David Mallon, Head of Research for Deloitte’s Human Capital Practice, discussed the 2025 Global Human Capital Trends Report, focusing on turning tensions into triumphs and the concept of boundarylessness in organizations. He highlighted the experience gap, where organizations struggle to find experienced talent, often due to outdated job requirements and the lack of entry-level roles. Mallon emphasized the importance of assessing human capabilities like judgment and adaptability over traditional proxies like degrees and years of experience. He also noted the role of AI in both exacerbating and solving the experience gap by providing personalized learning and development opportunities.

Introduction to human capital trends and experience gap

• Theresia Hermes welcomes everyone and introduces David Mallon, Head of Research for the human capital practice in the US.
• David Mallon explains the purpose of the human capital trends research, emphasizing its global scope and executive audience.
• David introduces the theme of this year’s report: turning tensions into triumphs, focusing on boundarylessness in organizations.
• He discusses the evolving nature of work and the workforce, highlighting the fluid boundaries and opportunities they present.

Understanding currents and tensions in human capital

• David Mallon uses the metaphor of currents to describe the forces driving changes in work and workforce.
• He explains the importance of understanding and naming these currents to be more intentional about them.
• The report aims to help leaders navigate tensions by making better decisions through a lens of human performance.
• David emphasizes the multiplicative effect of business and human outcomes on overall organizational performance.

Global research and executive audience

• David Mallon highlights the global nature of the research, with 13,000 respondents from almost 100 countries.
• A significant portion of respondents are C-suite executives or board members, indicating a broad executive audience.
• The report addresses the challenges leaders face due to uncertainty and the disappearing boundaries of work and workforce.
• David discusses the tensions leaders face, such as the use of AI and technology to automate or augment work.

Navigating tensions and human performance

• David Mallon explains the importance of finding a balance between different tensions, such as personalization vs. standardization.
• The report organizes trends into categories related to work, workforce, and organization, with some trends cutting across all three.
• He provides a brief overview of the trends, including the need for stability, reclaiming organizational capacity, and changing work due to AI.
• The experience gap is introduced as a key trend, with a focus on understanding and addressing it.

The experience gap: Defining and addressing it

• David Mallon explains the perennial issue of talent shortages and the shift in focus to experienced talent.
• He discusses the challenges of finding experienced people and the paradox of job requirements for experience in entry-level roles.
• The trend aims to solve the problem of where experience comes from and how workers develop the skills needed.
• David emphasizes the need to reset expectations and understand what experience means in the context of rapidly changing work requirements.

Poll results and audience engagement

• Theresia Hermes conducts a poll to understand what contributes most to the experience gap, with lack of early career roles emerging as the top response.
• David Mallon discusses the importance of entry-level roles and the impact of AI and automation on their availability.
• He highlights the need to unpack experience and assess for human capabilities like judgment and adaptability.
• The discussion includes examples of how organizations are using data and technology to address the experience gap.

Case studies and practical solutions

• David Mallon shares examples of organizations using data and tools like eightfold to unpack job requirements and expand their talent pool.
• He discusses the importance of understanding work and the skills needed to perform it, rather than relying on proxies like degrees and years of experience.
• The conversation includes examples of how AI can help harvest tacit knowledge and stand up new employees more quickly.
• Theresia Hermes provides examples of how organizations like Vodafone and Boston Scientific are using eightfold to improve talent management and candidate experience.

Impact of AI and technology on talent management

• David Mallon and Theresia Hermes discuss the dual role of AI: both a problem and a solution in addressing the experience gap.
• They highlight the potential of AI to personalize learning and development opportunities for early career employees.
• The discussion includes examples of how AI can help organizations better understand and manage their talent.
• Theresia Hermes emphasizes the importance of actionable insights and the ability to customize learning and development opportunities for employees.

Q&A and audience engagement

• The session includes a Q&A segment, with questions from the audience about the role of business leaders in closing the experience gap.
• David Mallon and Theresia Hermes discuss the importance of involving managers and hiring managers in talent development and retention.
• They emphasize the need for HR to become a trusted advisor and influence organizational culture and decision-making.
• The conversation includes examples of how organizations are using data and technology to open doors for more candidates without lowering the bar for success.

Conclusion and next steps

• The session concludes with a reminder of the importance of addressing the experience gap and the potential benefits for organizations.
• David Mallon and Theresia Hermes highlight the need for continuous learning and adaptation in a rapidly changing world.
• The discussion includes a call to action for organizations to use data and technology to better understand and develop their talent.
• The session ends with a reminder of the resources available to help organizations address the experience gap and improve their talent management practices.

Theresia Hermes 0:09 Hi everyone. Good to see you and welcome today. I’m so excited speaking with you, David today, on of course, your human capital trends, what you have been guiding in the last year. So, so excited to sit down with you today and have this conversation. But before we jump into the to the larger the main topic of closing the experience gap, I would love to take, if you can take a moment, David, to set the stage and help the audience a little bit more to understand what the major themes you have covered in this year’s Global Human Capital Trends Report.

