When it comes to building the right mix of talent to best serve your organization, there are no easy answers or a one-size-fits-all strategy.
This webinar explores creating the right mix of best-fit talent to serve your business needs.
Our panel will discuss building an agile approach by addressing the skills gaps you need to fill — and the best way to do it with a strategy that embraces the build, buy, or borrow paths to best fit talent.
Rebecca Warren, Director of Talent-Centered Transformation at Eightfold AI, leads the conversation with Kevin Blair, Global Head of TA at Ericsson and Ben Broomfield, Editor at Large at HR Grapevine to discuss how to assess your current employee’s skills, identify the skills gaps you need to fill, and then consider the best build, buy, or borrow ways to fill them.
You’ll learn:
With a focus on agility and skills, you can build a talent strategy that grows with your business.
The conversation centered around the evolving role of HR and talent leaders in turbulent times. Key themes included the importance of HR becoming more agile and capable in response to change, prioritizing strategic planning, and leveraging the skills and capabilities of the workforce. Speakers also emphasized the need for identifying and utilizing employees’ unique skills, building career growth paths, and personalized learning and development plans. The conversation highlighted the need for organizations to adapt their talent strategies to stay ahead of the curve and prioritize skills and potential over traditional hiring methods.
Rebecca Warren 00:00
On our talent table Webinar. My name is Rebecca Warren. I’m from Eightfold, and I’ve been here about three and a half years. I started with Eightfold in customer success, and just recently moved over to a small brand new team in marketing called Talent-centered transformation, where we’re creating a practice around a dynamic understanding of talent that focuses on new and evolving ways of work. It’s great stuff, and you’ll hear more about this in the coming months. So before we get started, let’s get a few housekeeping things out of the way. If you look towards the bottom of your screen, you’ll see some widgets that you can use during this event. There’s further related reading in the resources section, you can ask us questions using the Q&A. So we’ve got a lot to go through today. So if we don’t get to your question during the webinar, someone will get back to you. We also have our Eightfold in person Cultivate event coming up in London, and you can find out more by clicking on the button to the left of the console. And last of all, you can register for next month’s talent table, looking at why collaboration and not control is the key for HR tech, where I’ll be talking to leaders from there and Accenture, all right, housekeeping is done. I wish it was that easy at my house. All right. So on to our esteemed speakers. We have Kevin Blair with Erickson and Ben Broomfield with HR Grapevine. I’m going to have each speaker do a quick introduction, starting with Kevin and then moving to Ben. Now in addition to your intro speakers, please also add your favorite summer activity. All right, Kevin, Will you kick us off?
Kevin Blair 01:47
Sure. I’ll be happy and excited for the Cultivate event. I’ll be there myself as well, so hopefully some of those attending will have the opportunity to shake hands with me on the day and get to know them as well. So yeah, my name is Kevin Blair, as said, I’m the global head of talent position. Ericsson, I’ve been there for about six months. I’m a career global head of talent position, previously at IBM Cisco and going way back to Oracle. It’s my passion. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. Despite having opportunities to drift into other parts of HR, my favorite summer activity, I fancy myself as a bit of a chef. So I would say, chance to get the barbecue out. It’s been out a couple of times already this year, and we’re not even through may yet. So I would say that would be my big summer activity.
Rebecca Warren 02:33
Fabulous. I’ll try to plan a trip so I can come and hang out with you and do a little barbecuing. That sounds like fun. All right. Ben, over to you.
Ben Broomfield 02:44
Thanks. Rebecca. Hi everyone. I’m Ben. I’m HR Grapevine editor at large. HR Grapevine is an editorial publication for HR folks, and telling folks just like yourself. Prior to that, been a HR journalist and a B2B journalist for the past couple of years, but in the past life, was a third-party recruiter as well, working with a lot of different startups and enterprise businesses out in the US. In terms of favorite summer activities, I have to say Kevin Barbecuing is up there for me as well. I can see out over my marketing at the moment, where I’ve done a few already this year similarly. But I think for me, I’m based in London, and anytime it sort of gets to the summer, the mood in the city just changes a little bit. Everyone seems to be a lot happier, a lot more polite, and you can just tell that everyone’s going to perform it by being outside with their friends and family. So yeah, that’s what I look forward to and enjoy the most in the future.
Rebecca Warren 03:35
I love that I’m based outside of Phoenix, Arizona. So summer activities for us are to stay inside, away from the 110 degree heat. So I like the year round weather much more than just the summer. So all right, well, thanks for the introduction. So we are here today to talk about agile talent strategies. Now building an agile approach to address the skills gap involves a strategic blend of assessing current capabilities, forecasting future needs, and implementing flexible talent acquisition and development methods. So let’s start by discussing talent agility, what it is and why it’s so important. So Kevin, I’m going to start with you. Can you talk to me about why you think HR must become more agile and capable in order to respond to both planned and unplanned changes? We know there’s been a lot of unplanned changes in the last couple of years.
