SHRM Introduction 00:02
Hello, and thank you for joining us for this presentation from Insight to Impact, Winning CEO Support for Talent Intelligence. This program is part of the SHRM webcast series. You can learn about upcoming and on demand events from our e-newsletters, and the webcasts homepage at SHRM.org/webcast. SHRM thanks Eightfold AI for sponsoring this program in our series of free webcasts for the HR community. Now about today’s program, which will address why every executive needs to make talent intelligence a priority in 2024, and how you get buy in from your executives. To lead our presentation, we’re pleased to welcome Jason Cerrato with Eightfold AI and Kathi Enderes with The Josh Bersin Company. Here’s more information about our presenters. Jason Cerrato is vice president of market strategy with Eightfold AI. Mr. Cerrato is focused on the capabilities of a full AI comprehensive talent intelligence platform and the future of work. Prior to Eightfold AI he was with Gartner as a Senior Research Director focusing on HR technology and transformation. With extensive experience in talent acquisition, Mr. Cerrato spent more than a decade with United Technologies Corporation, now RTX, where he was the Senior Director of Talent Acquisition, serving as the workstream owner for recruiting and onboarding for an enterprise wide global HR Transformation Initiative. He also co-hosts The New Talent Code podcast, which provides insights an open discussion with industry leaders on all things talent and HR tech. Kathi Enderes, is Senior Vice President of Research with The Josh Bersin Company, Miss Enderes leads and develops research based insights for all areas of HR, learning talent and HR technology. She has more than 20 years of global experience for management consulting with IBM PWC and EY as the talent leader at McKesson and Kaiser Permanente. Most recently, Miss Enderes leads talent and workforce research at Deloitte. She’s a frequent keynote speaker, author and thought leader, originally from Austria, she has worked in Vienna, London, in Spain, and now lives in San Francisco. Her passion is to make work better and more meaningful. I’m now pleased to turn over the webcast microphone to Jason Cerrato.

Jason Cerrato 02:23
Thank you so much, Connor. It’s wonderful to be here. Thank you for everyone who’s joining us. And it’s so great to be with you, Kathi. I’m looking forward to a great discussion. Really excited for Jason, I can’t wait. I’ve you know, make it a point to track all the work that you’re doing and The Josh Bersin Company is doing and I read all the research. So it’s so great to have a chance to discuss some of it and, and interact with you during the hour we have today. As part of today’s agenda, we wanted to kind of set the stage for this discussion for your organization’s to have these discussions internally. So we wanted to start with explaining a little bit about the power of real time skills, insights, and what we mean by talent, intelligence and how it’s a little different from how you may have operated in the past. Then we wanted to articulate some of the business case for talent intelligence and provide some real world examples and scenarios that we’re seeing from the companies that are already out on this path, and some of the benefits that they’re seeing from the use of artificial intelligence and talent insights. And then we wanted to summarize the hour by talking about how you would use this understanding to then engage different members of your C-suite if you’re starting out on this journey, or if you’re just at the early stages and looking to grow this initiative. But as the introductions shared, Kathi and I are both passionate about this topic, and have been in this space for the majority of our careers. So we’re looking forward to having this discussion with you, especially as the entire HR function is transforming to move towards this future of work. All right, sounds exciting. You ready to go, Kathi? Ready to go? And please, a lot of questions. We love the questions, so put them in the chat as soon as you have them. Alright, so along the way, what we’re going to do is we do have some poll questions that we are going to incorporate to engage the audience and make sure that you’re participating and get you thinking. So we’re going to kick it off with one of our first poll questions. So here we go. How critical Do you believe C-suite support is for the success of new initiatives in your organization? Take a look over the options and we’ll give you a few moments to select your responses. Now, Kathi, I think it’s great that we’re starting here because you and I both travel extensively meeting with HR leaders and senior executives that are you know, in considering these capabilities and embarking on this journey, and two of the most popular questions I receive are, where do I start? And how do I get buy in? Does that sound familiar to you?

Kathi Enderes 05:00
These are always the first questions that we get, of course, because it sounds great, right? And especially when we start telling success stories from other from other organizations who have been on the journey, who already further along, like, oh, that sounds fantastic, but how do I get there? And how do I make sure that I can get the support that we need? And, of course, for something transformative, like talent, intelligence? I mean, I don’t want to sway the answers, but I feel it’s impossible. Well, without C-suite support, it’s because it’s going to change your company, right? It’s going to change how your company operates, not just how HR operates.

05:34
What is the C-suite? Well, that’s a, that’s a good questions, the C-suite, or the C level executives, so we call them C-suite, because it’s the CEO, the CFO, the CFO, so the Chief Financial Officer, the Chief Human Resources Officer, the Chief Executive Officer, all of these are basically the Chief Information Officer, Chief Technology Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, so anybody who has like the C, Chief title in front of them, that’s what we call the C-suite. Great question, Kayla.

06:08
All right, we’ll give you a few more seconds to get a couple more responses, we have some pretty good participation, we can still have a few more. So if you’re sitting there with your hand on the mouse, ready to make a selection and give you a few more seconds, exactly.

06:24
Okay, and now we’re gonna go ahead and take a look at the results. So how critical Do you believe C-suite support is for your organization? 59.6% extremely critical.

06:35
Good. I’m glad. I’m glad that people see this, because that’s what we’re going to talk about now.