David Mallon 0:46 Thank you, and thanks to Eightfold for having me back. I would love to get out and tell the story of the human capital trends as introduced. My name is David Mallon. I am the Head of Research for our human capital practice in the US, and one of the many hats to get to where one of the ones I enjoy the most is, is my involvement every year in our human capital trends research. So this is, we like to think of the sort of largest and longest look at essentially, what are the big, what are the big issues in human capital. What are the what’s changing? How we approach, how we manage our workforces, how we work with the people who work for us. I always like to describe it. Some of you may have heard me, if you’ve heard me talk before, you may have heard this. We use this metaphor. It’s not, it’s not looking at the future. It’s not predictions. It is much more of trying to understand currents. I think you’ve all probably, I suspect, had that feeling of, maybe you were in the, you know, at the beach, or you were in a river or something, and you felt the current pushing you somewhere. That’s what this is. It’s sort of, it’s about now, it’s about the currents that are pushing us into different places with regards to all things work and workforce. And it’s important, because if we can, if we can understand those currents, if we can name them, and we can actually get better at describing them and telling stories about them, then we can also be more intentional about them, we can actually use them to push us in directions, to drive us into directions that we want to go. And so that’s kind of the point of this. Every year. This is, as you see here, the kind of top level idea behind this year’s report is turning tensions into triumphs. For the last couple of years, I’ve been looking at this notion of sort of boundarylessness in organizations. Every year, when we do these trends, there’s some kind of broader theme that we anchor to. And in the last couple of years, it’s been that, you know, there’s a lot of the basic assumptions, or definitions, words, the language that we use when we talk about how organizations work have themselves become, you know, harder and harder to kind of to define. So, for example, what is work? What is a job? How is that evolving? What is who’s in the workforce? Where does work happen? These are, these are so fundamental questions and yet, the boundaries between, you know, what is? What is one job versus the other is not even the best way to think about how to define work. The boundaries just get sort of more and more fluid by the day, and that, of course, creates anxieties, but it also creates opportunities. And in this year, we were kind of diving into, yeah, they realize there’s opportunities where there’s, we’re finding that leaders are realizing that there are tensions pulling them in a different direction. Different directions. And how do we sort of understand those intent, those tensions? How do we, how do we look at how to help leaders sort of get off the fences, the sort of wait and see that we’ve kind of been in given sort of the turbulence around us. What can we do about that? So this year’s report is taking that notion of boundarylessness and that notion of sort of tensions, and trying to dig into, okay, so in the various issues that this year’s trends represent, where are the decisions that we need to make, and sort of, how can we best make them and how we do that, it through a lens of what we call human performance, which is one of the, you know, kind of, I guess, some sort of biggest tensions is, how do we make decisions to both drive the business outcomes organizational outcomes that we have to have think growth and cost and speed innovation and so forth. But at the same time, the human outcomes that we need to think well of or trust, because we firmly believe in our research, have sort of shown over time that these two things are actually multiplicative. They’re not in competition. And the more that we can do both, the more that we get overall performance and the organization. Now I’ve used the IF YOU If, my guess is, if you’re in the audience today, that you’re probably familiar with our human capital trends research, but I mentioned it being kind of the largest, longest look at these currents and human capital going we’ve been doing it for well over a decade. Each year it gets a little bit bigger, but it is very much a global story, very much global research. You see here, 13,000 respondents into our surveys in almost 100 countries around the world. It’s very much a global story, and it’s a very executive audience. About a third of our respondents are actually identified as in C suites or board of directors. So it is not just us taking, you know, collecting data from what you might imagine to be an HR audience. It’s actually very much a business and executive audience, and that, I think, is really important. So with that couple more words about just sort of off the top of that, this year’s report, I talked about the notion of tensions. If it feels like it’s sort of hard to be the leader today it is. We are surrounded by uncertainty, those boundaries between what is work and workforce, etc, that those, those disappearing nature of them does create. Well, for many leaders, it’s sort of suddenly unstable, like I knew how to make decisions in a certain world, and now maybe that’s harder than it once was, and there are these polls to go in different directions. Do we use, for example, AI and technologies to automate, or do we use them to augment? How much should we be trying to personalize for the experiences of our customers and our workforces? Or how much should we be trying to standardize so we can go fast and be efficient? Do we focus on predictability, sort of trying to make sure that we understand what’s in front of us? Or do we focus on potential, given the amazing things that technologies could do today? Those are just a few. And navigating these tensions we talked about in the study this year, it’s not about picking a side. It’s about finding the balance between these, given the questions in front of us, given the particular challenges that we’re facing. And you’ll, you’ll, I would invite you to kind of think about these kinds of balances, finding balances when we actually dig a little bit further into one of the trends today, which is the experience gap. So if you do go, just a quick word about the report, if you do go and look at it, or maybe you already have, let’s see, there we go. You’re going to see that it is digging into how we navigate these tensions to make decisions. You’re going to see that we are talking to leaders at all levels, not just the executives, but at all levels around. How do we not just focus on business outcomes, are not just focused on human outcomes, but do both, and how we do that in the right ways, how we treat decision making as a discipline, how we make sure we have the right data, etc. You’ll also see that we have organized the trends in some categories, some that have something to do with work, some that have something to do with the workforce, some that have something to do with the organization. Or the organization, I will tell you, because every time we talk about this, people ask, but I wouldn’t have categorized that trend in that category. Yeah, we know it’s just it was meant to be a little bit to make it easy to work with some of them could be in all three categories, and probably are that said, Here are this year’s trends. Given today’s topic and time, we don’t have a chance to we don’t have time to go through them all, but I will just sort of quickly highlight, you know, kind of some of the ideas behind them in that first column you see, you see us talking about, leaders want to go fast and be agile, but the workforce is saying it’s kind of crazy. Can we slow down and actually anchor ourselves, and that really is all. This is our notion of stability. We’ve invented a word there. But how do we create better anchors in the organization for workers so that, paradoxically, they can go faster, so they can thrive in all the disruption and change around us? Similarly, we all know what it is these days where, you know, our lives are busy. We’re constantly interrupted, etc. We know that fairly often work just seems to get in the way of work. So what can we do about that? How can we reclaim a bit of capacity in the work that’s in front of us, given all things AI, they see the ones in the middle. It is changing work. It is changing what it means to be a worker. And what we’re realizing is that organizations are doing to kind of stop and rethink what we met, what’s in it for the worker. Why would a worker work in an AI enabled organization? That’s this notion of sort of thinking differently, about a value proposition. Today’s topic is the experience gap. We’ll skip that one. In all of this, we are making differences. Decisions about our investments in technology, we talk a bit about sort of how that’s shifting. You see the ones on the right. We are also rethinking questions of performance management. That’s an ongoing, never, seemingly never ending conversation of, how do we better understand performance and what is the future role of managers and organizations? And then when it comes to change, how are we motivating? How we think differently about how we motivate people in the organization, especially given our ability now to know them, sort of finer grade levels, much the same way that we do our customers. That just kind of gives you a quick overview with that.