Kevin Blair 04:38
Yeah, sure. Not to make it topical at all, right? No, absolutely not. And just by the way, I forgot to mention my introduction. The reason I’m so dressed up today is I’m actually at a wedding right now, and so obviously, the reason I look considerably less, more less casual than in my pit for the Eightfold event here is that I don the suit and the tie. But, yeah, listen, the role of HR has been changing anyway, and that’s been accelerating over the last four or five years particularly. And it’s not just about the responsiveness to macro economics, which has been really important. Because businesses, not only have they gone through this, this absolute battle for talent during 2001 2002 where they’ve attracted and put a lot of effort into bringing top box talent organizations that they’re now in a position where potentially retrenching around that talent, they’re facing engagement issues with the talent that they want to retain. Outlooks not great, but more often become very compressed. So being able to be a responsive HR organization in general has been really important, and making sure that you’re reacting to what’s environmentally happening in your own business. However, with talent acquisition, and talent in particular as a total concept, is more and more we’ve been saying that we need to tie ourselves to the commercial event in the business, so to the commercial outcome, so to the revenue during a much straighter line between our activity where in talent acquisition, we produce a product that then produces something from the company. Everybody is hired to fulfill a value based role, and so therefore, what you then have to start doing is reprioritizing your stack and make sure the ones that are going to deliver the greatest value in the shortest period of time that the business needs, that your team is intensely focused on them, and you’re not thinking about all of these homogenized metrics that make you as a TA leader feel good, that you’re saying, Hey, this is we’re doing a really great job. When actually, are you being impactful on the things that really make the company money, make the company move forward, drive the product forward. And I think that is at the very forefront when you ask C level executives that don’t sit in HR talent like what they expect of awesome they expect of me is tying my activities back to the commercial outcomes.
Rebecca Warren 06:50
That makes sense. Ben, what would you say about saying no sometimes, instead of yes, I know we talked a little bit about that.
Ben Broomfield 06:59
Yeah, absolutely. I think if you if you look at a lot of those really large organizations over the course of the last 12 months, who’ve been forced into positions where they’ve had to make layoffs or go through other difficult changes, you see it time and time again in each of sort of the statements that the CEO shares, they say, Well, look, the economic circumstances weren’t as we expected them to be, or, you know, the outlook wasn’t as Positive as we thought it was going to be. And definitely there was a period, as you say again, sort of over that, over that, sort of 2021 2022 period. So many companies are going through a real period of accelerated growth. And in that time, HR and talent leaders, I think, at these companies, were very, very happy to say, look, we’ve got all of these great requisitions open. We’re going to go hiring like crazy. We’re going to grow in all of these areas. And saw that as though we’re saying yes to the business, we’re helping them grow. We’re helping them achieve those goals. And now, sort of a couple of years on, I’ve had to turn around to say, Well, hang on, we basically just said yes. We weren’t really sort of thinking long term about, is this strategically the right thing to do for the business at the moment, and rather than sort of saying, you know, yes to that expectation to grow, to be a bit more, a bit more cautious, and say, well, is that going to be the right thing to do for the business? Are there some areas where we can accelerate, but does that? Does that need to be translated across the rest of the business as well? And there are certainly, yeah, many, many of those companies, I think, who went through that. Whereas if you look at maybe someone like an apple, they were sort of the last big tech company to have to make, you know, major layoffs. And though they did in April to one of their teams, they were very cautious. In that sort of two year period, they didn’t hire as aggressively as any of the other big tech companies. They were a lot more cautious to say, Well, let’s not just, you know, let’s not just sort of hire for the sake of hiring. Let’s be a bit more, a bit more planned about it. And then they were, they were fortunate, I think, in that position, to not have to go through some of those difficult changes, at least for sort of the last couple of years. So, yeah, I think whether the changes are planned or unplanned, definitely trying to be a bit more, a bit more strategic, and give that real advice to the business and be that strategic partner, rather than more of an administrative executor. And just to say, Yeah, we’re gonna hire and hire and that’s what,
Kevin Blair 09:02
right I think, I think Ben actually makes a really, really good point around ta leaders and talent leaders have never, historically been asked to think about sustainable recruiting practices. It’s like the business needs to grow. Let’s grow, grow, grow, grow. The business is in a bit of trouble, or the market’s in a bit of trouble. Return to potential change, layoff, redundancies, whatever, having that sustainable model, particularly as we have the opportunity with things like the gig economy, differentiate with ways of employing people, people much more focused on project work versus careers. Huge opportunities are there to think about, we have to have more focus on sustainable strategies.
Rebecca Warren 09:37
Yeah, agree. And so talking about that shifting to what it might look like inside an organization, right? Organizations need to understand what skills they have, what their strengths are, and what the gaps are, to make sure that they are prepared for those internal changes. So Ben, you said something about catching people before they fall. Tell me a little bit about what that means and how organizations can think differently.
Ben Broomfield 10:05
Yeah, absolutely, I can’t claim to take credit for the phrase. It was actually yet an Eightfold webinar roundtable that I was hosting a few weeks ago, and it was brought up by one of the guests, but, but I just, I love that phrase when I heard it, when it came up in the conversation. And I think it’s, it’s when we sort of look at this skills based approach and how companies can be more agile with their talent. It comes down to how they can really think about the skills that they have within the organization and how they can be best deployed. As we said, it’s a period in time where talent is very, very highly prized, especially if those highly skilled roles, where you really don’t want to lose talent, and actually taking approach to be a bit more agile with it, to take more of a skills based approach, to say, well, this person is, they’re a great employee. They’ve got a great relationship with their manager, but maybe they’re looking elsewhere. They’re coming to that period in their career where, you know, they’re looking for a move, but actually they’ve got all these great skills that could be used in lots of different other areas of the business, in roles that they haven’t thought about, in roles that we haven’t thought about as employers yet. So it can be a great way to sort of catch those employees before they disappear off to another organization, or before they disappear off to another role, to say, look, you’ve achieved some great things over the last 12 months of the last two years, however long it is, but we think your skills could also be used in this area of the business, and maybe it’s something that you’ve, you know, you’ve not thought about yet, and really present that opportunity to them before they sort of fall away. Because it’s always better to, you know, ideally, to sort of retain those skills within the business, even if you’re losing them from that specific team.
Rebecca Warren 11:38
So question to either one of you, when we think about that. On the flip side, you’ve got some managers who say, I’m not letting my people go right, like, I’ve trained this person. They’re my rock stars. I’m not letting them move internally. And sometimes we see that attrition happens because folks are like, my career is stuck. I can’t go anywhere. I have all these skills. I want to do new things. And the managers are like, Absolutely not. So what are some things that using a skills based approach could help with when managers are resistant to someone leaving their team?