06:41
And

06:44
I think that’s I think, you know, that’s the answer we were hoping for. I mean, that’s a pretty straightforward question here. We were kind of leading the witness a little bit. But one of the things that’s more telling is how quickly the drop off is, you know, there were only a few that said, moderately critical, and no one answered slightly critical or not critical at all. Right. So that’s a very good sign to see, it’s very hard to do these type of things, from the grassroots bottom up, or to lead from the middle, you kind of need everyone pulling in the same direction. And when you have the senior leadership on your side, you have the wind in your sails, right.

07:18
Yeah, especially when it’s something that’s transforming. And, and really changing ways of working and operating all of that. It can’t really do that grassroots, the seed like the level that it has to come from the top because the C-suite, obviously, they drive the culture, they drive, the budget, they drive, what managers and leaders are working on. So I feel it’s, it’s critical. So I’m glad we’re diving into this topic specifically.

07:47
So I want to go ahead and set the stage for what we’re actually referring to here with the transformation and the initiatives that people are trying to take on and give some examples of this power of real time skills insights. You know, there’s a lot of discussion going on right now in the market and in the industry and amongst leaders around the value of skills and the changing nature of skills, and a lot of discussion of becoming skilled based, we want to we want to consider being a skills based organization, I want to walk through a couple of slides just to kind of level set the conversation and explain what that really means when people are saying that, in my opinion, one of the things that you’re saying when you’re saying we want to become skills based, is you want to start to shift, or maybe balance the focus on your talent more and more. And what what are the capabilities that your talent has? What are they interested in learning? What are they able to learn? And how does this mix with the skills we need to accomplish our work for the future? Right, I think a lot of our history in our organizations have been built around jobs. And jobs are certainly a reflection of skills. But skills really reside and are owned and are grow within your talent. So the way I phrase this is I’m talking about this shifting to more of a talent centered design. And if you think about that, what this allows us to do using skills as kind of the currency, and AI has the capability and allows you to examine talent through a deeper lens. Right. So in talent acquisition, there’s been a lot of focus for the last few years on job descriptions. Are our job description descriptions accurate? are they valid? How often do we incorporate them? How do we make them inclusive? But a big part of that is also looking at well, what is the actual work? And what are the tasks that are involved? And if you start to understand this at the work and task level, you can start to break it down to the skills level, what are the skills we’re actually looking for, and that’s increasingly important because as much as our job descriptions aren’t always well written, they’re also often historic. And the nature of these jobs and the way the work is getting done is changing very rapidly. So even as people look to include skills, they need to make sure they’re including the right skills

10:00
that are going to be the skills that are needed for the way this job is done tomorrow, versus how this job was done yesterday, right? From a talent management guy. Yeah, I just wanted to make a comment. I every time I talk with clients, I asked them how long after you’ve written a job description? Does it take until this job description is obsolete? And sometimes they say, a day, a week, a month, right? Because a new technology comes around new, new business models come around new customer opportunities comes around something disrupts the market, just think about what happened all through last year with generated AI coming into into place, or nobody had generated API, of course, in that job description early 2023, probably because it wasn’t, it wasn’t even a thing. But then it came around so fast that we said, well, software developers have to use, of course, generate API because they’re going to be developing code much faster and marketing people up to use generate API to write marketing, copy all of that. So I think it’s when we think more about the underlying skills that people can use. It’s much more enduring, and also much more flexible.
11:08
From a talent management perspective, you know, it’s often been focused on performance and promotions. But in the last few years, we’ve been focused on mobility, this concept of

11:17
How do we create more of a marketplace for talent? And how do we move talent around the organization, both for development, but for retention, as well as for agility? And I think by part of this, you start to look at skills, you start to examine proficiency, who has proficiency? Where do we need it? How do we develop it right? From a diversity, equity and inclusion perspective? There’s been a lot of discussion around job requirements, right? Are the job requirements valid? Are we setting up unnecessary barriers? Are they are we putting in a lot of things that don’t allow us to be inclusive? Do you really need seven to 10 years of experience? Do you really need a degree, we’ve seen a lot of states over the last year remove degree requirements for how they’re handling their own needs within the state government. So if you shift from job requirements to skill requirements, right, what it also allows you to do is if you understand those skills, you can extend that further to say, well, what are the skills that are needed? But what are skills that also allow someone to be capable of learning how to do this? Right? And what are the adjacencies? And how do we expand the audience for consideration and as a result, that creates more inclusive practices in and of themselves? I see you nodding and smiling. What are your thoughts in their cabin? Yeah, absolutely. I had to I had a great example of, of the DI and and expanding kind of the talent pool with a more diverse perspective from actually healthcare. And you’ll hear us talk a lot about health care, because we did such a big study together with eight fold on the healthcare industry overall. And by the way, in the next two years, that 50% of the job growth in the US is actually coming from the healthcare industry altogether. So it’s like a huge industry. And one thing that we have a great study around which kind of touches all of the

13:02
areas of talent acquisition and mobility and also the AI and employee experiences, how one healthcare organization, no one mentioned their name, is actually partnering with Amazon, to have warehouse workers retrained to be nurse assistants, because they have such a big nursing shortage as everybody else has, and in the US and beyond. So they have people that are warehouse workers in the US retrained on Amazon Stein, basically on Amazon’s worktime, to be nursing assistants and directly get placed into the healthcare organization. And when we ask Amazon, why do you do this, of course, it expands the diversity pool for the nurses too, because a lot of times these are minority, these are diverse people that work in the in the warehouses and carry the boxes, and all of that. And all of this will be, of course, heavily automated with robotics and all of that. We asked Amazon, why do you do this? And they said, well, first, it helps us financially, we don’t have to let go of all these people pay and severance. But then it also said, it comes right around. Because when people have have higher paying jobs, like in the nursing positions, for example, and they go shopping, whether they spend it they spin around Amazon, so they don’t just do it on the goodness out of their heart. They do it also to basically for financial reasons, but it’s a kind of a win win win for Amazon. It’s a win for the healthcare organization. And of course, it’s a huge win for those people, everybody who gets a higher paying job, and less physically straining job and a future job that doesn’t go away. So just a little example that I always like to think about when when I think about kind of all of these together and especially vi because it can seem a little bit like amorphous or something like that. How does this impact di you really tap into a much bigger talent pool and a much more diverse talent pool than you usually have?