I’m going to stop here. And I think we’ll, we’ll dive into, we’ll start to dive into the conversation today, which is the experience gap, what you’re seeing here on the slide, maybe just, I’ll point you point out what’s going on when I said that we the point of this research is we look at these currents and we try to figure out how to name them and do something with them. One of the things, one of the simplest things that we’re gathering in our research is simply, well, which of these is sort of the most top of mind? Call it urgency or importance, and then where are organizations on the journey of doing something about it? And that’s what you’re seeing here. You’re seeing that this, this set of all the trends. And you’re seeing the big lines are essentially some notion of urgency or importance. So these are the, these are the sum of the companies that said this is a really important thing for us, or it’s, you know, so it’s top of mind for us. And the smaller, darker green line is those that are at least trying to do something about it, and the very small blue line are those that feel like that. They’re actually, you know, moving the needle. They’re actually generating outcomes, given today’s topic, and I’ll, I’ll bring Theresa, Theresa back into the conversation. You see it at the bottom, and it’s interesting, as we’ve watched this one, this report came out essentially back in February, and as we’ve seen this notion of the experience gap play out since then, it’s become a very big topic in the news and in media and so forth. But back, but back when we were collecting this data, last fall, not necessarily, you know, it wasn’t something that many companies were doing well, you see, you still see, you know, a sizable number still said it was important. It made it. It made our list. Right amongst the things that didn’t make the list. It made our list, but it was kind of an emerging issue, and yet, maybe it’s not so emerging anymore, and we’ll talk about that along the way.

Theresia Hermes 12:28 Yeah, and David, honestly, I loved your creation. You put in the beginning the business outcomes multiply multiplied by the human outcomes. To really think about human performance, because I think anyone on this call today has some kind of this tension already, of we are asked to do more or grow faster be more profitable, but in the same time, of course, we as managers are the ones who are put in a position of, how do we build trust with our employees? How do we make sure that they are also empowering and welcoming those new innovations and I think especially with the experience gap. I know we dive into it a little bit more. I think that tension becomes even more clear. But I know we spoke when we connected before this webinar, quite a bit on this one here, because I think the knowing and doing gap is such an interesting one, because I think everyone can can, like, understand it, that yes, I know this is a problem, but it’s really hard to get into the doing. And I’m wondering, do you have any thoughts on what is preventing those leaders today from doing anything about it? And obviously you already said some of these have already changed since you have published this report. So just curious, of like, what are the changes you have seen already? And then, of course, also, what is something where the leaders feel like they’re prevented from doing something while they’re acknowledging there might be a problem?

David Mallon 13:48 Well, I mean, to some degree, the answer to that question is different for each of these trends, or at least somewhat different. But we, we do ask of, you know, a version of that question, and we’re collecting the data, and it would not surprise you to know that sort of, you know, some of the common barriers or obstacles can be things like, you know, internal constraints, like maybe the internal culture of the organization or its organ or its structures, etc. Those are the kinds of things that sometimes prevent us from, you know, going fast. It can be external constraints, meaning, like customer expectations, regulations, etc. It can also be just more simply, a lack of alignment. Maybe leaders don’t necessarily align around thinking that it’s something that should get prioritized. It can be a lack of resources. It can be a lack of knowledge, how do they have the capabilities to do anything about it? And actually, the most interesting one that comes up fairly often, it should just be called out, is in many cases, like in the case of the experience gap, they just didn’t understand the issue. They didn’t, you know, many organizations basically just said, we don’t know enough about this to know what to do with it. Um. Um, so you know, all those things could be, you know, are amongst the possibilities. I would say, as a general rule, it would again, probably not surprise you to know that those that really speak more towards the things that are truly disruptive. So, for example, being able to understand this new value proposition and what it means to work in an AI enabled organization. That is one where it is, it was probably, you know, more on the side of we just don’t understand the issue, or we don’t have the capabilities to think about it. But for example, the one about when reclaiming organizational capacity, so when word and work gets to the way of work, you know, it was more, not surprising, going to be more internal constraints, like our kind of, our structure, our culture, sort of just, we get on our own way.

Theresia Hermes 15:48 Yeah, I always like to say internal problems are better than external problems, because internal problems you can actually take action on and do something about it. But one of the things you said, David around the experience gap, some of them don’t even know what that means and what it is about. So I think that’s a great segway for you to introduce a little bit more in detail the trend you have, of course, included in this report, closing the experience gap. So if you walk us through a little bit more what you have found out throughout speaking with those leaders, what that means and what are the impacts for the business.

