Xabier Ormazabal, Eightfold Global VP of Product Marketing, shares how a skills-focused approach to building and growing workforces with real-time data can help ensure current and future success. Ormazabal also revealed how to do this more easily with AI-powered Talent Design, the latest product from Eightfold that helps organizations see and align their skills to their needs.
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Course, I know it’s late in the day. Day two of HR tech. All the techno beats have been flowing and the booster pumping. Everyone’s having a great time. My name is Xabier. I go by Xabi. I lead product marketing at Eightfold AI, and basically I’m excited to be talking to you about this topic today. And I’m essentially going to cover five things a little bit about who is Eightfold AI – I’ll talk about the state of talent and skills today and the need that the market is expressing for this kind of solution. I’ll talk about talent design. I’ll give a brief demo of the product, just a quick overview a couple of minutes, so you get a flavor of what it feels like. And then I’ll talk to some customer successes of organizations have been using our solutions for a few years now, and are seeing some incredible outcomes. So just to begin, how many of you, by show of hands, are familiar with Eightfold and know what we do? Okay, there’s a few of you, maybe 40, 50% of the audience.
Well, we call ourselves the single AI platform for all talent. So we’re a solution, a company that is focused on sort of this category called Talent Intelligence. So we call ourselves the leader in this category. We have built a number of deep learning AI technologies that are purpose-built for talent and really kind of focus across all different personas in the talent lifecycle, whether it’s your candidates, your hiring managers, your recruiters, your employees, all the way through to contractors and even citizens. We work with a lot of public sector organizations like the state of New York or the government of Puerto Rico in the number of workforce development projects with a product that we have called Workforce Exchange. And across the bottom of the slide here a few of the organizations and interesting projects that we have that kind of span the gamut of the things that we do. So from from left to right, we work with hydric struggles with a solution called Heidrick Navigator for executive succession planning, built on our technology. Ernest and Young, they have a solution called Skills Foundry, where they help their organizations become skill-centered organizations. And I’ll talk a little bit about them later on, the Josh Bersin company, we’ve been partnering with them for a number of years, and we have a series of research called the Global Workforce Intelligence Project, where person has published research on a number of different industries, from semiconductors to banking and fintech to healthcare, which I’ll talk a little bit about today with Gig Eagle. It’s a project with the Department of Defense, with the Defense Innovation Unit, where, essentially, they have visibility into the civilian skills over 1.3 million reservists, so they can utilize all those valuable, high paying skills for internal projects for the Department of Defense. And Starbucks is one of our great customers that have a lot of breadth and depth in terms of retail volume, hiring, and many other exciting areas, leveraging our AI or capabilities. So one thing we talk about, just to kind of level set in this area of talent intelligence, we sort of talk about this new age of HR. We know that many organizations have the core of their HR information in what we call systems of record. So it’s structured data. It’s your HCM, it’s your HRIS or ATS. It’s really focused on understanding the jobs and positions of the people in your organization. What job do they do? What job code is it? What level are they at? When did they start as an employee, etc. What’s their tenure? All really valuable data. But that occurred. What typically occurs is that what HR and IT and other teams need to solve for specific projects, whether it’s assessments or performance management or any number of succession planning, for example, they bring in point solutions that help them get a particular job done, but then they tend to silo the data. The data starts to live in many different places at once. So our real philosophy and what we see the need in the market is for systems of intelligence that can span these different high value HR systems that you have and give you a mix of insights into your internal plus market and external based data, and then it’s automatic and self updating. So we ultimately help you in the shift away from rigidly defined jobs and positions to a much richer understanding of skills and talent in applying the right talent in the right place at the right time. So this doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Obviously, there’s a bigger trend that’s happening in the industry. The famous book Work Without Jobs talks about this, and one of his central theses is about kind of this continuum of how you do have employees in these fixed roles with a fixed job definition and set of responsibilities, but then you have