Kevin Blair 12:10
I mean, I guess I think from my view, and then Ben can maybe come on here. I think from my view, one of the things you’ve got to do is step back a second from that scenario and think about the what we’re actually asking managers to do and how we’re enabling them to that most managers, when it comes to hiring and recruitment processes, are generally expected to have a capability and a competency the minute they’re promoted into or developed into what people need a role, right? So this whole idea that all of a sudden will develop you on the product. We’ll train you on how to sell or how to engage, or how to count in spreadsheets or write formulas, whatever, but we won’t train you how to do a recruit a higher is a critical business decision, because you wouldn’t have the role if it wasn’t key to it, if it didn’t add value. But then we just expect people to do it. So first of all, there’s an education gap that we need to go to the manager and say we’re going to do it right now. We’re building it to roll out to 8000 managers and housing where we’re going to say, we’re just going to develop this muscle so you feel capable and competent to execute in the ecosystem of the hiring strategies similar to what we’ve seen in other organizations. And I remember practicing this six or seven years ago. It was a bit of an aha moment for many. CHROs, yeah, why don’t we train them to do that? And so I think first of all, you step back and you say, Let’s build a capability so you understand what good recruitment is and what the company’s philosophical position on it is. And then if you’re looking at that and then educating to understand, well, if you’re working in an ecosystem of skills hiring, and everybody’s adopted it, you’re going to be as much a beneficiary of that as you are somebody that’s potentially going to lose people in this rotation. And if you’re buying into the idea that hiring people with a high degree of learning, like learning agility, high degree of cognitive intelligence, that they’re adaptable, and they demonstrate certain skills then you can welcome them to your organization. But if you’re still very focused on I’m going to hire for competencies, capabilities and experiences, you’re going to lose your people because they want to develop their skills, and you’re not going to gain because you’re not open to bringing those skills in. So for me, it’s partially the ecosystem you create. It’s also a lot, a lot about education and getting the managers to understand what’s happening.
Rebecca Warren 14:21
Yeah, absolutely.
Ben Broomfield 14:24
I think there’s definitely a cultural component as well to any change that is consistent. It definitely comes, it comes back to all of those change management fundamentals so that, you know, are still just as applicable as they were 50 years ago as they are today. Communication is a really important thing. Education is a really important thing. Managers have to understand the benefit to them and to their team of this type of approach, and so sometimes that does mean as a campus sort of taking that step back to say, Well, hey, this might be a short term loss to your team. You might lose this particular skill set, but with this new approach, here’s how your team might benefit right now, but also here’s how the business is going to benefit. So, yeah, I think it’s definitely speaking the language of those managers and making sure that they are very clear on what the benefit is to them of sort of a broader shift to this type of skills based approach, and not that it’s only going to be something that’s rolled out to one or two select teams. And you know, you’re just going to have your best workers push from you every time they show their cost, instead just being a bit more, a bit more sort of communicative for them and sort of helping them understand, ideally, through, through a few different use cases, some successes within the business, why it’s been such a beneficial strategy to the team, and how those benefits will feed back to them into the short and long term as well.
Rebecca Warren 15:39
Yeah. And I think as we talk about that, what’s changing in our organizations, right? Things are shifting so quickly with tech, all the different things that are coming in, you know, pressures changes, all of those things. It’s not even enough to focus on change management inside of organizations, and that’s one of the reasons why the team I’m in has been developed. We have to think completely differently about talent, right? We have to think about centering our businesses around talent, as opposed to centering around filling jobs as opposed to right, here’s a job description and somebody that I need to plunk into it. We have to think differently. And so what are some of the things that you both would suggest when you think about staying ahead of the curve? What kind of things do we need to be thinking about as organizations to make sure that we don’t fall behind?
Kevin Blair 16:36
So I mean, maybe, maybe make my comment first. I think, first of all, if we talk in terms of the tech, as you mentioned, I have been for years preaching and debating and eulogizing about the fact that technology around HR, particularly talent and recruitment, needs to support us better in driving the activities and the outcomes far too focused as TA, tech can focus on features, benefits. Mi reporting, hey, look for this release. You’ve got this extra bit of insight. It’s great. I always want more insight. Please start. I have an organization of 250 recruiters. Please help me start using technology to direct their behaviors, their activities, to draw straight lines, outcomes, to reduce the technical debt, to reduce the productivity debt, because the wastage and latency is huge in the TA organization, because they have to filter a lot of things. They have to, you know, kiss a lot of frogs, or whatever you want to use as an analogy. But the point is, technology needs to start helping us direct the activities and the outcomes. And you see it in other industries, and really positive conversations I’ve been having recently with yourselves at Eightfold and a couple of other vendors that actually started to look at the way the CRM markets went with Salesforce and companies like that, where they actually started to say, Let’s drive behaviors of salespeople, well, let’s try behaviors of recruiters and managers to better outcomes that can be inclusive, that don’t need to be exclusionary, that can adopt, that can build in inclusion in the process, but ultimately get us to that place more quickly. That is, I’ve been saying it. I’m bored of myself saying it. That’s how much I’ve been saying it. So I’ve been saying it for a very long time, and I finally feel like we’re starting to make those steps.
Rebecca Warren 18:26
Then any thoughts there?
