An Eightfold customer since 2021, Deutsche Telekom saw an opportunity to apply the platform’s skills-based matching AI to project staffing. Now the leading digital telco is one of the first to implement Eightfold Resource Management, a product the company’s vision helped shape. The solution overcomes the limitations of various legacy staffing tools to help Deutsche Telekom optimize resource use, facilitate international collaborations, enhance recruiting efforts, accelerate project staffing, and provide additional growth opportunities for employees.

The challenge

Deutsche Telekom provides a wide range of communications services and technology solutions to 300 million consumer and business customers worldwide. The leading digital telco is active in more than 50 countries and operates through dozens of subsidiaries and affiliated companies.

Deutsche Telekom’s business operations often involve project-related work. For example, organizations assemble agile project teams to deliver internal IT solutions, launch new products, and organize network services. The company also has several consulting businesses that assign employees to client projects or engagements.

Deutsche Telekom has multiple standalone solutions for project staffing, with every organization driving its own processes and tools. Resourcing projects with these distinct legacy systems has two primary drawbacks.

First, resources aren’t optimized across borders or business units because project managers can only tap into their local employee base. As a result, people with the best fitting skills are often overlooked. This also impacts recruiting efforts, as external candidates may be hired even when qualified internal candidates are available. “That means that we’re not leveraging the global potential of our talent,” Ilja Bitterling, VP Skills Intelligence & Performance Management said.

Second, finding the right employees for a project, based on a variety of variables like skills and availability, requires too many manual steps. The resulting inefficiencies slow down the staffing process, make it harder to fill roles quickly with external talent, and limit the scalability of these legacy solutions over the long term.

The solution

An Eightfold customer since 2021, Deutsche Telekom has used the Talent Intelligence Platform to become an increasingly skills-based organization.

The company powers its internal opportunity marketplace with Eightfold Talent Management. The award-winning growth hub connects employees with job openings and learning experiences that fit their skills and career goals. The company also uses Eightfold Talent Acquisition to streamline the recruiting of skilled talent.

Recognizing the similarities between recruiting and project staffing, Deutsche Telekom saw a fix for project-based work in the deep-learning AI of Eightfold. “The intelligence to find matching candidates was already so well developed,” Bitterling said. “Why not apply this to the use case of resource management where we also have to find people based on their skills and experience?”

Deutsche Telekom shared its vision and functional requirements with Eightfold, becoming one of several customers to help shape the development of Eightfold Resource Management. The product adds skills-based project staffing to the integrated Eightfold platform, further leveraging the power of talent intelligence.

Now the leading digital telco is among the first to implement Resource Management. “It is an example of how willing Eightfold is to develop their product capability in order to drive customer value,” Bitterling said.

The results

Resource Management allows Deutsche Telekom to overcome the limitations of its legacy staffing solutions. The single, shared platform gives project managers visibility into resources across the company and quickly matches people with projects based on their skills, availability, and other variables.