselves with your support and with your help, they’re depreciating and they’re in your portfolio. You hold these assets, and this does not look like a winning strategy. So everything we’re talking about is a way to seal up the leaky talent pipeline people will leave if you don’t do these things for them.
Rebecca Warren 41:03
That’s 82% of folks are looking for new gigs, right?
Jess Von Bank 41:07
Totally, and all of suddenly, you’ll have this healthy, you know, well, performing, appreciating portfolio of assets. If you know, people put things in place to grow people. That requires a lot of talent, intelligence, a lot of data and insights about how people work or want to know what skills the business needs, how people can attain them, then all of a sudden, you’ve changed the talent conversation in your organization. But that’s got to be a mindset as well. You really have to have a cultural mindset about how you think about talent, what you know, sort of point of view, and your belief system is about how they should be nurtured and grown, and what their mobility should look like. You can’t hoard talent and teams like you’ve got to have a belief system around this, and then you can put the tools in place to allow it to happen like that, but you’ve got to, you’ve got to articulate that belief system first.
Rebecca Warren 42:02
I really believe that, yeah, and if we’re adding to where we want to go, right, we want to get to that Mecca, that uncharted island, that North Star. We know that we’ve got some holes in our ship, right, but we’re going to figure out how to seal those up. Now. We’re on the journey. And Jason, you talk about this, right? Like what you see can get solved. So how do we navigate those waters in between, where we want to go, what our foundation is without? I mean, there’s so many things that are changing so quickly, right? We talked about how your job today is not going to look like the same job next year. How do we navigate those waters and solve for those things that we can’t see but yet still want to make sure that we’re on the right journey?
Jason Cerrato 42:49
And I think, you know, there’s two sides to this equation, going back to that chart, with the executive perception and the employee feedback, there’s the employee experience, kind of as depicted here, for what can happen when people are guided with intelligence. You have kind of the user layer where they could have their role, and you have the information that they’re provided. You know they’re providing their skills and any kind of additional information. And you know, they’re getting people, they’re giving personalized recommendations, upskilling opportunities, and they’re getting line of sight to future roles. But underneath, there’s this data layer that’s continuously learning, updating, dynamically getting information from them, people like them, the organization, the market, and in an environment that is leveraging talent intelligence, this becomes a continuous learning exercise, right? This is not static. This is not getting stale, and it’s continuously being informed. But what happens is this starts to uncover a variety of information for again, it’s not just personalization. It creates options. It creates that chart of a variety of potential futures, a variety of potential paths, but also a variety of ways to get there. Is it a way to upscale? Is it training? Is it mentoring people, to meet people that are already in those roles, ways to have conversations, and a variety of options for depending on time availability, those conversations with your manager, to actually achieve those paths in the organization. You know, obviously you have to want to work for the organization. So culture is a baseline. Is this somewhere I want to work? But then those people and am I being compensated and rewarded properly? But then there are people that are leaving saying, I didn’t know there was a path. Or. Wasn’t being considered, right? And that’s the other side of the coin too, which is for people that are evaluating talent, did I know who I had on my team, and was I evaluating them through a lens where I was considering them through through a view that allowed me to think of them based off of what the job was going to be, not what it was historically, or who they were as a total person, not the roles they’ve held or what they’re capable of learning very quickly, right their ability to learn or their adjacent skills. So all of this creates a lens that allows you to see much more of the people on your team, much more of what’s already in your organization, much more of what’s happening in your market, to be able to prepare and plan and navigate those waters, and it’s really hard to solve for things when you don’t have that information at your fingertips, and I liked we were having a conversation before the session started today. What this also allows you for is for breaking down some of these silos that have historically existed between talent acquisition and Talent Management and these other areas to allow you to see this data through the entire talent cycle, right? So now it’s talent enablement and not just talent management, and it’s talent activation and not just talent acquisition. So you truly are looking at this from a recruit, retain, redeploy, redesign conversation, and you’re seeing all of that across the full spectrum, and it’s not looking at it in silos, and you can’t see the full process. So from strategically as an enterprise, you can