Ben Broomfield 18:29
Yeah, I think sort of more more broadly than if companies do want to get ahead of the curve, then I think they have, they have to start looking at sort of this issue just just belong, just beyond sort of the lens of, we’ve got a team of recruiters, and we want to shift to a skills based approach. So, you know, we’re going to start removing degree requirements from CVS, and, you know, a few other things, and then just leaving them to that. Think it’s a real opportunity to get a bit more consistency across talent acquisition, but also across talent development, performance management teams as well. To say that we’ve, we’ve got these skills that we know we’re seeking in the organization. There are different ways we can go about scoring that we can get through external recruitment. We can get that through internal development. We can get that through sort of talent management and succession planning. When all of those different areas are sort of working separately from one another, there’s different technologies that sort of sit within each of those departments that aren’t speaking to one another. It becomes very difficult for any sort of consistency to take place across the business. And that’s where you end up in organizations where some teams are completely overstaffed and have got, you know, more and more skills than they need to do the work that they’re doing, and are probably going to be in the firing line for layoffs when they come up. But also, then you’ve got, you’ve got teams who are understaffed, they’re under-skilled, they’re struggling, they’re burning out, and you’ve got those real sort of discrepancies within the organization. Within the organization as well. So I think the to get ahead then organizations really sort of want that technology that can, they can simply speak to different areas of the business and maybe sort of some of those different silos within HR, and make sure that there is a bit more consistency about the goals that each of those different teams are trying to trying to achieve.
Rebecca Warren 20:02
Yeah, I love that, that transparency across the organization. It doesn’t just belong in one department here or there. Everyone needs to work together for the good of the business. And that’s what you were saying as well, Kevin, is let’s drive the outcomes and the behaviors across the organization, as opposed to looking at my work in a silo. I love that. All right.
Kevin Blair 20:22
I think also, Ben makes an interesting point about engaging the audience as a whole. I think a lot of companies, when they report internal mobility applications and engagement, often it’s a small percentage or a certain percentage of the group that does multiple applications. So you know, 20% of the company applies for 80% of the jobs, or that kind of thing you do see a lot of that repetition behavior. So I think engaging everybody is really important, and maybe that’s you’ve got to bring them all to the table.
Rebecca Warren 20:51
Yep, I love that. So let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about those agile strategies that we’re going to need to put in place in order for organizations to stay ahead of the curve, as we just talked about. So first, let’s talk about buying Kevin, this one I think naturally lands in your court. So in my opinion, companies need to do more than creating a job ad and casting a wide net, right all of the buzzwords that we talk about in TA. So what are you seeing and thinking when it comes to skills based hiring, that’s a completely different conversation than what we’ve been doing, which is looking at a resume and matching keywords.
Kevin Blair 21:32
Yeah, no, I think it’s a good point. I think what we need to do is reinvent the way we think about selection as assessments of totality. So even, you know, engaging the audience, go broad, go specific, bring people, show that you’re open to skills as a priority, versus perhaps some of the experiences in the brands. Removing a lot of Credentialism, I think it’s a really important, really big advocate for getting away from this Credentialism in the US. And there’s a lot of university bias and college bias and all that kind of stuff that goes on in the corporate world, moving away from Credentialism, and starting to focus on the capabilities of the individual skills. And you do that through open and transparent, not going to market with who you are and what you’re doing, but then also the way you select and you bring people into the conversation is really important. So you know, by taking assessments, that focus much more on the things I mentioned before, learning agility, cognitive intelligence, the skills of the human as opposed to the experiences they gain through the workplace. I think that that’s really important. And then start to identify areas of your business where you can lean into differentiated ways and depths around how you can accommodate that, and the way in which, you know, we’ve got this thing around. And again, I kind of been told that for many, many years, the idea that, you know, processes haven’t changed, but you know, we’re still recruitment has fundamentally been the same for hundreds of years in terms of, like, identify somebody that can fulfill a task you engage and you get them to do the task, as opposed to actually starting to think about, well, you know, this, this, this over rotation, this obsession on Capabilities and Competencies. If someone’s been sitting in one of our competitors right in Java for the last four years, how much do I need to assess whether they can write Java versus what else they are capable of bringing to our company? Right? But they obsess about technical tests and coding. They’ve got a 10 year career in writing code in Java. Let’s focus on the person we’re bringing in and the development opportunity we have as a company by bringing it forward. So I think, I think, you know, the openness at which you go to the market and rebuilding selection assessments to really focus in on, you know, not, not sense checking what someone is written in a or a LinkedIn profile, but actually getting under the skin of the people and what they can contribute, it’s far more valuable, far more valuable. Yeah,
Rebecca Warren 23:49
And I think that’s absolutely spot on. And I think when we spend time hiring, I think we say a lot of times, I’m looking for the perfect person. I want them to have all of these things they need to hit the ground running, right? All of these things that we say, is it such a bad thing if we bring somebody in who has the capability, who giving them that extra 20 to 30% in their you know, room to grow, because if you bring in somebody who’s got 100% of what you’re looking for, not only does it take forever to find that perfect person, you’ve got to untrain whatever they’ve learned if you’ve got anything different in your process, but you also aren’t giving them anything to to add to their tool kit, right? I always say that bringing in somebody with 100% of the skills is like hiring a consultant, because what are you pouring into them and what are they able to learn? So how do we find the people, as you said, with the competency to do it, the potential, the interest, as opposed to saying we’re going to match them exactly to a set of keywords.
Kevin Blair 24:49
I love that and I’m not going to, I’m not just saying that my kids represent the industry. I have two kids at university right now, college right now, a couple of coming, a couple coming through towards that as well. And when I talk to them about their careers, they have no ambition to think about corporate careers, the traditional start in the mail room and hopefully finish up at CEO 4550 years later, they could not feel less about that. They are thinking about their skills, their development, the experiences that the workplace can create for them, the opportunities internationally and developing their skills and capabilities and ultimately the work they do now. They couldn’t care less about moving from a junior to a mid level to a senior just because it’s your job title. They just don’t care.
Rebecca Warren 25:33
They really are not thinking a linear career path at all. I love that. Okay, so Ben, anything to add on that before we shift to build?