14:59
You

15:00
You know, you even expanded the conversation beyond just internal mobility and a marketplace to one of the ways we refer to it as this kind of workforce exchange, right. And that was something that came as a result of the pandemic. And, you know, it’s great to hear examples like that, because during the pandemic, organizations were forced to do some of those things. Now, they can do them strategically, and gain additional benefits. So it’s a great example. And then the last one here is this kind of expansion and a deeper dive into employee experience. There’s been a lot of focus around experience at work with employee engagement surveys and trying to get at sentiment to experience with work with digital tools, and digitalization and hybrid and remote and flex and asynchronous. But when you break it down at a skills level, you can start to get an experience from work, right? What is the meaning I’m getting from working here? Am I able to contribute to my full capability? Am I developing skills that I’m interested in developing? am I contributing to the team at a greater level. So all of this starts to build on itself and gives you that deeper view. But one of the other takeaways from this slide, and it aligns something very well with research you’re doing at the Josh Bersin company, is this becomes increasingly systemic. And we move away from silos. And we start to look at these things more comprehensively. Yeah, you could almost draw these, like the four columns that you have here, as kind of interlocking circles with skills in the middle, right, because the skills kind of touch everything.

16:27
It’s almost as if you saw the next slide, Kathi, because part about it is if skills reside with people, and I’m talking about talent centered design, I was extremely happy to see this and one of your recent research reports coming out of the Josh Bersin company titled Welcome to the post industrial age. Do you want to walk us through this real quick? Sure, yeah. So I think you talked a lot about most of these concepts already JSON, but really the way that we are thinking this, the industrial age, which basically meant, we built organizations for industrial scale, meaning we built organizations for just duplicating the work like we had management and labor, we had just basically, scaling out success of the company meant just hiring more people getting more people in, who all did the same kind of work, it’s kind of that conveyor belt is like the like that concept. Basically, I’ve seen his work, we divvied up into all these people, we put it all together, the more people we can hire, the more people we can get into organizations, the bigger we get, well, this used to be the case. And maybe before we hit the point where we said, information is really the most important and, and most precious area, that companies have intellectual property, the skills of people the insights, the culture, can have really moving into what we call the post industrial age where that’s characterized by

17:54
people the skills and workers being not abundant. So you can add everybody knows this, of course, you’re all facing these challenges of hiring enough people finding the right talent skills, shortages, worker shortages, talent shortages, labor shortages, that’s what we call the post industrial age, where also AI and, and end to end technology transformation is really influencing everything. And in this post industrial age, we can’t just bucket things together in
jobs and match people to these jobs. And then they’re going to do the work as we had in the industrial age. But we have to think more much more about and you mentioned that to about the people and the talent at the center. And what skills do people have? And then how do we
match the skills that people have to the work and this could be in a job, but this also could be in a project that people are working on. It could also be in a mentoring kind of capacity, it could also be in like internal gig work. So it modularizes In a way the job. And the reason why this is so important, is when you think about the job that you’re in and what skills you use. I mean, we didn’t say this in my introduction, but I happen to have a PhD in mathematics. So I’m used Am I using my PhD in mathematics right now? No, not really. But are these skills that I have that I can apply to other work that we have? Absolutely. Right? So if I want to do other work in the company that might need my PhD and mathematics skills? Yes, absolutely. I can work on that too. But it might, the organization might not even know about this, because they’re just looking at the job that we have right now. And the skills and the capabilities that we need for that job. So people have many more skills than they need using for their job. And this is really what this is all about modularizing the skills and mapping that to the work and the job almost becomes second secondary. You still need kind of job codes and start job structures for your HCM system and just basically to pay people on all of that, because that’s mostly not modularized yet I think it’s going to come but I’m basically breaking up the paradigm of