have some of these conversations, and all of the data is feeding the full conversation. To be able to see these, see and make these decisions. So if I just advance the slide to the next slide, I jumped the gun here. If I go to the next slide, we talk about this, Rebecca, maybe you need to do it for me. Okay, if I go to the next slide, we talk about this as being talent centered design. You know, we have the ability to do career navigating and career planning, and you have these career paths that become dynamic. And with every piece of data that gets collected on the individual, it opens up these career paths in the organization on where the individual can go, but these become living, breathing things, right that change and evolve with more information on the user, on the individual, and on the role. And it’s not just the role in their department or in the function. Its common paths, its adjacent paths, its company recommended paths, and all the steps in between for how they can get there, and every time they’re getting further along that path, the steps they’ve taken to get further along that path could open up a new path. So what happens is it shows what’s in it for them, and kind of the steps they’ve taken, and what that means along the journey and navigating those waters. So this creates this kind of virtuous cycle, and this explainability of the effort I’ve made and what organizations are reporting is this creates kind of the carrot at the stick for making the effort, and the connection between what training I should take, how it connects to what the business needs and what it means to the career paths available to me. And they’re seeing people going back into the system with repeat visitors, people engaging in training and completing training, and the training aligning to the positions that they need people in and the path that they need people to pay attention to. So when we talk about engagement, aligning talent to the right places, and actually this being a dynamic, continuously learning, living, breathing thing, when we say the technology is here to actually empower some of this. This is what we’re talking about, and the ability to uncover talent in new ways, the ability for people to actually see this in new ways, and to be a little bit more transparent to your workforce in new ways. That’s what this is starting to unlock.
Jess Von Bank 49:39
This reminds me of one of my favorite client calls I’ve ever gotten, and it was such a simple question, like, we oh my gosh. We help with huge transformations. We do big work. Like this was my favorite client call I ever got, and it was this, I have head count. I have 10. Hire FTE. I never get this. This never happens. I have an FTE. It was like a Christmas gift. What do with it? It’s technically a backfill. Technically a backfill. I loved that they were like, it’s technically a backfill, but I don’t know if I should fill the same position the same way, new opportunity to get something accomplished that we really need right now. And we thought all the way around it, okay, what’s the role grade? Like, what do we have to work with from a budget perspective? Like, what can we do with this job? And they asked all the right questions, what’s the work that really needs to get done right now, correct gaps in value and impact? Like, what’s not working for us? And they were like, well, our CRM is kind of underperforming. I’m like, is it underperforming, or is it under-resourced? And, you know, these are some other things that are happening in the department, and we’re considering investing in this next year and this. And we, we looked at the entire landscape, and then we figured out what work really needs to get done? How is that work going to get done? Is it all human, or is some of this going to be automated? I’m going to come back to that in a second. And then what? How should we fill this position? And we ended up filling it like two half FTE, half of this person is going to do this, and then half is going to do this. It was the smartest that was, like a decade ago, and it’s still like it was the smartest conversation I’ve ever had about thinking about all of the ways work needs to get done, and thinking about it opportunistically. Instead of the knee jerk reaction somebody left, I have to backfill their role. I’m going to fill it the same way they’re going to do the exact same thing. We’re going to measure it the same way that conversation and everything you just explained, Jason becomes, I hope, if people learn one thing today, they learn this. This is the Holy Grail as AI and automation disrupt work and the end it is. It already is, and it will continue until 80% of the jobs that exist today will be disrupted in some way by AI and automation. 20% of jobs will be massively disrupted or completely displaced. So what you just said is this sort of organic dynamic. How do we keep mapping people and skills to the organization, not to jobs and roles to the organization, because the other thing that’s happening in parallel is AI and automation is transforming how jobs are constructed, how work gets done. We have to keep mapping these two things alongside each other in order for us to have the right people and machines sort of all accomplishing work in tandem together. And so this thing right here, what you just described, I hope everybody is paying attention to the importance of this alongside whatever AI strategy conversations you’re having, yeah, and I’m keeping an eye on time.