Ben Broomfield 25:44
Yeah, I think, I think we’ll probably come on to it in sort of just a second as we discuss the build in a bit more detail. But I think you make a great point. Is something that was raised in that April roundtable that I attended that sort of shifts that conversation to, you know, what? What skills development are you looking for? What training you’re looking for, what experiences are you looking for? It shifts that, rather than a conversation that happens, you know, sort of 12 months after the employees joined the company in an outdated yearly review, it shifts that to, you know, really the interview stage. And it shifts that, you know, sort of to the onboarding conversation as well say, Well, look, we know these are the areas that you’re sort of looking to develop. We’ve already got these, these plans in place that there was someone, sort of on that day who was having a lot of great conversations with, with their with their applicants, but then also with sort of people on their very first day of work to say, look, we’ve got this, you know, we already have an idea of what, you know, learning programs are going to be interesting to you, and sort of giving them a briefing on that on sort of their first day as a part of their reporting. And it’s just those kinds of shifts, again, that did obviously create a bit more of a consistency as well, between the build process, between the buying and acquiring talent, with that building and development journey.
Rebecca Warren 26:54
Yeah, not, not the secret that happens after you’re hired, but what does that look like before you even get in the door to know if this is a long term opportunity for you? Yeah. So, let’s go into that build piece. So we talked about buying, right? What talent are we looking to attract? How are we going to work to do that differently? Now, as we talk about building, we’ve got all of these buzzwords, right? Upskilling, reskilling, career moment, you know, career pathing, internal mobility. So how do organizations think about building career growth paths for folks while taking those individual preferences in line? Now, some people may say, hey, I want you know, my journey should look like this, and it doesn’t happen that way, right? So how do organizations think about building those career paths that could be very individualized for folks when they come in the door?
Ben Broomfield 27:52
I think it’s a good point that those who have made that increasingly people are going to be expecting that from their workplace. Obviously, can we check the example of kids? I’m sure there are plenty of other, you know, sort of people of that age who are seeking that when they come into the workforce, they’re expecting that non-career path, they’re expecting mobility. They’re expecting to do a lot of different roles, to pick up a lot of different skills. And so for those employers who sort of don’t take this approach, then they are very much going to be blindsided by that when they come to realize, oh, shoot, all of a sudden, people, all of these employees, who who want to move around in their career, who want to try different roles, and we’ve got no idea where to place them, where they would be the most of use, what, where they could add value. Whereas if organizations are able to be a bit more proactive about developing that, that short, medium, long term approach to what capabilities they need, what agility they need this organization, it then becomes a lot easier for them to say to any employee who’s joining the team, well, now we already have an idea of what this career path will look like. We know how we can match up that individual preference for growth with something that’s going to be as useful as possible for the organization, by sort of leaving it until the last minute to get that understanding from employees. It’s going to be very difficult to offer them that sort of development journey. And so either you’re going to have to force them into roles that they want to do that’s useful for your business and they’re going to leave, or you’re going to have to, you know, just sort of have them in areas that aren’t as useful for your business. So yeah, I think it really just sort of brings it, brings those two areas together, almost sort of as a bit of a Venn diagram that comes together and just finds that balance between what the business needs, and then those in the business knows that it needs over the short, medium to long term, and can then bring those skills and sort of feed them through as more of a proactive measure, rather than doing it reactively.
Kevin Blair 29:40
No, I agree. I think there’s some things as well, when we think about some of the things that we’ve talked about over the years, but we haven’t actually lived. I am a big, huge believer in the philosophy of developing strengths as opposed to trying to overtly correct weaknesses. I think we all have weaknesses. I do. And one of the things I love about the current leadership team I built, and I’ve inherited a lot of them, is they’re well placed to cover my gaps and my weaknesses, and I’m able to excel with pushing my strengths out there and continue that. And so by making sure that you have clear paths that you know not to say, well, we define this role, and you’re eight out of 10. So these are the two things you need to learn to get there, but opening up the aperture around well, one of the things that can happen that make you move into that age that makes an eight good enough, or that that age is also applicable over here becomes a 10 over here. So using technology with intelligence that can actually direct you, and using more and more if again, you know, I get frustrated with some of the learning platforms I’ve seen over the years, whereas the very much about the person directing the journey. So I’m here, and the learning platform is static. I direct where I want to go, where I need to learn. That’s not how life’s working. Now I want the Netflix, Amazon experience, where I sit in the middle and all the good stuff comes to me. You need this because we’ve identified this. This is what you should be doing, Kevin, you’re really good at this. Kevin, go and focus more on focus more on this, develop this, that experience, consumer experience in the workplace. So I want my learning platform to look and feel like Netflix. I wanted to tell me what it’s recommended for me based on my preferences for learning, based on what I’m good at and what I want to develop, and based on the direction it can help me get a different experience in the workplace as well, and there’s still too static you study to direct yourself and or you’re saying, Look, in the job Scripture say, I’m sure those two things, I’ll go find that in the learning platform. Maybe that’s not the right answer, like you know, for particularly for a skills based organization, maybe, maybe it’s not. Maybe you do need to open the aperture and think to a much greater extent.