20:00
not just being stuck at the job, but really looking at people and what skills they have, what skills they want to develop to. And you mentioned that to Jason, and how to map that to the work that to be done. Little example on that we talked with a technology company, about their product manager role. And they said, one of their best product managers is a person that used to be a sommelier, like somebody who does wine tastings. I said, sommelier, that’s so interesting, right? And how come they said, well, the sommelier actually has a lot of adjacent and transferable skills, because they are, if you’ve ever been to a wine tasting, and get good sommelier really is good at getting your requirements, what wines, you’re interested in how you’re actually thinking about purchasing this wine? What do you want to pair it with? What food do you want to pair it with? What you’re interested in, in terms of the regions, all of that. So they’re really good at guessing customer requirements, they’re really good at communication, they’re really good at taking a lot of information of like 1000s, or millions of wines, and really selecting what might be most appropriate for the client. All of this is, all of these skills, are skills that are very transferable to just basically the product manager role. And they just had to learn the technology on that level to understand and translate it, like they had to learn the wines. But they had, basically they had all these transferable skills. So sometimes when we’re just looking at somebody who has been a product manager for all their lives, we’re missing a huge source of talent that we could match to the work that needs to be done. So just a little, that’s exactly what this is doing this, deploying of kind of a skills based approach, powered by AI to understand talent, intelligence is helping us look at work differently, and understand work in real time. And kind of think beyond the job to understand the task and the skill and the work and the project. And what’s at hand. And what this does is, as mentioned, this helps unlock agility, right to be able to have multiple options for a variety of scenarios, and not just go fast, but the be able to turn quickly. But it shifts the conversation from analyzing a supply of people to jobs, right, a one to one relationship to one of skills to work. And the other part about it is you talked about kind of that industrial age versus post industrial age, in the industrial age, everything was based off of scale, and repeatability and incremental value. Whereas in this post industrial age, it’s much more dynamic, it’s much more exponential, right. And it’s not just adding 10 People results in the same amount of increase, it is a matter of the
right people with the right skills can lead with significant increase. And as you start to understand this and identify this, those are the type of messages that we’re talking about when you’re going to those business leaders and those C-suite members to understand the value and the support for shifting this kind of approach. Absolutely. I think you hit it right on Jason, that like just just adding more people sometimes slows people down. Right? So sometimes it’s actually gonna get you less productivity if you add more people, because then you have more coordination efforts. It’s been proven over and over again, that small teams are working much better than making dates, right, like the two pizza rule that Amazon has, for example, something like that. Just at the industrial model of just adding scale, like adding warheads. First, you can’t do it anymore in the labor market that we have. But the second, it’s also not, it’s not generally producing better results. One example we have there is that Panasonic, they did a study on on, basically, team productivity. And they use people analytics to really determine what their what they like what the right mix of the right team size was of their battery kind of production, of course, they are seeing huge increases in demand because of all the solar and all the like renewable energy and all of that. And they found out that actually, they had their P teams was too big. So they were looking at really what skills do we really need on these teams. And then they could scale it down to say the teams that were generally like a little bit like 10%, smaller than the bigger the biggest teams, but they had the right skill mix. What much more productive than these, like large teams. So they said, maybe we don’t need more people. Maybe we just need to select who are the right people and the teams and then put them to work. And that’s really what this is all about. Yeah, and that story paints a perfect picture for the slide that we just transitioned to here is that what this understanding and this awareness allows you to do is it allows you to organize around talent and understand the work rather than how a lot of this has been done historically with job titles and job descriptions and hierarchy and org charts right

25:00
That picture of the world is very different from the world in which we operate. And once you get at this level of understanding, it gives you a variety of options for how you address that work, and how you organize and how you strategize around talent. Right, especially in today’s very complex dynamic work. Is this done by full time employees? Is this done by contractors? Is it done by people in the office? Can it be done by people working remotely is are the skills that are needed for today, but skills that we don’t need going forward? So we just want to contract someone and borrow them are the skills that relate to our intellectual property that we want to invest in, that we want to keep core to our business are these tasks that we want to automate, and potentially take off the plate now that we understand who can who can’t who’s interested, who isn’t interested, and what the value is. So this understanding of skills and the ability through talent, intelligence and AI, to understand this in real time, gives you these options that help inform strategy. And it allows for as the Josh Bersin company talks about these four R’s of Azure addressing the work and the challenge, you could recruit, you could retain, you could redeploy, you could redesign, right? Some of you may have referred to this as build, buy, borrow, I’ve heard build, buy, borrow, bought. But the whole point of this is the way to truly understand what your options are, is to get a broader data set that’s informed by the market with organizational understanding with talent, intelligence, identifying your talent in real time, that gives you visibility to make some of these decisions. Right is that’s exactly what a lot of organizations are coming to you to learn how to do or engaging with you to walk you through how they’re doing this, right. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Because I think the most organization is still in this a little bit like, last century mindset to say, well, we have a new customer need, we have a new product need, what are we going to do? We’re going to just hire
these 10 people, right? So like, we need 10 heads, we need 10 people, like we couldn’t just go out and hire that and recruiting a lot of times it’s scratching their heads. And it’s like, how are we going to do this to talent doesn’t exist, where we want to place them. But the business oftentimes is not listening. So they say, Well, you just need to recruit them, I don’t care. You just need to recruit them fast. And then you get into this back seat as a talent acquisition person, for example, where you say, Oh, I can’t do it, right. Time to hire doesn’t work. And honestly, we see with that. And you see, as a recruiter, you see a recruiting leave, you see, in your talent, intelligence insights, the talent is just not there. And rather than saying, We just are the order fulfillment people in the recruiting area, how can we help the business, reshape their needs to say, well, maybe we don’t need to hire these people. As you said, maybe there is like, maybe this is hiring three people, adding some automation to it, redesigning the work rescaling some people that are internally already to put them into this plays, maybe we already have the people internally. And then also maybe outsourcing or contracting some of the skills that we might not need for the future, right, this is just a temporary need. So being much more strategic around it, and pushing back on the business, quite frankly, and, and serving much more as a talent advice. And I know, I’ve heard this from a lot of your clients, too, that’s having these insights puts them much more into the position of being becoming less of an order taker in the recruiting area, and much more of a strategic talent advisor to help basically the business, support their needs and and solve their problems. So Kathi, your team at the Josh Bersin company did extensive research on this working with your clients. And you published some research on this. And I want to take the next section of our meeting today, just to kind of walk the audience through some of the stories and use cases that you’ve seen and some of the outcomes that have happened from early adopters. Would you mind taking a few minutes to walk us through that? Of course, of course, yeah. So when you think about getting C-suite business

29:03
suite, buy in for talent, intelligence, and we talked a little bit about why talent intelligence is so important and skills insights are really important.

