SHOW INTRO

[00:00:00] LIGIA: Welcome to the New Talent Code, a podcast with practical insights dedicated to empowering change agents in HR to push the envelope in their talent functions. We’re your hosts. I’m Ligia Zamora.

[00:00:19] JASON: And I’m Jason Cerrato. We’re bringing you the best thought leaders in the talent space to share stories about how they are designing the workforce of the future, transforming processes, rethinking old constructs, and leveraging cutting-edge technology to solve today’s pressing talent issues. It’s what we call the new talent code.

[00:00:38] LIGIA: So if you’re looking for practical, actionable advice to get your workforce ready for the future, you’ve come to the right place.

EPISODE INTRO

[00:00:49] Victoria Meyers leads talent attraction at Amdocs. which specializes in software and services for communications, media, and financial services providers and digital enterprises. With over 30,000 global employees, the company is committed to driving internal mobility and opportunities for their employees.

[00:01:08] JASON: Recently, Amdocs introduced a program called Harmony to generate a proactive approach to harmonize their employees’ career aspirations with the demands and needs of the business. From this conversation, you can definitely tell that Victoria loves her job, and she says she has a real passion for helping people find their ideal career paths.

[00:01:27] By creating this talent-centric approach with the help of AI, 48 percent of Amdoc’s positions are being filled internally. Victoria is the epitome of the forward-thinking talent leader.

[00:01:38] LIGIA: Stay tuned for another action-packed episode.

[00:01:50] Hello, listeners, and welcome to another episode of the new talent code. Guess who we have as a guest today. I’m so excited to introduce you all to Victoria Myers. She’s the global head of talent attraction at Amazon. Yes, I said talent attraction, not talent acquisition. Why? Because with her proven track record of success, she’s actually not just attracting new employees.

[00:02:15] She’s also driving impactful programs and initiatives that elevate the growth and well-being of Amdocs’ entire workforce. And let me tell you something. It’s a pretty large and global company, but you don’t need to hear this from me. Let’s introduce Victoria Jason. Let’s hear directly from her.

INTERVIEW

[00:02:31] Welcome Victoria.

[00:02:35] VICTORIA: Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.

[00:02:37] LIGIA: We are too because we have a lot of questions for you, but just to kick this off, in case anyone hasn’t heard of Amdocs before, you want to give us a quick overview, just in terms of the magnitude, the scope of your brand.

[00:02:51] VICTORIA: Amdocs has been in business for a little over 40 years, and we’re pretty much, we’re a business to business and we’re a tech company.

[00:02:59] Our customers are going to be telecommunication providers globally, as well as in the media industry. We’re very well known. We’re known to be for our billing platforms. So if you get your bill from T-Mobile or AT&T, how they determine what to bill you is something that Amdocs built, but that’s not all we do.

[00:03:20] We’re really at the forefront of taking our customer systems to the cloud, doing digital transformation projects. So it’s very exciting work. Very smart people are surrounding me every day. And we’re really at the cusp of cutting-edge, bleeding technology.

[00:03:36] LIGIA: And you’re pretty dispersed. You have quite a large workforce, correct?

[00:03:40] VICTORIA: Correct. 30,000 people globally, from India to Israel to Cyprus, APAC, Mexico, Brazil, U. S., Canada, and on and on and on. I could mention many more.

[00:03:52] JASON: So, Victoria, we are fascinated about careers and nonlinear career paths. We talked a little bit about your current role, but can you tell us a little bit about how you found your way into talent attraction and talent acquisition? We’ve talked shop, and I love hearing these stories. Everyone has their own journey into this space, but how did you find your way into HR and the talent attraction space?

[00:04:17] VICTORIA: Well, I think most people fall into it, and I’m one of those. So, after college, my brothers and I decided that we wanted to do our own consulting firm. So we did that together for about a year successfully. And that’s what opened the door for me into recruiting. So I was the VP of operations. I was the salesperson. I was a recruiter. I pretty much wore every hat, but the recruiting was the one that I really enjoyed. I felt like it aligned to who I am personally of wanting to help others.