David Mallon 16:20 Yeah, sure. Happy too. So the short of it is, you know, if you have a perennial issue in organizations is, do we have the talent that we need? And it’s not just an issue. It’s one of those issues that’s not just something that you know, our folks in the audience that might be on the HR side. They’re very familiar with it. They hear it all the time. But it’s also an issue that is usually fairly, you know, shared by the non HR population, the business executives, organizational executives, the middle all the way down to supervisors and hiring managers. There’s just, do we have the right, do we have the right talent? And, you know, perennially when, when we or others do surveys on that, not surprising, many organizations say, yeah, no, it continues to be a struggle. We sometimes struggle to find the skills that we need. We sometimes struggle to find the particular talented people that we need. But in digging into this, this year and what became this trend, we sort of, we began to realize that, yes, that’s still a challenge, but something has shifted about the way it’s being talked about and the why of it. So increasingly, organizations are not just saying we don’t, we can’t find certain skills. They’re saying we can’t find an experienced challenge. We can’t find experienced people that we need. As we dug into it, okay, that’s interesting. What does that mean? We realize, actually, there’s a bigger problem here than people realize. Part of the challenge is that organizations that need talent are shifting quickly. So essentially, what we don’t, what they’re realizing, is that we don’t just need them that our people show up with a certain skill. We need them, especially in a very fast moving, disrupted world. We need them to show up with that skill and be able to be adaptive, related to it, express judgment, related around it and our own. So far, our only means of sort of articulating that, because we’re, as most hiring managers, not very good at actually describing that. Was to say, oh, I need experienced people, because there’s a bet. Then if I have somebody who has five years of experience, I’m betting that in those five years, they’ve learned how to express judgment around those skills I’m learning. I’m betting that on somebody else’s dime, they’ve kind of figured out how to be adaptive. But simultaneously, there’s a bigger problem for the candidate side, on the worker side, is that in order to increase the organizations, we’re getting rid of the places where we previously have let talent grow into that experience. And so this weird paradox or challenge is happening where our data and others would say, increasingly, more and more organizations are asking for, you know, a certain number of years of experience, including, oddly enough, for for jobs like, for example, GenAI, you see, you see lots, you see far too many job wrecks, basically saying that they want five to 10 years of experience in generative AI. I suspect folks know that, you know, realize the joke in that pretty quickly, there are no people with five to 10 years of experience in generative AI, but it’s just how we think, right? Meanwhile, organizations increasingly have fewer and fewer of those entry level jobs. So if you’re a candidate, especially recently, if you’re a college graduate, and you’re thinking, okay, all the jobs I’m applying for, say, I have to have five years experience, but none of them are the kind of foot hold roles, entry level roles, where I could gain that experience. What do I do about it? And this trend is really about solving, digging into how companies work. You’re trying to solve both of those problems. Where does the experience come from? How do I close this gap? And then, sort of, how am I? Where do workers develop what is needed? I will say off the top, before we dive into the next bit, is that part of it is just also digging into what experience means in the first place, and resetting our expectations.

Theresia Hermes 20:19 There’s so much to unpack, and I think this is such an important topic. And I think over the years, we have seen a lot of organizations that haven’t acted on the business outcomes, right? How can we infuse AI to automate certain tasks, and often that is the early career task, right, where we feel trust that that AI can do that of summarizing and a presentation or something like that. And that, of course, takes away some of the need of an early career, where, as you said, normally, is the place where you learn and have that experience. So before we move into the data you have shown here, I know we have a poll out here, just reading out. I think you have all that poll in front of you, and the poll asks you, what do you think contributes most to the experience gap? Now, if you take your time, I would love to hear from you if you think it’s the job requirements that over emphasize experience, the limited access to the job on the job learning, lack of early career or development roles or rapid technology change, outpacing learning. So we give that, give you all a few seconds, and then we will review your results and kind of see what you have been all thinking, especially around the experience gap.

Let’s see looks that David, if you see it, it looks very you are the expert on trends and data, so I think a lack of early career and development roles has has risen on the top, followed with a rapid technology change and outpacing learning. And I think some of you have already mentioned David and I, of course, also just mentioned it. It’s moving, so I don’t want to influence it too

David Mallon 22:07 much. That’s yeah, the others are making a comeback. I think there are.

Theresia Hermes 22:16 Let’s give everyone maybe 10 more seconds to decide. Yeah, three more seconds. I think we can close it.

David Mallon 22:34 So I think you know, folks in the audience picked, there’s definitely people who picked all one of all four. So it’s not like any didn’t have any answers, but certainly lack of early career roles is key. It’s not. It is and it’s definitely part of the story. I would also argue that, you know, the other three are important parts of this story to kind of get to that along the way. In particular, I’m going to spend a bit of time on that first one of just sort of how we over what we are, over emphasizing experience, and we should probably unpack it.

Theresia Hermes 23:07 We can jump back to the slides there, because I think you bring a lot of good data in there, and they I think there’s something, as you said before, and I just want to emphasize this one more time, is that I think the organization don’t know how to assess those experience as you said, I if I have somebody who has five years of experience, I assume they’re adaptable. I assume they have critical thinking. I assume they know how to give a presentation. Do it? Conduct a presentation, or write, write a brief. And I think that is such an interesting point. So walk us through a little bit more the data you have seen. And of course, again, what it means really, for the closing the experience gap, sure.