29:13
The the first step to do that is you got to think and work with the business to identify what is their problem that they want to solve. And that’s we always hone in on that because a lot of times, companies might think, Oh, we got to start with the technology, we have the technology, and we’re going to just tell the business why it’s so important. Well, that won’t work. Because the business and especially C-suite leaders, I’m near very laser focused on what is the business problem that this can solve for us not? Here’s a cool tool, and I want to like I’m gonna buy it because it’s cool, and maybe we needed some point. So the first and most important step is really identify in your business. What is the problem that talent intelligence can solve for the business? And not just saying well

30:00
We have all these problems, but really narrowing down what is the problem. So here we have listed out three kinds of problems that and you probably have all of them. But what we really encourage you is narrow in on one that’s most prevalent for you and most important for you. So
encourage you is narrow in on one that’s most prevalent for you and most important for you. So I’ll go through each of these business problems through a little bit and give you some examples. You might have as a business problem, a skills gap, meaning you just don’t have the right skills, you have a lot of people, I probably have more people than you need, or maybe the right amount of people in your organization or in a very specific business group that’s most important.

30:33
But you have missing skills and capabilities. So for example, when we studied the banking industry, that consumer banking industry and I also, we did this together with eight fold, and based on eight folds, talent, intelligence, insights and database data set. We identified that the banking industry, consumer banking industry has actually a massive digital skills gap. They have lots of people that have old school technology, knowledge and debt programming, and like COBOL, or something like that, doing mainframe programming, but they really want all the banking companies, of course want to be consumer banking companies that go to their customers with their digital offerings. Because in the pandemic, everybody saw, well, we can do all of this online, we can do all of this, like any banking transaction, really online without visiting a bank. And so you got to make it easier and gotta like, provide the solutions that customers are really asking for that. But they don’t have the skills to do that. We see this in a lot of different banks that we talked with. And the skills are changing rapidly, roles us changing rapidly. In this this case, for example, in banking, that’s what they call high skills, velocity. So velocity just means things are changing very quickly. Because Because of AI because of new digital technologies, and all of that, what do you the most important thing to do there could be as reskilling so seeing if you already have enough people, probably you want to take you can’t hire people, as we saw this bank to most banks can actually hire into the digital roles, because most people don’t want to work in an old school bank when they can work for I don’t know, Google. Any, like Amazon or any kind of cool tech companies. They don’t want to go to a stodgy old bank. So you can’t do that. You got to rescale people, so it’s different, and how are you gonna raise skilled labor? How do you know if people have already the right skills in your organization? Well, you need talent intelligence, so you need insights on that. So that would be the first problem. The second kind of problem that you might encounter in your company is a capacity gap. We just don’t have enough people, let alone the skills, but we just don’t have enough people, we don’t have enough hands to even do this. Healthcare is a great example. And we’ll walk more through that nursing gap. But you’ve all heard about that. We quantified it together also with with eight folds dataset, and we quantified it to be in the next two years, to be in the US alone at 2.1 million people nursing app, which is massive, it’s it means every third seat will be empty. And in nursing, if you if we continue like this, skills are kind of intermediate, like changing skills and roles are changing somewhat. We need a lot of insights on a fuse of AI and new technologies and all of that. But the medical skills still need to be of course in place. So you still need people to know how to place an IV and how to measure blood pressure, and all of those kinds of things that they already need to do. So some of the skills are changing. But some of the core skills, there’s core medical skills, of course, stay the same. And what we’ve identified there, and I’ll walk you through that in more detail, redesigning jobs and work to put AI into place to need less people, less does highly qualified people to put these people from Amazon, for example, to work in lowest skilled nursing roles. That’s what this is all about. And again, for that you need talent, intelligence to know what skills you have, what skills you need, and what skills also in the outside market. That’s a massive benefit of talent intelligence to that it’s doesn’t just show you insight of information, but really outside information as well, what’s in the outside world. So that might be a capacity gap. And you might have that as the most pressing gap in your organization, for example, to say, we just can’t find enough people, we just don’t have enough heads. Last problem I’ll mention is

34:29
we might have a misalignment. So you might have enough people and you might have also the right skills, but people are working on the wrong thing. So they’re working on the wrong project. Maybe they’re not working into as we identified with a technology company. They had one business unit really underperforming. And they identified that they had the right people in the right skills, but they’re working on a project that was actually not going anywhere, right. So in that case, you’ll probably have to increase talent mobility to move people from this underperforming business unit. Maybe you want to shut this down.

35:00
On all together this whatever technology you were deploying, and move them into the high growth technology, business products that you are you working on, like,

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if you’re working on something that the market doesn’t need anymore, then you still need the talent intelligence to say, what do we have internally? What’s an externally? How do we match these skills to do the work that needs to be done. So those are three business problems that you might want to identify first, before you even start thinking about going to your C-suite and say, What kind of problem do we have most in our organization? I can’t obviously answer that for you. But I gave you a few of these examples. And just pick one, just pick one, because if you talk about all of them, pick one job group, not say, Oh, we have all these problems in all of our job groups, that won’t help but you say, this is one of the big priority job groups or job areas in our organization, this is the kind of problem we have. And then you could say, we can we can actually use talent, a talent, to stand a deeper, deep, more deeply understand the problem. So we have the healthcare example. And all of these actually charts that have actual real data from the healthcare industry in there that we created in our healthcare study that we did together with eight fold, where we say, well, what are the Vols that healthcare, for example, even has, what roles are

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rising in need? What roles are declining in need, which roles are growing really rapidly or rolls out like declining and really rapidly it really helps you understand with the talent, intelligence, how you what you need, what you have, and what you will need in the future. And then you match the skills to it. So you basically say, what are the differentiating skills? For example, for notice, if we identified in the healthcare study, nurse, nursing has the most important role?