[00:04:48] So I really pursued it while my brothers went off. One’s a COBOL developer, the other one’s in sales. And so that’s my passion is helping people. So I really pursued that for over 20 years, then obviously moved into leadership as well, and then had the great opportunity to work with, of course, alongside Eightfold, but to bring my passion for the candidate experience to that next level.

[00:05:14] LIGIA: Talk to us a little bit post-pandemic. I think I’ve heard you talk before about just how fast you guys were growing how the world changed for you. And for so many others, what exactly was going on in the market? What was going on at Amdocs with this incredible growth? How did things change? And what is it that drove you guys to start changing your framework, the way you were thinking about things and moving, potentially becoming a skills based organization?

[00:05:39] VICTORIA: The pandemic really initially, I think everyone paused and thought, what are we going to do? Besides the fact that we immediately went to within a day, virtual everything, virtual interviewing, virtual hiring, absolutely everything virtual. But otherwise us, our customers, everybody paused. There was a little bit of a moment of what are we doing next?

[00:06:00] And then because we are at the forefront of digital transformation and a lot of companies needed to do that because of the pandemic is why we ended up having a boom and growth. So a lot of projects came our way. And so we ended up having one of the biggest years of hiring. Ever in the company’s history, and it really helped push us to think about things differently.

[00:06:22] You know, if things drastically changed that fast, where else could we be going is where we started with the thinking process. We ran some different projects internally, figuring out where do we want to go? What’s next for us? And the project I ran was around attraction. If we could dream of our future, where do we want to go with attraction?

[00:06:43] And some of the things that we discussed and dreamed about led to wanting to have a proactive sourcing arm, wanted to have proactive candidate engagement. We needed a CRM. We needed a way, an avenue to reach the talent millions that were already in our database, but it was very difficult to find and reach. So for me, that was a piece of the journey. And others had their own aspects of the project, some ways they wanted to improve talent acquisition or it could be even the employee experience.

[00:07:14] JASON: This is often where some of these projects start with talent acquisition and sourcing and CRM and potentially improving the candidate experience. But often, these things grow into something a little bit bigger. And especially with talent intelligence and how these tools work, talent acquisition often feeds into other parts of the organization. And especially when organizations decide to become skills-based, once you become skills-based in a certain area, You can’t just stop there.

[00:07:45] It starts to proliferate into other areas of HR. So to hear your journey, it makes sense. That’s where it started. The world was changing fast. You were growing with these new customers. The business was driving this. So that’s where it started. But very quickly for you, this program became a bigger initiative and it started to grow. And I’ve heard you talk about this. You gave the program a name. Yes. It started to expand. What was the program called?

[00:08:13] VICTORIA: And it really was the idea of Again, imagining this future life of where you can harmonize your employee’s career aspirations with the demands and needs of the business. So really it wasn’t just about bringing in a CRM in the talent acquisition piece and talent intelligence, but beyond that, we really had this idea of.

[00:08:37] Once you’re an employee, how do we ensure that we’re supporting you and your career growth and aspirations? How are we still supporting what the business needs are? That’s the whole idea about Harmony and we’re still on our pathway, you know, the journey. Yeah, as you well know that it’s not just about the tool itself.

[00:08:55] It’s really about this mindset. Of continuous growth, the mindset of providing for the employee where people centric as an organization. This is our focus as a company and the employee experience obviously is very important to us. So along that is obviously other aspects of Eightfold that we’re implementing from the talent marketplace, projects, career interests, but it’s all about giving the employees that ability to dream of their own futures. And providing them the tools and the capability to reach it.

[00:09:28] LIGIA: It’s interesting because I’ve blogged about this before and people tend to think, Oh yeah, good luck. It’s a pipe dream. So I’m curious, was it easy at Amdocs to drive that talent-centered or people-centric culture for you? How did you bring everyone else along to buy into this people-centric concept?

[00:09:45] VICTORIA: We’re actually lucky because it didn’t, I wouldn’t say it started with us. Our CHRO is very focused on people-centricity. So she is actually been an advocate of that even before we began the Harmony program. So it very much well aligned to what her vision of the company could be really focusing on the employee.

[00:10:04] The decisions that the company makes, the employee is always at the forefront of every decision. It’s unique and different, I would say. The worry about how is the employee going to receive this and making sure that the messaging meets them where they are. Or that what we’re intending actually is received the way it was supposed to be intended.