Rebecca Warren 52:57
I wish that we could go for another hour. Don’t we always say that at the end of these conversations? But if I were to sum up the things that we’ve talked about now, so for trying to see around the corner, what are we looking for? Right? It’s looking at a skill centric strategy. How do we focus on the work as opposed to the job? The whole on the org chart? It’s prioritizing internal mobility, but also internal development and learning, that continuous learning, that employee engagement and experience, tying that together, using technology and analytics to get those insights to predict and to drive as opposed to seeing what happened in the rear view mirror. And I think overall, and we’re continuing to hear this, and I think this is going to be the next thing that we’ve got to really figure out how to do, is aligning the talent goals with the business objective. Right? Everything needs to be focused on that North Star, on getting to that distant land, hitting that big, hairy, audacious goal, whatever it is, it’s got to be aligned. Like think about if we were to hire every single hire, and we were to ask the question, which business objective does this hire drive? It would be a different conversation, right? We’re not looking to hire the manager’s purple unicorn with the top hat and rainbow sunglasses, right? We’re now looking at what does the business need, and how does every single person realize their connection to attaining that big, hairy, audacious goal, getting to that distant land, driving towards that North Star. I think, to me, is something that we still got to figure
Jess Von Bank 54:36
out. Yeah.
Rebecca Warren 54:39
Okay, so we’ve got three minutes left. I want to give you each two minutes, and then I’m going to close with a very short dramatic reading to get us all wrapped up. But I would love to hear from both of you, what is your one piece of advice? Like, if somebody is thinking about, how do I do all this stuff? We’ve talked about a whole lot of things. We’ve talked about fig. Out where we want to go. We’ve talked about figuring out the map. We’ve talked about trying to chart the waters. What’s the one piece of advice that you would give folks that are listening on what to do next if they’re thinking about getting to that healthy talent portfolio? So I’ll let either one of you decide to jump in and share your thoughts.
Jess Von Bank 55:23
I guess I would just remind people for all of time we’ve designed work for profit, not for people. And I think we’re going to be tempted. I’m really afraid we’re going to be tempted to keep doing that in this AI era where automation and efficiency, you know, just goes straight to the bottom line. That’s great. That’s fine to have operationally lean business processes and all of that. But don’t forget, work can be designed for people, for people to thrive, for us to do our best work as a recruiter, I would always go straight to the career side of whoever I was, you know, and be like, ooh, do your best work here. How do we make that true? Everybody has the same version of an employee value proposition. You can do your best work here. If you find ways to continue to make that true, your business will be profitable and you will figure out your AI and automation strategy. Don’t forget to do that alongside designing work for people. If you’re just throwing automation and AI and going crazy in this new era we’re in and 2025 will be all about agents and all of that, you’re going to get out over your skis really quickly. And so that would be my cautionary tale. Don’t forget, like the employee experience conversation, the talent intelligence conversation, the skills conversation, does not change. It becomes more important in this AI era we’re in. And so don’t forget that you know, to design in that order is all I’ll say, Jason, what about you?
Jason Cerrato 57:07
I often say you need to think, manage and measure differently, and what gets measured gets done. And as you’re designing for the future, oftentimes you need to build with the end in mind, and your measures will be very different. So for example, if you’re trying to design for mobility, build measurements that encourage that behavior, right? So attrition and retention are not mobility, and mobility is more than just hiring into a job. So you need to design measures that will track and encourage that. The other thing that I will add is, as we were in the green room, waiting to get started and building on the navigation theme, Jess had a great one. One of the things that this enables is HR to break out of the silos and operate east to west.
Jess Von Bank 58:03
So I’ll leave you with that navigational theme is you need to operate more east to west, not on the Viking story today.
Rebecca Warren 58:07
Well, let’s close that off with my last little tiny dramatic reading. So like the Vikings, driven by courage and vision, organizations must set sail towards innovation, guided by the promise of better tomorrows for their people and their purpose, using talent intelligence as their North Star. Thanks so much for joining us on our vikings journey through talent intelligence on charting our course, navigating the waters and finding those distant lands until the next time we’re out.
Jess Von Bank 58:43
Thanks, everyone!