in the middle, employees in flexible roles that are partially fixed but can really flow to work as needed and when needed. And then you also have some organizations, business users, different types of companies, that really focus on employees, fully flowing the tasks to where the work is, to assignments of projects. And I think a little bit about this in the high-tech space. Often when companies hire developers, they don’t even have a particular team that they sit in their first three to six to nine months might be rotational, working on different parts of different projects. So it’s kind of that sort of modality that can be thought of and applied to many different parts. And obviously the benefits of this is, you know, reduced time to fill greater speed and agility and really matching your talent to what your organization needs. When we talk about Josh person’s research and this concept of talent intelligence, it’s really kind of at the center of the different strategies you may we may want to apply in filling any gaps that you have in your talent, your skills. So Burson often talks about the four R’s: recruiting, reskilling, retention, and re-engineering. There’s a lot of leverage you have to pull to fill the talent gaps that you need in your organization. And one of the studies that Mersen did based on Eightfold data was a look at the healthcare industry in the United States, and, as a developed economy with an aging population, there’s a boom and a high need for highly skilled nurses in the marketplace to support all the needs of healthcare. But what was really interesting in the study as they dug deeper into the data was they realized that applying those four Rs, four different strategies, you could have pulled one single lever to cover that need. So you could have recruit your way out of a 2.1 million nursing gap. You could bring in some folks that way, you can also retain and better incentivize the people who are in the role and avoid higher turnover burnout. You could reskill people from adjacent industries, right? And famously, Amazon has facilities for some of its warehouse workers to be able to take training and get a nursing degree as a future looking rescaling opportunity for them, for example. But then ultimately, the biggest bucket is redesign. How do you help nurses operate at the top of their license? How do you fundamentally redesign the work and supporting roles around them so they’re not doing administrative it and other things aside from, you know, performing the highest level of care that they can for their patients. So again, you need a deep understanding of skills. You need to pull all the levers at your disposition to really fill the skills gaps that you have. Another interesting study, and this is to take the pulse of organizations, is from aptitude research last year around demystifying talent intelligence, and what they found, with about 350 respondents, many of whom were CHROs, was that about 64% of organizations were already investing in skills based approach, with another 23% just starting in that approach. So clearly, it’s something that’s top of mind for many different organizations today, and ultimately, when we think about the shift from jobs to talent and the flow of work, you really have to center things on the talent, as in the center of the slide. And it’s about working outside in do you want to maximize exposure of your talent to as many opportunities as possible? Whether they are full time, robbed jobs, there are gigs, there are projects, all the different things that might be required. There would be learning opportunities. And at the top left here, the biggest, most important input of all of this is skills and capabilities. It’s really the most fungible piece of data that we have around our talent to understand where it can be quickly applied elsewhere. And along with these other inputs, on the left you get better outcomes. On the right, you get much more speed and agility. HR is much more of a strategic talent advisor, instead of being more of an order taker, and you can really form decisions based on talent and focus on the work, the task and the skills needed, and where you can cover those an effective way. So when we talked earlier about the point solutions and the siloing of data, here’s another kind of view of that. When you think about skills specifically, they reside in so many different systems across the organization, whether it’s your human capital management system, your applicant tracking system, your learning systems, your performance marketplaces, etc, it’s residing everywhere, right? And organizations are dealing with this daily. So this obviously causes a number of challenges. So for example, you might not be able to capture all of your employee skills from your LMS, right? Things are siloed and they’re inaccessible, or they can be inconsistent. Your skill might be defined differently in your assessment tool that you might be using with candidates coming in, versus your formal system with your existing employees. And that disconnect can cause a lot of confusion, or it can even be irrelevant. You might have old job wrecks that are updated, that haven’t been updated, and that have skills that are several years old.