Rebecca Warren 31:44
Yeah, so I’ve got two things I want to add to that. I love this conversation here. So I think the first piece, when we talk about internal development, sometimes it feels like we’re just kind of lost, right? Like you said, Kevin, like there’s so many things out there to do, if you have a performance conversation with your manager, and especially in the past, it used to be that laundry list of all the things you have to fix right focusing on your weakness instead of your strengths. So how do we focus on those strengths? But also, how do we focus on, maybe not a laundry list of things that we want to improve. How can we start thinking about like those micro learning plans? Right? Let’s work on one skill. We don’t have to fix all these things, or we don’t have to develop all of these things at one time, but if one skill can make us incrementally better, let’s focus on that and do it in an abbreviated way. I’m going to work on this skill, right? And it’s that sense of accomplishment as well. When you get sometimes those development plans, and you’re like, oh my gosh, that’s overwhelming. I’m never going to be able to do all those things. And we look at those and they’ll show up, you know, two months before they’re due, and we’re like, Ah dang it, we haven’t done anything on our development plan. And then everybody’s scrambling to try to do that, to say that they’ve done it. How do we make it less of a tick the box and more about excitement to learn these little things, and sometimes doing it in bite sized pieces is a lot easier than trying to, you know, correct this, all of these things that that we need to do in order to get to that next level. The other, the other thing I wanted to throw out there. And we haven’t really talked much about this. But when we talk about reshaping organizations and reshaping HR, if we think I’ve worked at a previous company where we had really strong partnerships with the HR business partners, the generalists, they were involved in the recruiting process. They were involved when the new hires came on board, and they came alongside with them to really help them in their journey. I’ve seen a lot of organizations it feels like now are kind of hands off, self directed, do your own thing. How do we change that role of business partner to be more of that mentor, that buddy, to put those resources in place. Kevin, I didn’t know if you’ve. I don’t know if you’ve seen anything inside your organization to help shift that where an employee doesn’t feel like they’re completely alone, and pulling in mentors or buddies or using those business partners to help drive some of that engagement as well.
Kevin Blair 34:21
Yeah, exactly what you just said. It’s back to this ecosystem concept that the company is an ecosystem, and effectively, it’s an organism. It’s organic, it’s evolving, and it’s changing. And people come in, we hire externally, 10,000 plus people a year that come into the organization with new skills and bringing those experiences, in particular, when you’re in a large corporation like, like Erickson, we have, you know, five generations in the workplace. We have five general people who come from five generations in the company, three generations and two generations. And so what you want to do is make sure that you leverage the new that’s coming in the establishment already here, making those connections on those journeys. And again, it comes back to this experience of community. I think Ben was talking about before, about that engaging everybody, not just having engagements, 20% of people that are active and responsive, but actually probably more so, focusing on the people who are a bit ambivalent and a bit disconnected from your point before, Rebecca about the fact that we get this development plan, and everyone rushes to do at the end. Why is that? Is it because they’ve got so many other priorities, possibly, probably mostly because it’s not really talking to what they’re interested in doing and the direction they want to take, but they’re ticking the box to fill a corporate mandate to get to the next level, to get the move that they want to get, as opposed to, you know, engaging them and driving them forward. There’s no doubt, you know. And again, we talked about it for huge pressure, particularly in a time like this, where they’re being asked by a lot of the business to restructure and regroup the organization, whilst at the same time, most organizations consider them a cost. So they’re also getting whacked themselves for change. And so again, the importance of demonstrating that value and demonstrating a straight line to revenue or contribution or value is you then start to make these connections happen. You then start to show people that are engaged around a journey and they’re pulling through. And it’s done through communities, connections, intelligence and technology, bringing people together. I was looking at this technology recently and found that it’s an engaging tool that’s moving towards learning capabilities. It’s a very early stage company with a couple of guys I used to work with, so I kind of got to see the beta test. And it’s very much focused on bringing people together on their outside activities. So the stuff they do outside or outside of the workplace. Private Pilot football teams connect them on their social interests and their hobbies and hope that they then permeate skills or experiences in that community, because they’ve come together around a common interest that’s actually nothing to do with the workplace. They support the same football team, but what they’re doing is they’re seeding work, questions and comments and experiences into that group that’s actually developing the connections that are multi generational, multi discipline, multi functional across the business, which is really interesting when you look at some of the case studies they’ve done. It’s amazing. I thought it was amazing the example I was sharing with some of the pilot clients. I thought it was amazing the engagement they would drive them as a development environment.
Rebecca Warren 37:25
So switching that conversation from what are you going to do for me, more of what are we going to do for you? All right? Well, I appreciate that. Yeah, that’s great. Okay, so let’s talk about borrowing talent. What does that look like, right? So that third leg of the stool. So some companies are developing an internal project marketplace to get that cross functional engagement. Others are developing gig workers that are inside of an organization that just move from project to project, and we’ve got other companies that are looking to external agencies and firms for consultants, and all of those are different ways to borrow talent. So Ben, what are you seeing at large about what that borrows space looks like? It’s pretty broad, but I think also probably less developed than the other two spaces that we’ve talked about?
Ben Broomfield 38:23
Yeah, absolutely. I think it requires a bit of a shift in thinking, as we said earlier, away from that traditional definition of this is how everything is based around jobs and work is completed through jobs, more to something a model that is a lot more task based and is a lot more skill based. So definitely a bit less developed, because it requires a fairly major sort of shift in thinking, from organizations. But it definitely does coincide well with the shift to the gig economy, with, I think workers in general, just frustrated with the sort of bureaucracy that can get in the way of having to do their work. I think that can, again, become very, very frustrating. And there are definitely some organizations out there, I know, sort of planner, the delay payments company, for one, is a great example where their entire team is organized into it isn’t sort of, sort of based out, based, sort of into different divisions. It is based on specific project based teams that are very small, much more than, sort of your average team size. People work together on one specific project for a certain number of months, and then they sort of go on to do a new project with someone else. So there are definitely employers who are taking that approach and taking a very different, different way to sort of how they approach work. But I think that for it really to be successful, then it does. It does have to be sort of that, that very major shift. It’s quite difficult to do, sort of. Then you do sort of get that, that circumstance, I think, where you have your big economy workers, or your project workers, or your part time workers who you almost Can, can and have ended up historically, feeling like they’re second class workers and not as important, not as respected by other teams. It might be something that requires a bit more of that, that sort of fundamental shift to make it fun. Yeah, it’s definitely exciting to see what organizations out there are beginning to think about just sort of do away with this very, very traditional approach of we have a division within that there are people on teams who complete jobs and, you know, sort of that. That’s the model for it. So it’s, yeah, it’s an exciting time.