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How, how do these align with what’s available in the outside market? And that also comes to the solutions, then your way could say, for example, where are the skills located? In the US, we have this chart, it’s an actual chart of the US where there’s big skills gap in the healthcare industry and in the in the states that are in red. And whereas maybe more than you need in the in the states that you have in green there, and can you relocate people or we maybe do some more hybrid work, remote work to actually make sure that you take the overflow and not just try to dig deeper into the hole where like fishing in an empty pool, basically. So there you can think about how do we have adjacent skills, what skills are adjacent to the newest thing skills? For example, in health care, or in like the product manager example I gave? What skills could be adjacent for the product manager role? And that could be the z sommelier skills, for example. And how do we then we, like use what we call systemic solutions. And we’ll call this the for our framework, because this is for us to at the same time to solve the business problem to recruit, of course, because you still need to hire of course, how do you can you be more strategic? How can you think about locations, university relationships, improving your recruiting operations, using skills for recruiting not just degrees of job, like job qualifications, by the way, our jobs?

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So recruiting, still important, but then also at the same time? How can we differentially retain the people that we already have? So how can we understand who has already right skills, and then we do some employee experience work, maybe we focus on pay equity, or support people with better benefits, whatever the problem might need, be for them to need to be retained, better career growth, all of those kinds of things, listening to people, so at the same time retaining as well. Also thinking about how can you re skill so how can you find the people that have adjacent skills, and then give them some development give them reskilling and the healthcare scenario for example, of course, that will require you to ask to give them medical education because just because somebody has patient empathy, for example, as we found with in a healthcare company that said, they will reskilling, their receptionists, because the receptionist in the in the hospitals more and more this job is going to be automated and because you check, check in with the iPad or he has taken on your phone. And they said if people are interested in going into the medical field reception, it’s a great future nursing potential because if you think about it, they might not have the medical skills but they have the patient empathy skills, they already know how to deal with people that come into the hospital, just stressed out and they can’t deal with it and with the patients and with their families and all of that. So all the interpersonal skills that are actually harder to build and much more like critical they already have so rescaling people and then moving them around in the company. And the last are that I want to mention

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is redesigning the work itself. So thinking about how can we take the work apart? One company Mercy Health, for example, they did internal gig work for all of their nurses offer that to them to say, you don’t have to work 40 hours a week, you can, if it fits better for your personal situation, you could work just five hours a week. And they based on skills, they were basically finding out how to deploy nurses to these internal gig work situations. But of course, you need to know what skills to have and what when you can deploy them because otherwise you have this imbalance of the need, and and where you want to go, but huge benefit for them because
people well, so it also helped them retain the nurses and attract them. So they all like help each other in a way. And what we found in healthcare, and we quantify that here with healthcare study that we did with with eight fold is that each of these ORS have a slice of the problem in a way. So recruiting has the actually the smallest slice, because in this case, because there’s just not enough nurses out there, you can try to recruit only one, but there’s just not enough.

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The next one is retaining people, of course, you’re going to retain people as well as the next area that you want to retain people. And and next biggest slice, basically all these retention solutions, reskilling a much bigger slice. And the biggest slice of all, in this case was redesigning the work itself. But you cannot do that redesign of the work itself without the insights, not just on the jobs because the jobs, Barry can the skills insights, as we talked about before, you really need to understand on a deeper level, how to do this. And we did all of this, by the way based on the data from eight fold. And you could do this too, for your problem, right? You could add identify your problem, let’s say, go to your executive center and say, Well, if we have this problem,

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here’s how we can solve it. Because what we want you to understand is, are the problems that business executives have either actually solvable without talent, intelligence, you won’t be able to get the answer, you will just be able to say, I think we can solve it, I think we can try. I think we can record and do all of the things. You really need the data and executives are so keen, of course on on understanding the data and insights as well. Jason, I talked a lot. Any any thoughts or any any comments you have on all of this? No, yeah, no, I think it’s a phenomenal story. Because it’s much more powerful to tell a story when you’re telling a story through data. And it’s also ties the fact that it’s not a single strategy that’s going to get you out of this, you need to have a more comprehensive understanding of the issue, and a variety of scenarios to understand what buttons to push, and what levers to pull to address all of the different factors that are weighing in on the challenges ahead. But a big part of this speaks to a lot of the companies that you’ve been working with are some of the early adopters of this. And they they not only are ahead of the curve from some of their peers, because of how they’ve got this visibility and how they’ve changed their structure. But they’re also now setting the pace kind of for what’s coming next, which was why the Josh Bersin company put together this research, which I love, which is on what you refer to as Pace Setter organizations. Can you walk us through a little bit of that? Yeah, so the pace sentences was fascinating when we looked at various different industries. On like a global basis, we looked at health care, we looked at banking, we looked at consumer packaged goods, we looked at pharmaceutical industry, we said there’s a pattern there. That’s a pattern that in every industry, there’s like five to 10% of the companies that do things completely differently. And they have completely different outcomes. So they have better financial performance, they have better talent outcomes. They lead the industry with innovation. And they also lead us kind of on our indicators of having what we call systemic HR leadership. So we identified that Pace Setter kind of team of companies in every single industry, and we saw that they are not just leading the industry right now, but they’re also exponentially increasing the lead because they’re constantly transforming. They’re not just transformation ready, but they’re always transforming. So those those pacesetter
companies do things completely differently. We like crystallized that into the seven winning strategies of peace citizen, you can read this, this report that we have written on the seven winning strategies of faith said organizations but they in a nutshell, they really reorganized
constantly. So they redesigned constantly and always look at what skills do we need and they prioritize not just operational skills and roles but then also transformational roles transformational skills, technology roles and technology skills, rather than just operating and in healthcare for