[00:10:25] And then we’re also receiving the feedback from the employees and trying to incorporate that into what we do, whether it be policies, practices, or programs. So for that, it wasn’t a hard sell, you know, is about bringing these ideas that we have, and it really aligned to her dream and vision about people’s centricity. So I think in that regard, we got someone to advocate for us.

[00:10:50] JASON: As the Harmony program expanded and grew and rolled this out, you sit at a very specific point in that program, right? So, the Global Head of Talent Attraction. But sitting in that role, we often hear, how do you make the candidate experience match the employee experience?

[00:11:08] So, as this has expanded and you’ve tried to build this out from the sourcing and the, interviewing process and the personalized matching to now building a talent marketplace. Can you talk about the Amdocs approach for building this out and making the two sides meet?

[00:11:24] VICTORIA: It’s a very interesting question. It’s actually something we’re still working to tackle. We’re in the process of rolling out our employer brand. So that’ll be in about a month from now. And really what we’re looking at is The two, when I say talent is not only external candidates, talent is also our employees. And when we’re thinking about how do I attract talent, it could be attracting our employees to something, right?

[00:11:50] To a program, a learning course, or whatever we’re doing. And so it’s really, it’s a mindset again, about changing how you think about talent. And that is something that I have to be very vocal about when I’m in meetings and try to help everyone understand That talent attraction is not just an external focus.

[00:12:08] It includes an internal focus. And with us rolling out employer brand, I think the timing could be more perfect because it’s giving us an opportunity to look at all of the programs and all of the touch points across all of the personas. And where can we weave in our employee value proposition in our employer brand story into literally every touch point.

[00:12:30] JASON: That’s why we invited you on the podcast. A big part of the new talent code is how you have to think differently. And a big part of talent intelligence is the ability to start to break down some of those silos. So I love that.

[00:12:41] LIGIA: Kind of change management, did you have to go through? And I’m sure you guys are very technical, so you’ve probably have a lot of experience in this. But what were some of the hurdles, things you anticipated work through? And then looking back, what kind of surprised you that you probably if you had to do it all over again would have incorporated in your plan?

[00:13:00] VICTORIA: It was one of the things I can tell you we worried about. At the very beginning, before we launched our Harmony project, we had whole sessions around change management and how do we ensure that everything that we’re bringing that’s a transformation will be well accepted by HR, management, employees.

[00:13:19] I think it’s still something that we’re working on as we’re still on the journey, of course, but one of the things that works very well for us was to do pilots. I have peers within the organization who are talent strategy leaders that support specific business units. So they have very strong relationships from the GM and the senior leaders and the head of HR of a business unit.

[00:13:43] They’re there to talk talent. What does that mean for their organization end to end? And so having that already established and in place, we were able to bring to those leaders what we were looking to achieve and get pilots run within a business unit that helped to bring the employees who got exposed in the pilot to whatever that initiative was, get their feedback.

[00:14:06] Get them exposed to it, get them excited about it, knowing that this was coming and would be rolling out later. So I think that was a really good success and something that we continue to do, and I can tell you at Ambox, if you say it’s a pilot, people sign up. It’s innovative. What are we doing? Let me take part.

[00:14:22] Let me help. People want to have their voice heard. So I think that’s a really good avenue. Now looking back, what could we have done more? I would say more communication. So we did a big launch in April and there was a lot of communication. There was a lot of training for managers and talent acquisition because at that time it was the CRM and talent acquisition piece. And I would just say, do more training, do more comms around the system and the tools, which we still are, mind you, but I think that maybe more splashes spread out, perhaps.

[00:14:58] JASON: One of the topics that has come up in a lot of the recent meetings I’ve been involved in is people are asking, does this change the way you organize your HR team at all?

[00:15:10] So you mentioned having these talent advisors embedded with the businesses, supporting these pilots. Did they exist before? This program and before this rollout, or have you kind of reorganized some of the HR function or how your team is set up to support the marketplace or to support this kind of skills based approach?