Kevin Blair 40:28
There was a there was there was a thing that I know, if they still do it, I used to look at the Google hours thing, where they used to give a certain amount of hours every week or every month back to their employees to collaborate on personal interest projects that were to the benefit of the company, and I believe, many different Google products that we know today were actually a result of those Google hours project, whereas that was very much focused on the individual. But what it did is actually evolved where teams will come together, we pool the Google hours to affect business outcomes. I’m going through a situation right now where I’m a very passionate supporter of bringing more neurodiverse people into the workplace. Autism ADHD, a standard selection process is very difficult for those individuals to come through. So I basically went out to a couple of people within the organization, said, I think it’d be really cool if we had a differentiator process that was adopted and we could run in parallel to our own process. I was not short of volunteers from all over the business to help me work on that, whether it’s a neurodiversity ERG, whether it’s people in diversity, whether it’s people in learning, whether it’s people actually in the in the business who hiring a lot of developers and believe their environment is a good landing spot for people with a neurodiverse condition. And so for me, you know those, those things that exactly are going to be bringing those people together around that common interest, but also that has a business value. And then, you know, creating this, whether it’s a formal marketplace or whether it’s just you allow people to come together on cross functional projects that have an interest to develop the company. I think it is a huge opportunity for learning and developing skills and capabilities. And fortunately, all these people in my little volunteer group are learning a lot about recruitment right now because we’re looking at selection and assessment processes. They’re not designed for that, and they’re like, oh, yeah, I get it. I can see why somebody who doesn’t make eye contact in an interview might not be shifty. They might be uncomfortable making eye contact. So how can we accommodate for that in our process? Right? You know, the person we want to stand up and walk around in an interview, as I had recently, that’s okay, because if that puts you at ease, and I get the best out of this discussion, I couldn’t care less. I genuinely couldn’t get less.
Rebecca Warren 42:46
I think that’s such a great point. And we think that remote opportunities have made it a lot easier for there to be more diversity in the workforce, because we don’t have to do a certain thing a certain way, right? Folks can. They don’t have to worry about getting into an office building right there. Some of the challenges they may have working in a traditional office have been taken away, or the playing field has been a little level by being able to be remote as well. So some of those accommodations, I think, are great, yeah, so talking about just really as a quick aside, we’ll go down to one of our last questions. So what kind of things would you bring into the office? This is taking it off of the questions. What kind of things would you bring into the workplace that you do outside, right? Like I write and facilitate murder mysteries, I got to figure out a way to incorporate that into my day to day. What kind of things do you think that you might be able, from the two of you, be able to bring into the office that might shake up the workplace.
Ben Broomfield 43:46
I love a murder mysteries. So first and foremost, if you’ve got, if you’ve got some writings that you can share, then I’m interested to see it. Yeah, I think again, I feel like I’m going to be stealing Kevin’s point because of what you said right at the beginning about his love for food and barbecuing, but yeah, I love cooking, and sort of, I love food, and I think that is something that is obviously you can’t, you can’t do it on your own, but it’s something that is very community based, and something very communal. And there’s something really enjoyable about taking the time to prepare a meal with your friends or with your family or someone that you care about, sort of just to, I don’t know how it would necessarily translate into the workplace, but again, there’s, there’s a lot of great lessons there, and it’s just an opportunity, I think, for sort of people just to stop and pause, take a moment just to focus on a sort of small task or small bit of food that they’re making, and just catch up with it and have that moment to speak and connect. So yeah, that’s, that’s one thing that I’d love to bring
Kevin Blair 44:39
up that’s a good one, willing your barbecue into the office is due to violations of health and safety policy. But I think the other thing, more broadly, more philosophically, is I personally love things that are gamified. I love making decisions in a very light hearted way. You know, everyone goes on to say, you do it, you’re doing two days in a meeting room for an off site, and then you find you did your best work around the dinner table over a glass of wine as a group. And sometimes that’s how it works, right? So I think the more we bring gamification into the way we work and the way we make decisions, not in an overtly ridiculous way where we, you know, everything we make decisions by Pac Man, but we actually get more hands on. We get more experience, like get more touchy around the topic and a bit deeper on it, and that’s how we start to bring things in, is that we experience it and we connect with it, and we remove some of the structures and the barriers that are normally constrained to making decisions, just make it a bit more fun. How do we get there?
Rebecca Warren 45:36
Yeah, Agree, Agree. Okay, so let’s talk about how talent, agility can empower HR. We’ve talked about different ways that HR, maybe has been looked at as a little more traditional, hasn’t necessarily had a seat at the table, bringing in an agile approach and empowering HR, I think, is the next step of where we need to go. So how are we and I’ll throw this out to both of you. So how do you think a skills based approach to talent helps HR as a function?