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So what tends to happen in this lack of centralized, unified, standardized data, if you don’t have all the insights, you can’t make the right decisions, and if your skills data is inconsistent, your talent experiences, both for ingest of talent, for developing and career pathing with talent for applying talent to different parts of the organization and W McG way it’s going to be poor and inefficient, and also, if your skills data is stale, it’s a rear view mirror. You’re looking at snapshot of the past, and it’s not helping you get ahead of the curve. Think about what are the competitive market challenges that you’re going to have further down the road? This is a reality that a lot of our customers, you know, struggle with, or that they see in their industries. You know, if we have companies like John gear struggling with electrification, what does that mean for them in their own manufacturing process, right? Or companies like Eaton, which is a manufacturing company in the electric business, where they are just have a war for talent. A lot of people are leaving manufacturing. So how do they find the right data to the right talent to fuel the gap that they have, they need to do that with the right skills data. So this concept of intelligent talent frameworks around skills and roles really drive greater clarity. First of all, you can unify and understand. If you can gather and analyze your skills data from different sources into one system, you can get a much cleaner view of what’s going on. Then unsurprisingly, need to standardize and contextualize and have a clear and consistent vocabulary, right? All the things that we said was called, one way in your LMS, another in your ATS, another in your hrs or your successor, planning point solution. Those need to be standardized. And finally, it has to, you know, evolve and be continually enhanced. Again. If it’s static, I think it’s stuck in time with that rear view mirror, it’s going to be impossible to continually flow and evolve to where it has to be. Another element of this concept of intelligent talent frameworks is the importance of understanding talent in the context of work. So this is something in our data model, the way that Eightfold operates. We have three major data sets that we work with. We have the company’s enterprise data from its different systems. We have market data and public sources that give us a view of over a billion anonymized and aggregated career trajectories and a rich understanding of how people evolve in their careers, their trajectories, and then we have user interactions. How are ta leaders defining those roles and calibrating working with recruiters? How are they working with hiring managers? What decisions are being made? How are employees entering their skills profiles and career hub and how are they selecting their career paths as they choose different upskilling opportunities to grow and evolve. All of that information continually feeds back into the deep learning to continually tailor and improve the experience and the insights. And it really flows the two main ways. It’s to individual intelligence about candidates, about employees, etc, and organizational intelligence having that view that you could apply to Big Picture solutions such as upscaling or succession planning, or even reorg or redeploy Finally, these concepts of intelligent talent frameworks need to be built on a platform where you can actually execute those talent strategies. So often you have a lot of labor market analytics tools that are very excellent and give a lot of insight, but they tend to be outside the loop of where decisions are being made or where actions are being taken. To actually apply this for ours, from person or, you know, hire, retaining however you want to describe them in your process. So this is where, when we look at our platform, the the green layer with the three boxes, once you have the platform and the talent design, you can then go out and acquire talent, you can source, you can screen, bring in and match the right talent to your needs. Find hard to find talent in rare places. You can manage an upscale and career path your existing talent. And you can even bring talent into the flow of work in the project based focus of what we call resource management. So just to summarize, when we talk about this concepts of intelligent talent frameworks, you have to unify, understand, organize, enhance and evolve so it’s not static, and then have a way to plan and execute. That’s really the key to make this effective and pervasive in your organization. So with that, I’d love to announce Eightfold Talent Design, which is a new solution that we’ve announced this week. It’s really about design, those talent, intelligent talent frameworks for the future of work, and the three kind of pillars of talent design, we have roles, design, skills, design, and then market insights. And for those of you who might have been familiar with us, or even worked with April for a few years, role design is what our former job intelligence student was. So it’s a continuous evolution of the insights that we’re already applying in that project, in working with organizations. So what I’m going to do the next few slides is talk a little bit to each of these three buckets, how it applies to different use cases and show a couple of short demo vignettes. So with talent design, some of the benefits of this are really greater agility, and you have a robust talent framework that’s built to last. You can make data different decisions, and again, you can accelerate those core cost issues of hiring, ensuring the quality of candidates and employees and driving more mobility for your increasing your internal employees already. What’s interesting as well is thinking about how to apply talent design through the lens of different personas in your HR organization. So if you think about talent acquisition, it drives a lot of strategic alignment between recruiters and hiring managers. It also helps you have a consistent definition of skills between who you’re hiring for and how you’re holding that same bar for internal mobility, so you have a much richer process across both parts of the past. And that sounds trivial, but it’s not. I know many organizations, TA and TM are two parts of the organizations don’t necessarily collaborate and talk to each other. In talent management, it’s around enriching career journeys, succession planning and learning development. It’s really how to focus on key skills development. It’s not about having more courses, but the right ones to help your employees evolve. And talk about that in one of the case studies at the end. So when we talk about skill design, again, think of it as a middleware for skills to be able to pull skills from all those disparate systems, import them and unify and manage them