[00:15:29] VICTORIA: They were there before. Our talent strategy was that we wanted to seat at the table and to be a part of a business unit. And so what has changed is we’ve expanded it. Initially, it was two business units, and then we’ve expanded to truly try to cover all of them and make sure that they’re getting. Again, have a seat at the table, but also that they have that focal point.

[00:15:50] So now we talk total talent solutions from end to end from streets, strategic workforce planning to, do we want to do proactive sourcing? We’re now trying to bring in contractors as well as the actual hiring. And then after they’re hired, our organization includes L and D and OD. So that way we can provide whatever the training may need.

[00:16:09] And when you’re looking at a total talent solution. It’s looking at the employees in the business unit. Is there a need for upskilling and having a skills based model helps you to identify if there’s gaps and who on your team knows what, so that way you can appropriately assign them to the right projects, that’s really where we want to go. And I think the business sees a value in that.

[00:16:33] LIGIA: I know you guys recently won an award congrats from the human resources association for the use of AI and human resources. Congrats to you and Asaf and the whole HR team. So I’m curious, at what point did you guys realize AI was the answer in order to do this at scale?

[00:16:51] I know you’re a very technical company and also huge innovators. You probably have a lot of expertise in house and to some extent maybe are AI subject matter experts, but how did you guys go about convincing the C suite that this was, that you needed AI based solutions in HR?

[00:17:07] VICTORIA: Data is king, as they say. And so it’s definitely at, at Amdocs, that’s the case. And you have large data sets really to have the speed to analyze the data or use the data, you really need an AI system to assist with that. And so being a tech company and at the head of innovation, again, another easy win. Because you go to our leadership and you provide exactly that.

[00:17:34] We had a massive amount of data at that time. Also keep in mind, we were hiring an extreme mode. And so to be able to say, we want to move to a proactive model. We want to be able to have all of the data and use it to service the business needs. It made sense. And now as a company, I mean, we’re still at the forefront when it comes to AI, not just in HR, but we’re the only organization that has a framework for telecom called the AMAZE framework that we have built.

[00:18:04] We’re a company that was pushing, move forward with gen AI and use it in your everyday life. And they’re very vocal about. How it can assist you as an organization. And I know my, my kids, right? The schools are like, don’t let your kids don’t use AI. And I’m thinking, why not? Because if it makes your life easier, let’s do it. Embrace it. So Amdocs has been embracing it really from the start and same for when we brought this to them.

[00:18:29] JASON: So being involved in some of those strategy discussions and having that kind of total talent approach to figure out how you address some of those needs. Is that a way that you’re managing differently?

[00:18:40] VICTORIA: Yes, one of the goals is to ensure that we’re providing the tools for the business to be able to manage their headcount. It could go to making decisions for progression. It could be going to making decisions for, again, staffing a project. There’s a lot of different avenues that having that information can assist with.

[00:19:01] JASON: So then to put my New Talent Code hat on around thinking differently and managing differently, the last piece is, how is this helping you operate differently?

[00:19:10] VICTORIA: Operationally, we actually split the talent acquisition function to talent attraction and talent acquisition. So that way my team focuses on, we did a lot of analysis, we built personas, we built our talent communities based upon the personas, and the analysis that we did was For the past three years, what were the primary roles and skills that we hired for in each region?

[00:19:35] So we looked at each region individually and we’re able to say, okay, this is what we’re often hiring for. Then this is the target that we want to proactively go and add to our talent communities and engage with. Now we’ve continued. It’s not you to just do it once. No, so this is a continual thing and actually for fiscal year 24.

[00:19:53] Now those talent strategy managers are doing the same thing. They’re looking specifically into their business units and with Gen AI also as a focus. What are the skills that we’re going to potentially be needing for fiscal year 24 and beyond? And then we’re using that to again augment our proactive sourcing strategy to build those talent communities further and engage with the talent.

[00:20:15] This is independent of open positions. So that’s what’s operationally different. Yes, we are tracking. Are we filling open positions? But we’re not being reactive to open positions. We’re trying to think ahead of that versus the talent acquisition team is very focused on filling positions. Now there is a global sourcing team that’s an arm to them that they are still doing some proactive sourcing, but it again is more around. There’s a position to be filled. Okay, so this is operationally a difference for us and it’s all about, we wanted to break that mold or that cycle of being an order taker and being reactive.

