Ligia Zamora  

Hello and welcome to The New Talent Code. We just had another fantastic interview wrap up. This time we actually interviewed one of our very own. Some of you may or may not know, but at Eightfold we recently brought in Darren Burton as our chief people officer and he has an incredible background. He’s been a champion of workforce transformations, D&I, culture and change management across a ton of industries, including aerospace and manufacturing. It actually like blew my mind. He looks so young for having done so much. But anyway, he’s actually what we define as an HR change agent. He’s been pushing transformations, HR transformations across different industries by being transparent, holistic, strategic, just the perfect guest for this podcast. 

Jason Cerrato  

Yeah, it was great to have him on the podcast. It’s great to have him at Eightfold. I mean, what a great conversation. Here’s a little background on Darren for our listeners. As mentioned, you know, extensive HR experience over 20 years as a talent leader leading large scale operations at companies like IBM, Campbell Soup Company, Raytheon, most recently KPMG. You’ll hear from him on why he decided to come to Eightfold and what opportunities he sees here and why he’s excited about some of the capabilities we’re bringing to market. We really wanted to pick his brain about how CHROs can walk into the boardroom even more prepared. It’s something that can be really daunting if you don’t have the data to back up your initiatives and your talent programs. We covered a lot of ground in this episode. 

Ligia Zamora  

I love his analogies. You know, he really puts a lot of things very simply. I love how he was saying HR in the past has been driving without the lights on. Just because they haven’t had the right level of insights into talent. But the best part for me guys is when he starts talking about you know, just like brass tacks. How do you go from being a facilitator to a champion in HR? It comes a little later in the episode so definitely keep listening. One of my favorite parts of the episode was when he talks about his previous role as the HR leader at KPMG during COVID, and during the shutdown and during the move to hybrid remote work, just the way the nature and shape of his role changed. 

Jason Cerrato  

The importance of his role on that leadership team. I think that really stood out to me, especially as we all work together to kind of build the way we’re going to move forward into the future. The role that HR now plays, kind of in that transformation. It was really an interesting thing to discuss. 

Ligia Zamora  

Yeah, I definitely felt like I walked for a minute in his shoes or you know, 30 minutes but anyway, enough from us to enjoy the interview with Darren Burton, Eightfold’s new Chief People Officer.

Ligia Zamora  

Hello, Darren, and welcome to the show. Let’s go ahead and jump right in today. We’re going to put ourselves in a CHRO’s shoes. We want to know a little bit more about your every day, how people should think about transforming organizations to be skills-based. How are we ultimately going to fundamentally transform the HR function and a little bit more about what kind of information you need when you step into the boardroom? Right? Historically as well as today. But anyway, before we go there, that was just a short summary. Tell us a little bit about yourself and more importantly, what brought you to Eightfold? 

Darren Burton  

Thanks, Ligia. It is really great to be here. I’ve been doing this work for more than 20 years. I won’t say exactly how long but a long time. Yeah, you know, I’ve worked in six different industries and six different companies. I’ve had just about every role in human resources you can think about. I’ve worked in manufacturing, I’ve worked in unionized environments, non-unionized environments, work for technology companies like IBM. I’ve worked in business, outsourcing. I’ve worked in aerospace and defense, in the intelligence business within Raytheon, and the missiles business within Raytheon.

Ligia Zamora  

Wow.

Darren Burton  

Prior to coming to Eightfold, I was working in KPMG and I was a CHRO for KPMG and responsible for an overall HR transformation with KPMG. So really fortunate and proud of the background that I have, and then it brings me to why did I choose to join? And it’s pretty straightforward because although I did not know about Eightfold prior to joining the advisory board, when I met you folks, and we started having these conversations, they became more and more intriguing. And what I found was what had been looking for that entire career spanning all those different companies and all those different industries was what I’ve been trying to do is really understand talent within those organizations and be able to quite simply make intelligent decisions about how we engage with our talent and attract that talent, move it through the organization, and really make sure that we’re being productive as far as how we engage with our talent. And we never really had that ability before. And I’ve never been able to cross all those experiences that have been tremendous, truly be able to have a talent intelligence platform like Eightfold offers at scale in any of those organizations. Simply put, also, we tried to do this at IBM. I tell the story all the time when I first started my career, and what we were trying to do was create an internal talent marketplace for people because if you think about it, then it was 300,000 employees or so and think about just the breadth of skills that existed within the organization that we really didn’t understand completely. So what is truly trying to understand that talent and then ultimately, how do we engage that talent and kind of take it through the lifecycle of employment and match talent to what our needs were? Because clearly, with that size of an organization, we couldn’t simply hire all of the talent that we needed. And if you fast forward to today, that’s exactly where we are now. But we have the technology through artificial intelligence and deep machine learning through Eightfold and a platform. So when I saw that when I engaged with all of you and the leaders, I said, I’ve got to get engaged. I got to do this. So that’s why I joined.