David Mallon 23:44 I’ll start with the answer that the majority picked, which is just entry level roles we are seeing across industries and sectors. You can have this, this can be this point maybe, could sometimes be a little bit overblown, but it has. It was more common in the past that companies would have organizations and places where you could come into an organization with less experience, so you can kind of grow into that organization. So think, you know, almost somebody cliche, but think the mail room or the call center, or that, you know, some or working on the front line somewhere in a retail shop, or what have you, right? But there, there was this notion that there were roles where someone who could demonstrate competency in other ways, or just simply, you know, show up with a degree, or whatever it is. There’s ways to get started, and then that would be the stepping stone that would then let you grow into higher order roles. But increasingly, those foothold rules don’t exist and they’re kind of going away quickly, and this is where AI is probably both part of the problem and it will potentially be part of the solution. It’s because technology and automation are one of the reasons why organizations feel like they can get by with fewer of those roles. Other other things in today’s world, you know that we all tend to work now. Many of us, anyway, tend to work now across distances, with lots of, you know, maybe people in other other parts of the world, or have, you know, being on on Zoom calls like this one that you know, traditional notions and internships and apprenticeships and so forth have also, it’s not that they’ve gone they haven’t gone away. There’s actually a renewed interest in them, but they become harder to do. There’s been this sort of notion of sort of apprenticeships being harder to do, which speaks to this sort of lack of developmental experiences. So all of this is creating this gap, which is what we’re calling the experience gap. It’s, as you saw off the top, of the knowing, doing, data, it’s not widely understood, although, as we saw, got to the back in essentially, sort of April, May, June, that sort of season of college graduation, we saw a lot of attention being, you know, given to the challenges that college graduates are having to find jobs. And it speaks a lot to this problem, because they’re coming out with strong technical skills, think, STEM and such. But they’re not necessarily coming out with the precursors of, as you described, some of the things that you just need people to know how to work together, to know how to solve problems, know how to sort of adapt, right? They aren’t coming with those and there aren’t ready roles for them to step into, to to to gain them. That said, as we’ve dug into this, we’ve watched it happen that we do know. One of the other things that we tested on is that we we’ve and something we’ve been talking about for a while, and it speaks to what I’ll get to in a second about unpacking experience is we saw many of the executives in our study tell us they do understand the need to prioritize human capabilities, or, you know, people use different terms for them. We call them human capabilities. Some call them human skills, soft skills, power skills, but notion things like empathy and curiosity and divergent thinking and so on, because the many executives told us they get that those need to be prioritized because, and this is this leading up to the to what is experienced, because those are actually what creates judgment. That’s where adaptiveness comes from. And so even though they didn’t necessarily understand the experience gap as an issue, even in our survey data, the executives were beginning to say they kind of got the underlying problem, which is, how do we hire for that? How do we hire for those human capabilities? How do we source them? How do we develop them, etc.

Theresia Hermes 27:45 I want to touch on that and bring out an example from Eightfold. And for those who don’t know Eightfold, we are a native talent change platform, helping organizations to manage a talent journey. And I think one of the things which are really important these days is having that insight. If you spoke about skills, right? But organization these days, especially with the changing needs of work and also roles, it is a question of, What do I actually need? What skills do I actually need? And of course, that often transfers to what experience do I need. But we come to that by breaking it down, why you don’t always need to go back to experience to identify who might be the right fit candidates. And I do think that’s important, because these days, it’s not just having that insight, but also the ability to act on that insight. We just spoke about knowing knowledge and the action gap, right? And I think that is important because just having that data is not enough these days. And one of the organizations we work with is Vodafone, and they really came to us and said, We want to become a skills based organization. We really need to understand in the first place what data, what date, what skills do we have, even in the organization, but also what skills do we need tomorrow? And then really understand which one do we need to upskill re skill, to really make sure that they’re redeployed within the organization, and making sure that the workforce is much more agile and diverse to react on some of those, as you also mentioned David, external factors, where we are forced to react to it and solve for it. And some of that, which I found incredible results, is that they see 67% increase in learning hours per employee. And I think that is important, because one of the things you mentioned, and especially if you think about it for early careers, yes, they might still have internships, maybe they find and then their first early career job these days, if they are forced to do remote jobs, it is not the same learning. So how can you help them to take the learning where they need it the most, which is custom to them, and that is only possible if you understand. Where are they in their journey? What do they have already? What are transferable skills, and what are the skills we as an organization need? So they. You push those kind of information towards those employees, but employees can also pull that and say, Hey, I feel like I’ve not the ability to do that critical thinking as much as I would like to, or present present in front of my management as much as I want to, so that they can find it and it’s really customized to them, because then we see the action and that we see the results for the organization and for the human right. And that, I think, as you said before, in the beginning, David, that is the win-win situation between the organization will get a skill they need, but also the human, the person, is embracing that change because it is also benefiting them and their journey. And that is, again, I love that equation you shared in the beginning. That is, I think where the benefits of human performance come in.

David Mallon 30:47 Yes, agreed. The thing is, this gap, this, this riddle is, you know, how? Where, where does a worker get experience? Where does the organization find the experience that they need? As you have said, and I think that the case you just shared, it shows part of solving this, for this riddle, is just sort of questioning the basic assumptions we’re making, you know, maybe, maybe it’s not experience that we need, maybe it’s not five years of experience. Maybe it’s just that we know where we’re. We know how to, or we try to evaluate those human skills. We know how to, to operationalize the development of them in the organization. We even, even in the context of a particular technical skill, like where we know because of the job, that we need some kind of technical skill that we are at least looking for. We’re expanding our horizons. So we’re so we’re what we can we’re not necessarily relying on old proxies, like degrees. I mean, there’s certainly, obviously, some cases where there’s some kind of role. There’s some, you know, where it might be regulated, or it might require some sort of standard, standard or certification, what have you. That’s fine, but you see more and more organizations sort of realizing we were probably asking for those degrees just because that’s how it’s always worked, not necessarily because we absolutely needed a four year degree, but again, much like the five years of experience, the four year degree is just a bet. It’s a proxy. And the idea is, if you’ve been through a university and gotten a four year degree, and then if you want to work somebody else for three to five years, I can trust that, or I can make the bet that you’ve learned some degree of judgment, and that somebody else has taught you how to think. Well, in the world image, we’re in part a lot of the solution here, and you see this in some of the case examples that are on this slide, and that we talked about in our research, is that organizations are realizing, actually, the solution here is to stop making those assumptions. Stop making to stop using those proxies. Let’s actually figure out, you know, how can we understand the you know, or assess for in our sourcing processes for those human skills? How can we assess for some degree of judgment or adaptability? How can we test that the skills are there at a level of granularity lower than a four year degree, because then that expands our horizons. It expands the possibility, the possible sources of talent. It creates opportunities for folks, even those already in our organizations. If we do that, that you know, can grow into roles that we wouldn’t necessarily have thought they could grow into but because we’re getting better, and the good news is that we have technologies, for example, like Eightfold to help with this, because we now have the ability to see more granularly into work, to better understand work, to understand what goes into it, we can, as you see here, we can begin to rethink what experiences means in our in our in in on the sourcing side, we can think differently about how we use internships or partnerships with higher ed. We can think differently about how we use apprenticeships. They’re they’re actually, there’s one of the examples we talked about in the report. There are now experiments or pilots going on in in parts of the world where you could become a medical doctor, not from a degree, but from an apprenticeship, because we’re getting smarter about actually understanding the work and what goes into it, and you know, so that it’s what’s allowing us to think differently about things I mentioned. AI being quickly before being part of the solution, part of the problem, but also part of the solution. Part of the solution. AI also has the potential to help us do some things that have been really hard, for example, to be part of experience. Is also the just tacit knowledge that builds up in people’s heads that just sort of how things work, that just, you know, learning the back. Back the back stories and the back channels, learning just sort of the all the little things that no one teaches you ever until you just been there for a while. Yeah, AI actually has the ability to help us also harvest that. And you see the example here about culture, about how to harvest that and bring it to employees faster, so it helps to stand them up in organizations more quickly.