[00:20:55] JASON: For those listening, I’m clapping, but I’m also going to pause so Victoria, you can say that all again. That was wonderful. Music to my ears, but maybe people can put it on repeat and play it again. But that’s absolutely what we’re talking about when we’re saying how this allows you to operate differently, right? And we’re saying instead of being reactive and having to react to a requisition and waiting for something to be in front of you to start to fill it, you can work proactively and guide talent towards opportunity aligned with where the business is heading. So music to my ears. That’s why I was clapping.

[00:21:28] VICTORIA: Good. Yeah. Along those lines, how I think of it is in marketing, they say it takes seven to nine instances of someone seeing the brand before they take action. It’s not much different in the recruiting world. And so it’s all about like what if you also put your sales hat on cold calling when you’re being reactive, you’re in cold calling mode.

[00:21:48] And what we want to do is have a pipeline of candidates that have been warmed up to the Amdocs brand so that when there’s a position in the future, And someone reaches out about a specific role, there’ll be more inclined to respond or even better at whatever point in time that they are at a point where they’re looking for a job will be at the forefront of their mind.

[00:22:09] So that’s really the ultimate goal for our team. And it’s a long term vision. Like we told them, we need a year. We need time to build that engagement and we’re not spamming it either. We really want to ensure that the type of information that we’re providing is relevant to the audience. And we segment our audience so that we, if it’s an executive, my tone and what I share might be slightly different than what I would share to someone in HR.

[00:22:35] For example, audience segmentation was important to us as well. We have journey maps for the engagement too, but how often we engage and what we’re going to send at what time.

[00:22:46] LIGIA: I’m going to lead the witness here, but flipping the coin, how different has it been then for hiring managers in terms of how they approach filling a role potentially or who they’re looking for and becoming more proactive? And I would assume it’s easy to sell them on this. I assume it’s easy for them to see the benefit, but I’d rather hear from you. How has that journey been with the hiring managers?

[00:23:06] VICTORIA: It’s been a difficult year in the sense that we’re now not hiring in the frenzy that we were. And so really the shift has changed from looking more for the external talent to looking more for the internal talent.

[00:23:19] We’re now at, I think, 46 or 48 percent internal mobility for the year. So yeah, it’s amazing, which I know is a whole nother topic. So it’s a little hard to answer that question with our, with it being such a shift, but I can say that from what I’m hearing, that the feedback has been very positive in relation to their experience, the quickness that they’re receiving candidates, that time to source and providing relevant candidates. The feedback’s been positive.

[00:23:47] JASON: What’s next for Harmony? Now that you’re this far into your journey, it doesn’t seem like you’re stopping anytime soon and you’re continuing to progress this initiative. What’s on the horizon? What are you working on now?

[00:23:58] VICTORIA: Implementing some additional features of the tool, but really the next big thing is employee development days in the month of May. So this will align one month after go live of our employer brand. And we want the employees to know the support that Amdocs provides to them so that they can dream about their career futures. And think about their aspirations. So it’s like dream about your future. You can set your career interests in the, in the tool, make sure that you have your skills detailed out so the AI can provide you where are your skill gaps to your future role.

[00:24:37] And then here’s actual learning pathways that are available to you. So the employee development days will be in May. We’ll have a keynote, we’ll have a lot of different sessions, some of them focused in the tool, but a lot of them really to be inspirational, we’ll have to be ready for Gen AI, we’re going to have tech skill sessions for them, we’ll have power skills, because there’s a lot of power skills that are related to being, you know, good user of Gen AI, and so the month long, that’s the biggest thing that we’re working on right now, I would say, is the Employee Development Days, and it aligns to one of our EBP pillars, which is Grow Your Career,

[00:25:14] LIGIA: Victoria, you’ve talked about the journey, the transformation, the new way of operating. And I know you said, give us some time, we’ll get there. Like any other initiative, it’s not rosy every single day, but how do you define success with this initiative with Harmony? What timeframe have you set with your executive management as well as with your team? to see these results.