and standardize them in a centralized way. So I’ll go into a little demo here just to showcase what this looks like. And essentially what we’re looking at is sort of the definition or the volume of skills in the organization right now. And we can see the skills, the equivalencies. And the best thing about this is we can import them. If you have an existing skills taxonomy from other systems, you can bring that into your organization easily. Also, another way that organizations get started very quickly with this is they’re able to actually pull in information from their distinct talent pools, from their employees, to enrich their understanding of skills. And with that, they can already start to see the presence of certain skills within their employee set, and they can see how it’s changing. What are their equivalent skills related to that definition? If we go in to edit a skill, you can change the name, you can change the association with equivalent skills. You can actually add skills groupings to sort of highlight or group together like types of skills. And that can all help you in your core definition and understanding of skills throughout your organization. When we talk about the next piece about goals and role design, you’re really talking about a way that you can define the skills that should be associated with particular roles and have a view at the top across your organizational level, benchmarked across your specific industry and then in the market overall. So in terms of what this looks like in the product, here’s an example of all the roles in an organization within Eightfold. And you see here across the top, there’s a couple of labels telling you specific roles that you could focus on or spend a little time doing a little bit more analysis on. So one common one is what we call roles with low future readiness. So future readiness is an assessment that our AI automatically does to look at a role and say how many of these skills related roles are relevant or are likely to be out of date soon. And if we go into a particular example of a role a developer, we can see the AI recommends additional skills that will make it even more future proof of future ready. And we can add those in with a single click directly into that role. So that’s just one quick example of what the role design experience looks like. Finally, we talked a little bit about market insights and having that view of what’s happening in the industry, having a representative data set that will tell you the prevalence of skills and roles and the rise of decline in the skills and roles to better form your processes. What’s really valuable about this is, once you bring that into the process, you can use it to align the role definition and skill definition and ultimately calibrate those roles. And that calibration of roles is the step that connects all of this theory with the actual execution of your talent. So to take a quick look at this within market insights, you first see a view of an industry, for example, high tech in this case, and you can then see, for example, common roles within that industry, common skills that come up for those roles. And also, what are the fastest rising roles at a high level view within that particular industry. If we go into explore it’s going to actually take us into a more detailed view of the most common skills in industry and the fastest rising skills in the industry.
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And so if we scroll down a little bit to those fastest rising roles, we also see information such as, is that role present already in the role library, in that talent framework that we’re describing, what’s the trend? Is it rising or declining? Is it really minuscule or has a big presence of industry? And what are some of the common skills there? And I can just go to a specific skill, in this case, one for an applied scientist for say, like a technology organization looking to do some data science. When I go again to the role view again, the AI could recommend some skills for the role if we wanted to apply that, but it feels like a fairly future ready role with a score of 89 The next thing is actually assigning the proficiency levels for the skills needed for this role. And once we define those proficiency levels, we can actually benchmark this against the industry and see how those skills compare to the overall trends that we’re seeing in high tech. And also, from here, we can go straight to the calibration, which is that next step that I was describing. So now we brought in this role, and we’re going to calibrate it. We’re going to give it more details. We’re going to see the impact on our talent pool today, or how people could be relative to it. We can even choose ideal candidates from our talent network to help fine tune the AI and teach you what good looks like, in addition to, as we mentioned before, the skills, proficiencies and here’s a little example of generative AI, automatically generating a definition of one of the skills, plus showing us a lot of interesting demographics in terms of the gender distribution and prevalence of that particular skill. You can add more capabilities in here, such as job titles, companies, industries, education, and finally, approve the role and add it to your role library. And once it’s in your role library, here’s where you can go off and use it for talent acquisition, use it for talent management, succession planning, any of your other use cases that you have that you’re defining your positions and defining your understanding of talent off of this, this element of the talent framework, cool. So I’ve just showed you quite a lot of things. I know it’s a little bit overwhelming, and I did about a one hour demo in three minutes. But what I want you all to say with the pure idea here, is that the way Eightfold has architected the solution of time design is that we meet you wherever you are. So if you’re an organization just starting and you have little or no role or skill frameworks, we’ll help you leverage your existing employee data and industry data. Industry data to really identify the actionable skills and trends that you want to apply for organizations that are more in progress and might have partial skills and role defined talent design will help you kind of further unlock the value of these existing investments and be able to consistently benchmark and for organizations that are more mature, that already have existing skills taxonomy have done some kind of exercise in the past, and they have mature frameworks that have been already developed. Talent design can provide an actionable recommendation to really maintain a future ready. So again, it’s not that rear view mirror. It doesn’t get stale. It can be continually refreshed. So I’ve covered a lot, introduced the concept of talent design. Took you through a bit of a demo. What I’d