Theresia Hermes 35:25 Absolutely, I think you said something really, really important. AI might be part of the problem, but also part of the solution. As I mentioned before, a lot of early careers might be sitting in their own home, not having their exposure as much as we have possibly benefited from our early careers of mirroring and listening to others. But AI is also the ability, like something we are developing and working with our customers at Eightfold, is to give everyone an AI coach customized to your needs, to your skills, based on the information from your organization, really customized of what it’s needed in your role. And I think one other thing you mentioned, and especially for early career, sometimes it’s hard to find where to even start. If you think about the role of an analyst, that could be a financial analyst, it could be a marketing analyst. And if you’re just starting to look for a job, it’s really hard to distinguish where my skills, my skills I acquired throughout university, through internships might be beneficial. So one of our customers, Boston Scientific, is using Eightfold in order to simplify the hiring experience, but also improve the candidate experience, and, of course, increase internal mobility. And what they have done is that you can basically upload your profile. You can upload your resume as a candidate even, and see what are fitting jobs, and that might be in a department you haven’t even thought of. And that is, I think, really important, because it is no longer that the candidate needs to exactly know which role might be, might be the one they’re looking after. It is also a way for the organization to showcase them where other spots in the organization they’re able to contribute and grow into. And one of the things we have seen with that they had these AI customized, personalized job recommendations sent to candidates and internal employees and external candidates, and they have seen that the 84% of applications who received these AI recommendation completed the application, and that’s led to a 53% of an increase in the overall application conversion rate. And that is important, right? Because that means organizations will see a good fit candidate, and a candidate will understand where I am a good fit and open up a door to other roles they might not have even thought about in a different department, where their skills are still very valuable.

David Mallon 37:49 It’s a that just understanding possibilities is like, I think is so much, is so much part of the story, just using data and we have in our hands, to better understand the work and better understand the possibilities it it goes so far for the organizations like Boston Scientific the decisions they’re making at the organization level, but even more importantly, for the workers themselves, to sort of better understand possibilities.

Theresia Hermes 38:19 There’s so many opportunities these days, right? The jobs have changed so much. There are different roles, and I think many of us, myself, are definitely included in this. I would have not imagined, and you might have picked up on my German accent, that I might have ended up as a Customer Success director in New York 10 years later. So I think there’s so much opportunity these days. There’s so much mobility and so much we can learn for free online, but also thanks to our organizations. And that opportunity in the past is not as we have always seen. In the past, it was very streamlined. These days, there are many more opportunities, and giving that information back to especially early, early candidates, is really critical so that they can find their path and the opportunities which are out there.

David Mallon 39:12 Yeah, no and, but I think we’ve touched on this. Now, this, this core concept, I think, a few times, but picking up on, on what you just said, it is. There’s a reason let’s not, you know, let’s give ourselves a little bit of patience and grace. There’s a reason why, historically, we’ve had these proxies. There’s a reason why we require three to five years experience. There’s a reason why we required a four year degree. There’s a reason why we required a four year degree. There’s a reason why we have used these stand-ins, because up till now, one, the world was moving a little bit slower, so it was okay that the job wreck didn’t exactly match the work. It still was generally workable enough to make some decisions. Around, be fit for a purpose, etc. So that was okay. It was okay that we, you know, didn’t need, that we that the child market was such that it was okay that we can ask for three years of experience, and if it was challenging to find the exact candidate we need, okay. So be it we, you know, it was okay. We could make it work, but in today, but in today’s world, that’s the story here is it’s the world does go faster. It is more complicated, and we are missing opportunities ourselves, degree to which we continue to use these proxies, and our opportunity as an organization and for our individuals, is to just sort of unpack and sort of get past, quite frankly, what is, what made sense in the past, but now is really a bit of laziness on our part to rather than just default to, okay, I want a four year degree and five years experience. Let’s actually get to what we really want, but let’s actually get to what we really need. Let’s figure out how to assess that. Let’s figure out how to grow that. Let’s figure out how to develop that, and then for candidates and for workers out in the marketplace, and especially for, I’ll say, I’ve got two teenagers who are in high school, and, you know, going to be headed off to college at some point in the next few years, and they’re going to they’re going to need to make choices about sort of where they what, what degrees they might go after, sort of where, where they what developmental experiences they choose. Is also, we now have the ability to provide them with more guidance to make, to make better choices, even even as they’re engaging those educational experiences, so that they come with the precursors of the judgment and adaptability and the ability to work with others in the organization, the teaming and collaboration and empathy and so on. We now have the ability to unpack these things, to better understand them ourselves, and then to better give guidance to both our leaders who are making decisions so our leaders don’t necessarily say, Oh, I can’t find the experience talent I need. We have the ability to arm our leaders with the data to be able to say, actually, if that’s not the problem, the problem is, I need the sources of talent in the marketplace to give me something different. And I’m going to start to exercise influence over, for example, post secondary education, to push in those directions, to begin to actually focus those funnels, in ways that are useful to us as organizations. We also have that, again, the opportunity to give that guidance to our workers and our candidates. So they’re, they’re, you know, quite frankly, they’re putting their time and attention to stuff that’s that’s likely to be valuable.