Jason Cerrato  

Well, welcome to Eightfold. We’re so happy to have you here. And it’s so wonderful that kind of what you’ve been seeking all along, you’re able to find here with us. We’re excited to see what we work on together to improve the HR function and to continue to build this talent intelligence technology. You know, Darren, HR has gone through several phases over the last 100 years and probably no more so than the last five or six. And I’d like to say when I was growing up in the HR function, HR was always kind of the defenders or the propagators of organizational culture, right. They were the ones that kind of helped set the rules of the road and help people understand the guiding practices of how we work together. And I think over the last few years, HR has been asked to kind of be the change agents in changing culture and driving transformation in this new way of work. So I think with everything going on in the world, it’s never been more challenging to work in HR, but also probably more exciting to work in HR, because of everything that’s kind of at our fingertips. How have you seen HR change in your career over these last 20 or so years?

Darren Burton  

It’s simply amazing. And as I listened to you talk, I think about the lead up to the last three years and it’s been that lead up of continually being more engaged with the business, understanding the direction of business leaders, and positioning talent in the work that we do to make sure that it’s aligned. But the last three years it’s just been a roller coaster ride, an accelerated roller coaster ride. When you think about what happened with COVID, the financial kind of unrest that we were experiencing, the social and political unrest that we were experiencing from that, you know, getting into the war in Ukraine and in politics, you know, across the globe. I mean, it was everything. And what it really required was for HR to do all the things that you talked about, but also really become the center of everything. And so when I spent time in my last employer, I really became the central leader on the C-suite, the executive leadership team, and making a lot of these decisions and really being the facilitator of the change. And so whether we were ready or not, we needed to be able to have very quick conversations around what does our workforce look like? Where are the gaps in our workforce that we are experiencing today? How do we really shift from 100% face-to-face interactions to 100% remote work, and it really became more of a business continuity conversation that we were having, and HR leaders, people leaders needed to be ready and engaged with that kind of conversation. And guess what? We needed data. We needed to be able to speak the business language with using data to be able to answer so many fundamental questions that not only internal leaders had, but the external board had as well around how are we position to ensure the viability of this organization through our talent and be able to engage in an effective way and provide confidence to the board that we have the ability to do that.

Jason Cerrato  

We talk a lot about organizations becoming skill-based and using skills as that data point to kind of understand the capabilities of work and of roles and how at even at the C-suite level, roles are changing very dynamically and skill makeup of the people that have to take on those jobs is becoming much more diverse and much broader. Probably one of the roles that’s changed the most is that of CHRO. So as you’ve talked about it, being that kind of sustainability role and that people role and blending labor relations with talent management and now doing this in a hybrid model. So we definitely see how skills have changed there but also how the CHRO truly has become this strategic business partner dealing with all different elements of the organization, in your experience, and maybe going back to your most recent role. What are some of those insights or capabilities or data points that you’ve used to great success in influencing the business? And maybe after that, what are some of the ones that are always hard to get your hands on when you talk about being more more of a data-driven HR function and HR leader?