like to do now, just to close, is take you through some customer case studies of organizations that have been working with us for several years, and we’ve seen a lot of value. Now, talent design is kind of a new product, but we obviously had our job Intelligence Center before that, so a lot of these organizations have already been using Eightfold to define their role and skills frameworks for some time. So the first organization like to talk about is Vodafone. And what’s really interesting about the stats here is they kind of have a split. The top two are talent acquisition focused, and the bottom two are talent management focused. And really what Vodafone was looking to do was simplify their digital processes, bring in the best talent they had, and actually migrator moved from being a telco and a data provider to almost a software solution provider for its corporate and for its private customers, obviously very big in mobility. So applying their deep understanding of skills and roles with Eightfold, they were able to really improve the candidate experience and drive a much higher increase in their net promoter score one points, and they’re ultimately able to decrease the cost for hire and time to hire by 50% through a number of different tweaks. First of all, improving the experience among the personalized career side, when employees or candidates came to the website having much better experience and a much greater transparency that actually drove a lot of diversity as well. They had about 133% increase in female candidates in the first three months of going live with the personalized career site on the TM side of the house. In a global population of about 98,000 employees, about 14,000 employees built their skill profile within the first year or so of using the solution, and interestingly, partnering with their LMS solution blend, they were able to reduce the course catalog to the courses that were most relevant to employees, while simultaneously actually increasing and Getting a 67% increase in learning hours per employee. So what was critical for Vodafone was having one integrated platform where both TA and TM could sit together, as well as learning and development and bring all the strategies together. The next customer I’d like to talk a little about is called, well, your Pacific partners. So very different organization. They’re the single model and distributor for Coca Cola products in Europe and Asia, and 60% of their employees don’t even sit at a desk. They’re out in the field. They’re doing distribution logistics. They don’t use a computer. They use a mobile device. And they were able to this is fully talent management focused. They launched their project career, hub, and about 80% of their employees have talent profiles, with 70% active adoption across the 30 countries, and 42,000 employees within their portfolio, Pacific partners. But probably what’s most interesting, too, here we’ve been talking a lot about talent design and skills and roles, and often when people think about skills, you think, oh, we gotta learn all the skills we have to learn everything that everyone’s doing across the organization. Well, ccep actually took a more strategic focus, and they only wanted to focus on the top of 100 skills that were critical to ensuring the commercial success of their operations, and beyond that, with the profiles that the employees created in the career hub, they only wanted to surface to employees the top three to five personalized skills recommendations that could help them guide their employee development. So in some ways, they almost use the same the old adage that I think attributed to Blaise Pascal, which is, if I would have had more time, I would have written a shorter letter. It’s like, if you think about it more, simpler is often better, right in terms of the outcomes they want to drive. What’s really going to move the needle? The last example I’ll talk about is ERPs of younger so a global organization, and they’ve really shifted in the past 10 years or so from primarily a tax and accounting services company to consulting strategy, and it and a big part of their solution. Actually, the first metric is related to their internal use and the bottom three or to their work with customers. So the first one is in their global delivery services. They had over multiple 100 1000s of users with an 80% adoption of the talent management solution. Why? Because e wise work is focused by someone we call resource management. It’s on staffing projects in real time. It’s on having the right skills in the right place at the right time. And this is beneficial, not only to the resource manager having to staff projects, to the employee looking to grow their skills, and to the customer who needs the best expertise that they need for the particular project at that point in time, through their Skills Foundry project, they were able to drive a lot of productivity improvements to their clients to help them become skills-based organizations and have a 3.5% increase in productivity. Also their customers reported a 26% reduction in employee attrition through the skills around group project, as well as a two and a half improvement in culture change across those clients. So really, what this kind of brings to bear is organizations that have this holistic view of having a deeper understanding of skills and are able to apply across the 4r a person or the different levers that they use within their business, whether it’s recruiting or retaining or redesigning the work, is really where they’re getting competitive advantage and where they’re evolving their organizations. So the very last thing I’ll share is I’ve only given a 30 minute session on this, and I give a super fly by demo, but if you’re interested in seeing more about talent design, we’ve got my colleagues, Tanya and Lacey, who are giving a one hour demo at 4:45, down in the Expo Hall at demo theater one. So as you go in, it’s to the far left, those tend to be very packed sessions, so I’d advise getting there early if you can, and they will give a really in depth end to end to end demo and explain all the different parts of what talent design is in a very comprehensive way. And finally, would invite you all to come check out our booth in the expo area. Also, we have index cards in the booth with this QR color. You can grab it off of the slide right now. But we have a really good asset, which is an ebook that explains talent center design. And talent center design is kind of like overarching philosophy, a lot of these concepts of, how do you build systems that are fundamentally architected on a deeper understanding of your talent and that can help you leverage the strategies
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in a more effective way? So with that, thank you very much. I’ll leave a slide up if anyone wants to take a picture. Thank you.