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example that meant, they’re not just getting the clinical roles in but they also have a lot of technology and transformation. workshop facilitators, like Lean Six Sigma like,

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product kind of, like design people basically design thinking people in their in that organization much more so than those companies that are kind of behind the eight ball and just chasing, chasing success. They’re also not just focusing on recruiting alone, because the talent pool has been fished dry, in most in most organizations, but they’re thinking about how can we use talent intelligence to retain people to rescale people to have mobility in the company as well. So not just going on site, as we talked about before. They’re constantly redesigning jobs and employment models and employment options, as I already talked about as well in the healthcare example. But we see this in all these other industries as well. And they have a different HR operating model, a systemic HR operating model, I could talk about that for hours as well won’t do that. But the last thing that really is relevant for for this discussion is they also collaborate across the C-suite. So they really have that whole C-suite working together to solve their big business problems. And the healthcare example, again, as we talked about before, is the CEO plays a big role and changing regulatory requirements to basically think about staffing ratios, staffing to patient ratios, all of that Theater Row, of course, has this massive role to redesign the work to use the for our model to use talent, intelligence. But the CIO also plays a huge role in using technology to enable better healthcare support, for example, with technology and automation, CFO critically involved, because they’re going to look at cost and investment. And the CEO, Chief Operating Officer also heavily involved. So what I know we’re going to talk about this in a minute here for a little bit and how you phrase what the benefit of talent intelligence is, is going to be different depending on which of the C-suite you’re going to talk with. The last thing I want to just mention before we maybe go to that these, like blast area where we talk about how you communicate to the C-suite and open it up to question is how you measure success of HR is actually going to change too. So if you’re trying to convince businesses, leaders, C-suite leaders, the most senior executives, that what you’re trying to do is actually adding business value, you’re going to measure the success with business success measures. So you can’t just say, well, we have we’re more efficient in HR, we it costs less money to do, like HR transaction to recruiting to do reskilling or any of those kinds of things. It’s also not enough to just say, well, our employees like it, our managers like it, or we have high engagement or retention. All of these are kind of internal metrics. But how can how, why not measure your success of your, your initiatives of your support of talent, intelligence by can the company grow? Is the company innovating our customers much more successful, and if you measure those, if you provide those success measures, nobody’s gonna push back because
that’s what the business we’re really wants to do. They’re really looking for those, like, bottom line and top line business indicators, not just for the HR indicators. And the last piece I wanted to jump in and add was

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another kind of summarization of these pay center organizations. They’re they’re collaborative, they’re systemic, and they have people dedicated to this work that are embedded. Right? So it’s one of the it’s one of these things where when you ask a question, like who owns internal mobility, who owns change management, who owns

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onboarding, right? There’s a lot of the opportunity to go like this. Because no one’s no one because no one owns it, or no one’s dedicated when the answer is everyone owns it, right? Everybody’s something where they have dedicated people that are embedded. So you get this more collaborative systemic approach. Oh, absolutely. I mean, this systemic approach is so key for all of this. Yeah. Thanks for Thanks for clarifying that. Jason. It’s, it’s, for the sake of time, I’m going to jump to I’m going to jump to the next section. And we’re going to talk about engaging different members of the C-suite. So for anyone who’s following along, we just skipped a poll for the sake of time, but as part of engaging different members of the C-suite, I do want to ask a poll to get the conversation started. So here is this poll question.

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And if you are near your your mouse and you can respond, the question is how do you currently involve different members of the C-suite to secure buy in for new initiatives in your organization?

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How are you currently doing it? Are you able to do it through data with stories like the ones Kathi just walked us through? Right? Here are a couple options here a, b, c, d and e

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But these are all great options, I would have a hard time to select which one? Because I think all of these kinds of interesting things are important things to do. What do you see most successful Jason in your work?