Theresia Hermes 42:43  I think a lot of a lot of employees do want to be future, proving their own careers, right? And I think you mentioned this before. We have now the demand of five years of GenAI experience. This is something we might have not known in the past, and things are changing much faster than they used to be. So to your point, absolutely, there was. There has been a reason why we have asked for all these experiences. But the world is moving faster than ever before. I think one of the examples I can think of is Bristol Myers Squibb, they had a huge farmer, farm acquisition, and all of a sudden they had cell therapy in their business, and they needed that particular skill. And again, that meant, of course, the organization also needed to be changed. Who are we hiring? Who is going to re-skill? How do we approach that talent? There’s all like that kind of shift happening. So on one side, the fast moving developments of skills are changing, in general, because now we need GenAI, and we need how to prompt correctly and how to critically think with AI and how to work with AI. But on the other side, the external world is also changing. There are acquisitions happening there. The economics are changing faster than ever before, and that is something where we need to repeat what you said so beautifully in the beginning. How do we find that balance between the business and, of course, the employee to make sure everybody’s a winner and embracing those changes and not leaving them behind, and especially on today’s topic, also the early careers, where I think you said it’s so beautiful, of saying it is not no longer that you have to think in that framework of, I need somebody who has three years of experience to get that skills, to get that skill. And it might be that you can find that skill in a different way and position it differently in order to take that experience away and really just focus on what you need and what the candidate really has. Yeah, us. I do think we have one poll, and then we can, slowly but surely, jump into our Q and A David. So we start with one poll, everybody can answer again, and then if you have questions, you can also put them in our Q and A session. So we can answer any of your questions. Personal questions on the topic we discussed today. So you see the poll here again, so I’m just reading it out which potential benefit of closing the experience gap feels most competitive for your organization. And this one, I’m very curious to hear, one of the options you have is expanding the available talent pool, improving retention and mobility, driving diversity and inclusion, or strengthening long term workforce readiness.

David Mallon 45:31 It’s most compelling, right? So what I think is the most compelling.

Theresia Hermes 45:42 I we have too much away in the beginning and give everyone to respond.

HCI Moderator 45:55 Yes, it’s changing fast.

Theresia Hermes 46:00 Interesting? Well, we give everyone another five five seconds.

huh? Like if I give another five seconds, it might be another

David Mallon 46:21 winner. Last minute reset.

Theresia Hermes 46:25 All right, 2321, and we close the poll. Yes.

David Mallon 46:34 I mean so many of those, obviously. I think the lines between these four options are not exactly distinct, and they’ll overlap a bit. You know, you might argue that the available talent pool and the long term readiness are sort of more about the sort of medium to, you know, medium and long term future versus retention is kind of about now. So, I, you know, I’m actually interested. I am interested in the fact that retention and mobility was actually the, as it turned out, finished at the top. That says something about, I think, kind of like, where the we’re also the work labor market is where the, you know, most organizations are are being particularly stingy right now with hiring, so which means that they kind of have to figure out how to keep the people they have and and and to grow and develop and make the best use of the people they have. So that’s probably my explanation for that. It’s interesting, though, to me, that that was the top.

Theresia Hermes 47:40 We just published a block entry on a study we conducted a few weeks ago, which I found extremely interesting. So with Eightfold, the organization has the ability to calibrate a role, which means kind of defining, AI, what good looks like. And then there’s a match score for potential fit of the candidate. And we have been seeing that the higher the match score, the longer the retention and the likelihood for a promotion, which is, of course, a good indicator for a right fit candidate. And that is, of course, for me, someone who has been in the HR tech space their whole career, is such a beautiful thing because it does bring talent acquisition and Talent Management together. Are we getting the right people in the spot where there’s no regrettable attrition, anyone who’s leaving below a year, but then actually be able to grow and stay with the organization? I think that is such a beautiful way of bringing the talent acquisition leaders and the talent management leaders together, but then again, also learning from that candidate experience. Hey, David, I understand all your skills now, and here they are, once you are onboarded. Here are all the opportunities you have to grow and upskill or also find another position within the organization, which might benefit your long term career goals. So I think that is just incredibly interesting. And I think we have so much potential these the this time around, which makes it, as you said, AI might might have seemed as started as a problem in some of these, but also has so much potential where we can help and drive change, making it really personalized in a way we could have never done before. So I’m very excited about that. All right. Well, if you have any questions, you can type them in into our Q and A session, and we learn from the polls it takes a few seconds.

HCI Moderator 49:28 Yes, absolutely. So thank you so much for this very interesting conversation today. And I do have a few questions just to kind of put forth to you both and for the audience, please do as you think of any please do submit your questions, and we’ll be happy to get to those as well. But I’m just curious. It’s easy to see this as an HR issue, but it really touches every part of the organization in how business leaders outside of a. Get involved in closing the experience gap.