Ben Broomfield 46:16
It does. There’s a good recent example maybe that I can share that McKinsey sort of mentioned that they were going to be giving a lot of their managers nine months to to reskill and retrain in a different area before, yeah, before, sort of as an alternative to let them go immediately, giving them that opportunity to retrain and then, you know, step into a different role within the business. I think that’s a really good example of, again, how, going back to what we mentioned earlier, how an organization and our HR team can be a bit more strategic and less averse, sort of to say, well, you know, we don’t, necessarily, we don’t have a clear picture of what skills we have within the business. We don’t have a clear picture of what skills or capabilities we need within the business. So we’re just going to highlight crazy when you tell us to hire and we’re going to highlight crazy when you tell us to do that? So I think it’s a really good opportunity for HR teams and for talent teams to be a bit more strategic and say, well, that we know that we’re going through this change as a business. We know that we’ve got all of these workers who have got great skills, but maybe sort of the work they’re doing at the moment, just as it isn’t an area that business is going to focus on, for whatever reason, we can shift them over to this other area of the business, where their skills are more needed, where we have teams that are up to staff, to, you know, where we have capability gaps that are missing. So I think it really it’s fundamental to successful succession planning, to workforce planning, to being a lot more intentional about the support that the organization gives and sort of helping them to achieve, to achieve its goals. We’re definitely in a position now where, as we said, there’s been so much change over the last couple of years, organizations are pivoting and changing each time. When a business decides to make that major decision, they need to know from the HR team what skills a business has, how they could shift talent around, how they could shift those skills around to get there. And so that’s where HR can really be, that part of the business says that no worries. We know what skills we’ve got. We know what direction we can move it and sort of demonstrate that to the other business leaders. So think that’s why having that that agility is really important, especially in that this time of just constant change that we’re at
Kevin Blair 48:24
the moment. And I think adding to that as well, think about what you’re measuring and why you’re measuring it. Like some people just have measurements for success or for outcomes, and they don’t know why they’re measuring it. I think, you know, I sometimes, when I sort groups together like HR leaders, they sometimes think my head’s gonna explode if someone tells me one more time that in some way, you can connect time to fill as a value or quality metric and improvement, right? It’s not, it’s the productivity of speed matching, right? So you know, unless you’re able to differentiate and start thinking, why do we measure everything in this homogenized way? Why do we think that arbitrarily, working towards a number that we picked ourselves that we govern the action activities towards, and then we congratulate ourselves when we’re green on it. We’ve got to stop doing it. We’ve got to start thinking about, what are we measuring, and why are we measuring? And we’re never going to get the true commercial connected to the value connected to the revenue HR model, until we start to demonstrate a straight line back to the very thing I said at the very top of this conversation, a straight line to the outcomes the business needs to see. And that is not always what we choose to measure ourselves on and argue that we’ve done a good job because we’re green across the board on our metrics that we decided what they were. We self govern, and then we congratulate ourselves on what a great job we did. It’s not enough. It’s not enough.
Rebecca Warren 49:45
Yeah, agree. Thinking about that holistic view of talent, of agility, of what are the business outcomes that we’re measuring towards, totally makes sense. I’ve always hated the time to fill a metric, not a great one at all. But it is an easy way to be able to put some numbers to our productivity. Okay, so we’re coming to the last few minutes here, Kevin, we need to get you back to that wedding quickly. So
Kevin Blair 50:14
I saw the ride pass outside, and I got a look. So yeah, we need to give speeches in seven minutes, and so I better be there for a toast.
Rebecca Warren 50:24
Okay, we’ll talk quickly. The last question I want to throw out in the last few minutes here is what’s one piece of advice that you would give to HR leaders moving to and through their first year of a skills based approach. So Kevin, we’ll shoot that to you first.
Kevin Blair 50:41
I would say, be all in and commit like it’s not something you can play around with. Back to the ecosystem I took before, and the capability if you can’t, if you don’t commit to it, you end up with a federated position where the organizer and two parts of the organization are doing completely different things, and your philosophical position on it is off. So some managers believe in it and will endorse it and move people on, and some won’t and will hold on to their talent because they need to think about how they replace them in a competency based assessment model, or something similar to commit. Be bold. Commit. Get it going and train the organization and educate the organization. Far too much stuff is rolled out with just a view of some HR experts in a room who said this was a good idea. So you business people, you go and consume this because we know what we’re doing, and you don’t just take the medicine that’s best for you, educate them and help them understand what the journey is and what the role they play in that journey is what you expect of them. We would do that in any other part of their job. We don’t do it when it comes to hiring and moving talent on. We just don’t. We just direct and we point and we criticize, not enable. We just don’t.
Rebecca Warren 51:55
I love that the keyword that I hear from you is all in and enabled. Amazing. All right, then over to you.
Ben Broomfield 52:04
Yeah, I think the key word building off that, that I would go with, is communication. If you’re going all into it for a change like this, it’s a major undertaking, and the organization and everyone within it has to understand why you are making that change, what the benefit to them is, why it’s worth their time, why it’s worth listening to? And I think skills based is the hallmark of HR buzzwords, right? It’s one of those things that could very quickly just be relegated to the history of the number of buzzwords that didn’t occur if people don’t understand what it actually means in practice. Again, I think there are still plenty of talent acquisition folks out there who will hear the word skill based hiring and nothing. That just means we need to remove college requirements from job descriptions and we’re done with it. There’ll be managers who hear skills based approach nothing. Well, hang on, that means I’m going to lose my best people to other people within the business. As we say, communication is a really important thing. If you’re not communicating in that way, employees aren’t going to understand what the benefits are for them. They’re not going to see all of those really exciting opportunities that it can give them in terms of career mobility. And candidates would see that either managers won’t understand, you know what, why it’s worth it for them. And there’ll be a blockage and process and business leaders as well, obviously have to understand it’s going to be a major undertaking. There’s obviously going to be lots of different investments in technology and culture and time and teams that are gonna come through. So if the business leadership doesn’t understand what the benefits are to that as well, then it’s not, it’s not gonna take so, yeah, communication is the word that I would go with.
Rebecca Warren 53:34
I love that so, and I would put one more word on that is transparency, right? If you’re not transparent, the organization isn’t transparent about where they’re going, then it’s really hard for folks to jump on board. So communication, transparency, enablement and be all fabulous . Well, thank you both for your time. Really appreciate it. Round of applause for you both for all of your words of wisdom and all of the things that you shared that wraps us for this edition of talent table, Join us next month, again.