Darren Burton  

So you mentioned the word skills, and again, that’s one of the main things that attracted me to Eightfold is the focus on skills. So when you think about how work has changed, and how the HR profession is going to be, I think revolutionize by the big S word, which is skills. It’s really just is a fundamental shift that is occurring. So we need to really start thinking about work in jobs and job descriptions in a completely different way. So when I think about that taxonomy around how you define a role, and a role description, it really needs to completely change and be really focused on the skills that are required to be able to fill that role, and how those roles are potentially going to be changing over time. Because again, if you can’t hire enough of the right kind of talent today, I’d rather hire someone who has 80% of those skills. That we need and be able to then develop them internally for the other 20%. In addition, we’ve got all kinds of skills that exist internally. And if I really understand the kind of skills that are required, and also the adjacent skills for the work that I have, then again, I can go in, I can engage in upskilling of my talent in a way that we’ve never really been affected that before. So when I think about, you know how HR is going to change, it’s just really the focus on the skills and you can see kind of the trends right now. People are really focused on contingent work and project work. That’s the beginning of this trend towards a skills-based organization because then you start looking at not the job itself, but the kind of skills that are going to be required to be able to do certain kinds of work, which we all know is going to be rapidly changing. So if I just understand the kind of skills that are required, and again, if I’ve got 80% of that, I can kind of move with the trends and the technology and the disruption in my industry and effectively really create a viable model for being able to address our needs over time versus the strict definition of a job or a role.

Ligia Zamora  

That in essence means the transfer. We’ve talked just now about acquiring skills against a job description at the most basic level: skills, right? So supply and demand. But the reality is, aren’t we also talking about transforming the way we assess performance? Aren’t we also talking about transforming the way we do compensation? So the transformation is, is broad and it’s broad in its deep, right?

Darren Burton  

And it’s all of those things, right? Because if you talk to a true HR professional you really you know, take a system view, any component of the people management system, it all needs to be able to work together. Yeah, and be supportive. And so like you say, it’s not just the job, right? It is the the compensation that goes along with that. The reward system that supports that is the succession planning, and career development that goes along with that. So when you start thinking about it, a skills-based organization, you really start to see how fundamentally it’s going to disrupt the people business itself. And you really become skills professionals, and engage with talent in a I think, in a very different way than we have historically. So yes, it’s a revolutionary change in my mind.

Jason Cerrato  

So as part of our running theme of The New Talent Code and doing things differently than they’ve always done. On a previous episode, we had the talent leader from WD-40. And she talked about the organization taking the skills based approach and kind of deconstructing organizations and moving more towards what she called squads. And one of the takeaways from that conversation was she talked about if you’re going to be carrying out work differently and evaluating talent differently, it required leaders to lead differently. Right. So just piggybacking on Ligia’s question in the last kind of discussion, what is this kind of put in your mind around a skills-based organization around how HR needs to run the HR function or how leaders need to lead from a transformation or a cultural perspective? How do you see that playing out there?

Darren Burton  

And let’s take leaders first when you think about the leader today, we have shifted I mean, very quickly over the past, let’s call it two years, where leaders have had to operate in a in a much different way. As far as you know, how do you create the kind of culture how do you create the kind of collaboration that in a remote way that they were not accustomed to really leading it? Leaders have really gotten I think, more open around how to engage with their employees and get work done. And I think that is the foundation that’s going to be required for the next step around really focusing more on skills versus jobs and role descriptions, like I talked about, and for most organizations, I think that they’re going to have to be able to engage with their leaders and being very deliberate around how leadership is going to have to change to be able to be aligned and support this new way of thinking. They have to not only understand the business and how it’s changing over time, but they’re also going to have to understand in their market broadly even outside of their organizations, how things are trending as far as skills that need to be acquired, where their skills are accelerating as far as the need, if they’re plateauing if they are declining. So there’s going to have to be a whole different skill set that the HR professional today in the future is going to have to require to be able to operate in that kind of model.

Ligia Zamora  

It sounds like it sounds like an adviser role rather than a support role. 

Darren Burton  

It truly is. It truly is and someone who’s coming with that knowledge in the data around skills and how leaders are going to have to be able to operate, to be able to engage with the skills that they need to be able to fill the demand. 

Jason Cerrato  

Kind of in the sense of crawl, walk, run with any kind of transformation or change. I heard you say around how topics like contingent workers and elastic talent strategies and flex kind of concepts are top of mind and very current. Do you think they’re kind of also one of the first steps because in many cases, those talent initiatives and those kinds of conversations are very skills based to begin with? 