Theresia Hermes 50:12 So I think one of the things, I think this is a really important one, I think one of David’s trends in the Deloitte, Deloitte Report here is like, what is the role of a manager happening, right? So I think that is a really good question, because I think the development and, of course, what is experience and what is skills, is not just the HR, it is also influencing the hiring managers, but also the managers of how to develop and retain your employees. So it’s not just being, in some ways, the hiring manager being stuck off. That was my profile, and I need the exact same profile to be successful in this role. So that is, of course, changing and proving of the opportunity of different transferable skills on the other side are also things once the employees are onboarded, helping the managers to understand, how can we develop team members and colleagues and employees today and guiding them through that career path? And I think there is a lot of education to be done. And the one thing I always like to say is always work on HR, becoming a trusted advisor. And I see it changing because a lot of these challenges we are seeing as an organization are actually a talent problem. So I do see that the importance of the CHR role in the HR team, bringing data and insights of what to actually do and what it means for the business is becoming much more important, which means becoming that trusted advisor. You can also influence quite a bit of those decisions from those people managers, influencing the culture, which, of course, in return, influence the way you’re working.

David Mallon 51:49 While I’ll add to that is I think it’s a moment in which it actually shouldn’t be too hard to convince your average leader. I think they’ll probably get it that the world is shift is shifting so fast, AI is, for example, just changing so much that how, especially at the executive level, how they got to where they got to, is not going to get their next generation of leaders to the same place and and so, like, you can’t start with the same assumptions, my comment Off the top about sort of the boundaries getting blurry. You can’t start with the same assumptions. It’s what will make a good executive five years, 10 years, 20 years from now, is not the same that makes your CEO, your CEO. And so if you can just get them to sort of open their eyes, open their their ears, their horizons, or imaginations, you can start to then focus on these kinds of questions, okay, rather than just doing it how we’ve always done it, let’s use the data and the tools available to us to better understand what it was we really needed in the first place.

HCI Moderator 52:55 Agreed, that’s a really interesting way to look at it and your response really kind of reinforced the poll that we just saw, too, from the results, from what people are thinking and relating to in their organizations. So appreciate that insight you know, along those lines, you know, with the talent issue and problem, how can organizations open doors for more candidates, without lowering the bar for success and and speaking to that, and what you just said, David in that that what success is is going to be different than what it was for perhaps their leaders. Sure.

David Mallon 53:34 I mean, you are one of the examples. I didn’t, I didn’t spend time on that slide where I was talking to cases. I didn’t go into them in too great detail, but I’ll talk to one of them, which is a biotech company that you know you’re going to need in order to do this. You’re going to need to use data. You’re going to need to use tools like Eightfold AI, etc. You’re going to need to dig in, but, but that they’re an example of an organization that decided just to stop and unpack all of the IT jobs in their organization like to break them down, what’s really what’s really going on, what’s really needed, and then to turn around, not just to use that to obviously Improve kind of underlying job architectures and data models, but, but to solve these sorts of problems, to use sort of them, okay, how do we then work with our educational partners to better give us that kind of talent, even if it’s not you know, we’re going to what it allows us to do is to not ask for that experience, not ask for that degree to go, ask for exactly what it was we we really want from our educational partners. And they were, they have been able to significantly expand their horizons to sort of recruit people that they would have, you know, five years ago, never thought they were. They would make sense for any role in their. Organization, let alone some of their more complex IT roles, but it’s because they did the it took a little bit of work, but because they, you know, use the tools work with some partners, to unpack what it was they’re looking for. It’s expanded their horizons.

HCI Moderator 55:16 Okay, thank you. Well, we do have a question that came in that I know we just have a few minutes left, but I just would like to get to it from Patrick. In your opinion, is the approach to closing the experience gap different in private and public services?

David Mallon 55:34 So I’ll just say as a short answer, because I’ve, I’ve had a chance to talk about this, this particular trend with both public sector organizations, agencies and with, obviously, commercial enterprises, and it resonates with both. And I think that challenges are very similar. We think they’re, we think they’re not, but I think there’s a lot that’s overlapping. I think so. My short answer is, I don’t think how you’re going to solve the problem is that different. I think sometimes just, you know, access to resources, time horizons, etc, might feel different, but the challenge is basically the same. And I think that you know, mostly how you’re going to solve the problem is going to be very similar. I think the challenge sometimes of public sector organizations is that there are, there is more of a need to do, I’m oversimplifying, but to document everything. So for example, the job rec means even more, like you have to kind of spend more time working on underlying job architectures and such. But there’s also a recognition that if you can bring science and data to that conversation, you can, I think you can expand those horizons pretty quickly.

Theresia Hermes 56:45 Yeah, and Eightfold, for example, works with public sector and private sectors. We do work with the Department of Defense, and we have the GigEagle marketplace, which uses the same AI technologies. So similar, similar problem statements of who do we have right today with skills, and what are our short term needs, and where do we need to deploy and move them to? So there is, I think, to your point, David, obviously, there are nuances. Obviously there are some changes around this, but there’s also a lot of similarities of the same challenges they see with the talent today.

HCI Moderator 57:19 Well, thank you. Well, unfortunately, we do have to wrap it up here. There are some questions that if we don’t get to, rest assured, as I said earlier, we will pass them along to Theresia and David and the folks at Eightfold. So we’ll make sure that you get everything answered. So just another thank you so much today for this extremely informative session. One more huge thank you to Theresia and David and to the good folks at Eightfold and Deloitte Consulting, I’d like to also thank our webcast viewer, thanks for spending the hour with us, and we’ll see you all next time. Thanks everyone.