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Again, I think a big part of gaining internal champions and buy in is storytelling. And it’s much easier to tell the story when you have the data. Right. So part of this is tailored communications with specific interests in mind, which we’ll talk about next. But it’s also this
communications with specific interests in mind, which we’ll talk about next. But it’s also this kind of building a coalition. Right? And somewhat, we’re used to this in HR, you have to play some of the organizational politics, but you have to align kind of what people are interested in what how they’re measuring themselves, and how this helps solve their problem. And the more problems you can solve collaboratively, the more things you can do synergistically, right. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I think I think it’s key. I mean, I am so glad you called out the database, fact based storytelling, because that’s kind of the business, the language that the business talks, if you think about, for example, like marketing or anything like that, or financials, people used to these, like fact based stories and Data database stories. So yeah, like so you see the answers here, the answers here are a little bit more spread out, because it is a little bit of a of an all of the above strategy. And it does speak to more of the collaborative and systemic nature of this. But hopefully, through some of the content that we’ve walked you through, you see the building blocks for how you would put something like this together. So again, here are some of the leaders casualized, personalized meetings, foster cross functional collaboration, seek feedback from key decision points. But all in all, compared to the previous poll, there’s a lot more equal values spread out across the strategy, because it does take more of a comprehensive approach. So now just for the sake of time, and for the folks that are attending here, wanted to walk you through what this means in terms of execution. So close to home. Let’s start with the CHR. Ro, Kathi is you’ve worked with a lot of Chr. O ‘s, and they’ve asked a lot of questions, and you’ve tried to influence them and guide them. Can you walk us through quickly here? Kind of what’s top of mind for the CHRO? And how do you make a play for their support? Yeah, for sure. I mean, they are looking, of course to think about the people side of the business. And whatever your business challenges that we talked about, right? It’s going to be very easy to translate that in the CH ro language to say, this is that like, not talk about tactics, but talk about how can tell an intelligence actually help us address this this business challenge. So it’s really key to think about, what’s the business challenge you’re trying to solve for? I mean, every CFO we talked with, say, labor shortage is a huge skill shortage is a huge, we don’t have the right skills, wellbeing, like and we don’t have enough people, we don’t have the right like talent in there. So all of those challenges will probably come up for you as well. And the talent intelligence, of course, play there is it’s massively important because well, how do we know we don’t have the right skills? How do we know what others are doing outside of our company? How can we benchmark ourselves all of those insights you cannot get with our talent intelligence to save while we are in this, we are, for example, working with a pharma company and they said we don’t know if we’re we are you looking at the right skills or other our competitors is actually looking at other skills for research and development? Well, without telling the intelligence, you can’t say that right? You could just guess, or you could say, well, I talked with one person from a competitor. But tell him intelligence brings you that kind of holistic story or the database story there. So very important. I know folks that attend will get a copy of the materials, that framework around identifying the problem and understanding this strategy is on that for our framework is something that would lend itself very well to this CHR row champion from from a CEO perspective, I think one of the things that would lend itself well here is explaining and articulating how this isn’t just an HR initiative for HR sake. And I loved your slide around not just measuring the benefits within HR, but tying them to specific business results. Right. I think you’ve talked about some of the specific clients you’ve worked with, where these, these either started the conversation or became revelations of the initiative. But now that we’re a little further into it, people can start to gain momentum by approaching it that way. Absolutely. I mean, the CEO will care about growth, profitability, future success, innovation, all of those kinds of things, if you can tie any of this to to those kinds of success measures so you can have a win, no doubt, but always tied to your problem, right? What’s the problem that you’re trying to solve with this? So very important, not from another stakeholder perspective, the Chief Information Officer CIO thinks often about diff

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Are things How was this delivered? How does this fit into our tech stack? What is this mean, from a technology perspective? What does this mean from a digital workplace perspective? Do you want to talk about kind of their role in some of these pay center organizations or initiatives you’ve been involved with? Yeah, for sure. I mean, they have really a very important role, because they are also thinking about the talent intelligence platform itself, right? Is that fitting into into what we want to do, but then also, they have their own challenges in terms of skills and capabilities, especially with the AI coming into place? Right. So they have that kind of issue as well. So I think it’s kind of a double play to say, how does it that the actual talent intelligence platform fit in, but then also, from your own like organization, usually, these are big organization and important organization, because every company now is a tech company, as we, as we say, and I think it’s true, they will, you’ll be able to translate basically the benefits of talent, intelligence to their needs, and that tech team.

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And then at the end of the day, everything comes down to dollars and cents, right. It’s where it’s where the rubber meets the road. So our last key stakeholder here is the is the CFO. And I think one of my takeaways from listening to you and spending time with you during this hour, is the difference between the industrial approach and the post industrial approach. And it’s not just a widget and an incremental exercise, this now has the opportunity to increase ROI and increase in synergies and value at more of an exponential level, but it’s through this understanding of applying the right skills in the right place. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, the CFO plays is is really critical because they hold the budget, right? But then it’s very easy to show a huge ROI on this, of course, because just the internal like, like the internal redeployment, reskilling and then mobility story, it’s like four times where we did the study, as well as at some point, it’s four times more profitable or more beneficial for the company. to redeploy somebody we skill somebody than to hire from outside. I mean, if you multiply that by how many people you need, if you’re a large organization, you have huge ROI right away.

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So with that, I want to thank everyone for spending their time with us and coming along for the ride. This is a very important discussion that a lot of organizations are having. I’m a very, I’m very passionate about it. As are you Kathi, we can talk about this all day.

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We look forward to everyone getting a copy of the materials or I’m sure there will be a recording available. But thank you again for joining us. And thank you to Kathi and the Josh Bersin company for sharing their insights in their research. And with that, I want to hand the program back over to Connor. Thank you, Jason. Thank you, Kathi.

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Thank you. This webcast is sponsored by Eightfold AI. Eightfold AI delivers the Talent Intelligence Platform, the most effective way for companies to retain top performers upskill and rescale the workforce, recruit top talent efficiently and reach diversity goals. Eightfold AI is a deep-learning artificial intelligence platform that empowers enterprises to turn talent management into a competitive advantage. For more information, please visit www.eightfold.ai. Before we sign off, we want to thank our presenters, Jason Cerrato with Eightfold AI and Kathi Endres with The Josh Bersin Company for the information they provided today. And we also want to thank everyone tune in for being with us, and for choosing SHRM for HR webcast. That concludes this program.