Darren Burton  

Yeah, I think it’s the Trojan horse to be honest with you. It really is, I mean, we were playing around with flex and contingent work, again, as a result of the pandemic, you know, in a in a huge way, even before the pandemic, we were talking about the gig economy, but it’s a whole different concept now. And I think that there is a percentage of every organization’s workforce that is going to be based on contingent and project work, and more and more that population is going to grow and even the core workforce, I believe, is going to look more like a project-based organization. That right then than it does today. So I think contingent and flex is kind of the beginnings of the evolution that we’re going to go through.

Jason Cerrato  

One of the things I’ve been sharing and a couple years ago, wasn’t as popular for people to hear from me to say, was that you know, universities for early careers, a lot of Career Services Center, were talking about over the course of your career, you would go through project-based employment, right, because you couldn’t go somewhere and work for 30 years like your parents did. And I think what’s happening now is with tools like internal talent marketplaces, organizations are trying to create that ability to have project-based employment but within their walls for a period of time to sustain their talent based off of how they deliver to their customers, right.

Darren Burton  

And you know this. I mean, you’ve been in the business just as long as I have — even though I’ve got more greys than you — that that internal kind of marketplace is absolutely where employers had been trying to go for some time. When the technology wasn’t there, and to I think, just important culturally, organizations weren’t really ready for how fluid talent needs to be able to move through an organization because everyone not everyone, but many leaders when you organize, you know, had that quarter mentality around talent, right? So you didn’t really want to release your best talent because you needed to be productive. So there were all kinds of rules of engagement around how long a person needed to be in a role, what kind of approvals they needed to get to be able to move from one organization to the next, and just kind of collapse under its own weight. I think those barriers are really going to involve, you know, kind of down in an organization again, because we need to be much more agile and fluid and how we move our talent around. So one of the big issues around the internal marketplace was culturally, from a leadership perspective, from an employee perspective, we just weren’t ready to engage that way. I think we’re in a much different place today.

Jason Cerrato  

Ligia, you ask that question all the time. She loves the question of how do I help people move but still get my job done every day.

Ligia Zamora  

Yeah, well I mean but that’s, I’m sort of like practical here I think about my mom listening to the podcast, our one listener. And I think if you had any practical advice, I mean, I think everyone’s talking about moving to skills and skills-based organizations. The reality is there’s a lot of change management associated with it. Or making people rethink old constructs and those things at a time of crisis, whether it’s COVID or a recession, you go to your place of comfort. So what’s your advice for HR? As they move, as you said earlier, from facilitator to champion, how do they get educated around this?

Darren Burton  

It is almost a requirement to be able to think today, because some of the hardest conversation that I had, you know, with our boards of directors was do you go beyond succession planning? Yeah. Right. Do you really understand the direction of this business? Do we really understand whether we have the skills and capabilities kind of a viable workforce to be able to move in that direction? Do we have the right numbers and types of employees to be able to serve our clients? I mean, these are really critical questions that without the appropriate knowledge and data and the intelligence to be able to have that dialogue, it becomes a pretty contentious conversation, potentially, a very anxious situation for CHRO. So it’s almost a requirement that we move in this direction. So if I think about helpful tips is that clearly doesn’t have to be done all at one time. Yeah, I think that you can really take pockets of your organization and begin to test some of these concepts with leaders that are, I think, more accustomed to thinking like this have had experience you know, through the pandemic or through disruption, that they understand the mother of necessity, right. I mean, it is when they understand when the organization truly understands they can’t just they can’t fill the needs, regardless of you know, all of the efforts around, you know, talent acquisition, people are still moving kind of fluidly through, you know, organizations. So retention rates are still high, that they need to be able to have a good understanding of the people that they have within their own four walls to be able to solve for their talent needs. I think if you start with, you know, organizations that are receptive, that’s the way to start versus all at once. And when you start to have the conversation even beyond the board with your peers in the C-suite, you know, clearly they have the same questions too. And they need to have comfort that the CHRO is facilitating conversations across the organizations by business units. They have leaders within their organization, meaning HR that can have those kinds of conversations with their leaders. This is the conversation that they expect. So I think that people need to understand that it is you know, not all at once, it could be step-by-step and begin to test some of these concepts. One of the first starts is do you want to have the technology to be able to begin to have this conversation. And some organizations have moved in that direction, but many have not.