[00:25:36] VICTORIA: So part of it at this point has really been around the CRM and the engagement there. So I do provide a monthly report highlighting the achievements there. We have on average a 56 percent open rate. We’ve at the end of February, 19 hires thus far. These are individuals that have received campaigns through the CRM and have since applied and then been hired. So we defined it very narrow, very specifically.

[00:26:05] And those are huge successes for us. Alumni, the fact that we have a huge engagement with our alumni and the feedback we’re receiving from them as well is very positive. The articles and the information that we’re sharing again is relevant. To that persona type and that they are enjoying having the updates and being kept abreast of what’s going on at MDocs. So all of those are successes. Now moving forward, what we’re still working on is additional ways to track for this, but we want to be able to see that an increase in diversity in our pipelines, diversity hiring, a reduction in agency usage for hiring.

[00:26:45] JASON: Have there been any aha moments or things you didn’t see coming in terms of benefits you didn’t realize or maybe lessons learned that you want to share with the audience?

[00:26:54] VICTORIA: I think as you go through the journey to become skills based, it really requires all hands on deck from, it could be comp and bend, definitely HR, learning, talent acquisition. So many different people need to have a part of it. And one of the things that’s really been difficult, and we talked about it from the very beginning, is when you are role based.

[00:27:19] Is the mindset of shifting to skill based, the roles are still there. So it’s not like they go away because you have your hierarchy of jobs. Your comp is related to that. So none of those things actually just disappear because you’re skill based. So how do you get the manager to understand that, that now we’re looking at the skills and yes, the person will still be hired to a role, but the role is less significant as to what the skills of the person are. That’s a challenge and take, it takes. Quite a bit of conversation and really getting everyone on board to the same level and helping them to understand that someone’s experience and skills are actually more relevant than potentially their education or the job title that they had before.

[00:28:02] LIGIA: I love it. To close today. I’m actually really curious on your LinkedIn profile. You wrote leading a global talent attraction team that inspires me to become the best version of myself. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? How you approach leading in your organization so that you can inspire positive change?

[00:28:21] VICTORIA: I believe in servant leadership. Where we really work as a team and allowing your team to experiment with their own skills to perhaps lead a project. So if they come and say, Oh, I had this great idea. And I’m like, okay, great. Go do it. And giving them the credit. For their achievements. When you do that and you see them start to flourish, they feel confident.

[00:28:46] You’re instilling that confidence in them because you say, you can do this. That’s what helps me then in turn grow and become a better person as well. So that’s really where that stems from is just seeing the team thrive and grow. And all of us are doing something we’ve never done before. We’re getting to be creative. We’re moving muscles or flexing muscles we didn’t necessarily flex before. And all of that just makes me feel positive and energetic and motivated to tackle whatever the next challenge is.

[00:29:17] LIGIA: It sounds like you find the right spot with a talent-centric or people-centric organization that really is focused on finding the right career opportunities for Amdocs employees. So congrats.

[00:29:29] VICTORIA: Thank you. I love it here.

[00:29:30] LIGIA: I bet it shows. Well, thanks so much, Victoria, for joining us today. You have been a wealth of information for our listeners, and I’m sure we’re going to get requests to have you back and delve a little bit more. Also, as you are farther along in your journey, I’m sure you’ll have some more aha moments. Any lasting advice, two or three things you would tell our listeners to think about as they start out on their journey or in the midst of it?

[00:29:57] VICTORIA: I would say dream big. And don’t be scared to pursue it. Yes, it can be a change, but that’s actually what makes it exciting. So surround yourself with a team from across disciplines and then really tackle whatever those challenges may be, but you can achieve it.

[00:30:13] LIGIA: You’re so inspiring. I want to come work for you. Never know.

[00:30:18] VICTORIA: That’s right. You never know.

[00:30:20] JASON: Ligia, I believe that’s called talent attraction.

[00:30:23] LIGIA: Exactly. What a, what a way to close us out. All right. Thanks everyone. We’ll see you soon.

OUTRO

[00:38:11] Thanks for listening to the New Talent Code. This is a podcast produced by Eightfold AI. If you’d like to learn more about us, please visit us at eightfold.ai. And you can find us on all your favorite social media sites. We’d love to connect and continue the conversation.