Ligia Zamora  

Yeah, it sounds like some quick wins and quick success. And quick references will help then convert the non-converted, the non-believers. 

Darren Burton  

Absolutely.

Jason Cerrato  

Hey, Darren, I just wanted to ask you a question around kind of this planning and preparing and you talked about HR in this kind of sustaining role, especially with so much transformation going on. One of the things that they say is how planning fails in the face of uncertainty. Right, and we’ve never been probably more uncertain than we are in these last few years and going forward. There’s been a lot of discussion around kind of changing how you plan and not just looking at, like we’ve talked about specific roles, but maybe looking at the work or looking at the scenarios and doing things around planning for specific scenarios or a variety of scenarios because you never know what may come at you. What are your thoughts around that and kind of how that changes the way leaders look at the organization or the way they plan for not just talent acquisition or talent management but total talent and the way they they need data to kind of plan in that scenario. 

Darren Burton  

So I don’t even know how you really begin to plan and to really do strategic workforce planning without data that we’re talking about. And again, many organizations and throughout my career, we have clearly attempted to do that kind of planning. But it’s I think it’s always really fallen short. Because we haven’t had the kind of technology I mean comprehensively across the organization to take all of our systems all of the people-related data that we have, bring it into one place, and then really be able to make sense of it, and then do the planning that we need based on the direction of the business and having conversations with business leaders. So to me the start of this is how do I really leverage all of the information that I have, all of the data that I have, and hopefully try to do that in one place. And most organizations can’t do that today. But if you can begin to bring all of those things together. I think you can have a different kind of conversation that we’ve never been capable of having before and leaders are going to resonate with that. Because he absolutely have not had that ability in previous years.

Jason Cerrato  

Yeah, there was a data point that showed for HR leaders planning especially even at the executive levels they were planning for jobs that they anticipate would look extremely different in fewer than four or five years. So it’s this how do you plan for what you can’t see? 

Darren Burton  

And in the meantime, they’re still hiring. Right? Today, right? And to me, it’s almost like driving with no headlights. A lot of what we’ve been doing is driving with no headlights.

Ligia Zamora  

What an analogy. Well, I think with that, it’s time for us to wrap up. But before I let you go, I’m going to do some quick questions. If you hadn’t gotten into HR, which is quite an illustrious career, what other kinds of work would you have pursued? What other kinds of interest you know if somebody had potentially had believed in your potential?

Darren Burton  

That’s a really interesting question. So there are many components of HR. Where I started was in labor relations, and I was actually a contract negotiator. If I had not continued in my path, to be more of a generalist, I would have been a labor negotiator.

Ligia Zamora  

You enjoyed it that much.

Darren Burton  

I really enjoyed it that much. I would have been doing labor negotiations and would have stayed in that field of work probably, but opportunities came up and I chose to pursue them.

Ligia Zamora  

Yeah. And what’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?

Darren Burton  

Wow. Be open the change. Especially in today’s world. The advice I always got was be open to change, and never make decisions based on how you think that’s going to impact your career. Be unafraid and really do what you think is the right thing to do. Right? Regardless of the pressures. So you have to have the courage to be able to make decisions. And I think that what my experience has been is that if you’re the kind of leader who was willing to make decisions. Guess what? People are always coming to you to make decisions. So I think that in order to be able to do that, I always say that, you know, I’m making career ending decisions like every single day. That’s the job. That’s the job, so be unafraid.

Ligia Zamora  

I love it. Take a leap of faith. Well, Darren, I want to thank you and I think I’m going to take the liberty of letting you know we might have you back on the podcast, you are just a wealth of knowledge. So thank you.

Darren Burton  

Thank you, more than welcome, my pleasure.

Ligia Zamora  

Let us know your thoughts on the episode reach out to us on LinkedIn, like us, subscribe, follow us. But as always, we’d love to hear from you. Thanks for listening to The New Talent Code.