Vicki Lynn (Argyle) 00:09
Vicky, hello and welcome to the Argyle HR Leadership Forum, “Next-gen Innovation for HR Leaders”. My name is Vicky Lynn Brunskill with Argyle. I’d like to introduce our moderator, Tim Young, Senior Vice President, Human Resources Operations, at Pearson. We are so excited to have Tim and our panelists with us for a panel discussion titled optimizing talent acquisition, retention and workforce strategy in the AI era. Welcome, Tim, over to you.
Tim Young 01:20
Thanks so much, Vicki Lynn. We’re all excited to be here, and thank you everyone for joining us today. We have a great panel. I’m going to introduce them in a moment, and we are looking forward to digging right into some really important topics of the day. A little more to introduce myself as Vicki Lynn said, I’m at Pearson. I’ve been leading AI driven initiatives for a few years now here and in my previous company. And I, I, you know, my best advice overall is, get started. Try something. Get going. And so today is we’re going to talk through how we’ve been approaching it, and some of the thoughts and ideas that we have. I hope you gain something of substance that you can take away and really drive where you’re at. So I’m going to introduce or have the panelists introduce themselves. We’ll get started with that. We’ll dive into questions. Please do ask questions in the Q&A. We’ll get to those near the end. We’re excited to engage and hopefully cover topics that are on point for you. Let’s go ahead and get started with introductions. Then I’m going to just go around the room a little bit. We’ll start with Tracy. We’ll have Tracy introduce himself, then Rebecca, then Christopher. We’ll go in that order. Tracy over to you, sir. Great.
Tracy Salters 02:31
Thanks, Tim. Good morning everyone. I’m Tracy Salters. I’m Director of Talent and Performance Management at American Airlines, and I am an active engager with AI across our enterprise space, in supporting not only our talent and development activity, but also our talent acquisition activity.
Rebecca Warren 02:53
All right. Rebecca Warren, I work for Eightfold AI, so I do all things AI all the time. Former TA practitioner, then moved into Customer Success with Eightfold, and now I’m actually in a strategy group inside of Marketing. I’m currently in Minneapolis. I live normally outside of Phoenix. Happy to be here since it’s supposed to be 100 there. And that’s me.
Tim Young 03:17
Thanks. Rebecca, Christopher?
Christopher McCormick 03:20
Thanks and good morning everyone. My name is Christopher McCormick. I’m an HR executive in the Bay Area, so I live in San Francisco. That is my real background behind me. I work in the life sciences and healthcare space. I’ve also been in other industries as well, and leveraged AI in many different ways. Currently, we do a lot of work with AI around our HR shared services model, and really building knowledge based articles so that employees have access to really good information based on some of the subject matter expert information that gets put in. So it’ll be interesting to hear the conversation today, and looking forward to your questions.
Tim Young 03:57
Amazing, great panel to have a discussion with. So I’m looking forward to it. Let’s dive right in. Tracy, my first question is going to come to you, and really, this is a good foundational question when we’re talking about AI, which is, why use AI, right? What’s, what’s kind of behind AI? Where is this going to be most valuable? And right now, I think you know, unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last few years, everyone is aware of AI and a lot of what it can do. And probably a lot of hype comes with that right, a lot of expectations that go with the solutions that are out there at market. So maybe we can get a little bit granular and talk about what specific things and TA, retention, workforce strategy are best served? What processes are best served using AI? What are your thoughts?
Tracy Salters 04:49
Well, you know, great, and I haven’t been hiding under a rock, so I have heard of AI, and what I see, more often than not, is that when you start. To talk granularly about AI, you can look first to some of those things that are routine processes that unfortunately take a lot of time when you’re doing them manually. So things like scanning profiles, you know, looking for the right candidates, you know, resume screening, even doing things like some of the predictive analytics you know, to identify what are the right candidates, the right sourcing strategies. You know, any of the information that comes back from the utility of chat bots and, you know, virtual assistance, all of those things you know, automating it and gathering the information from AI tools is really something that drives speed, it drives efficiency in those routine tasks, and drives an opportunity to ensure that you’re getting consistent application of those I focus a lot on, you know, driving our continuous improvement efforts. So this is a tool that helps to aid in continuous improvement.
Tim Young 06:01
Yeah, I love what you said there asking, like, continuous improvement used to have its kind of own section of different tools, and I feel like AI is a new one in that same tool kit, because, like you said, it can be more efficient, but it can also improve processes that were otherwise hard to improve. I like that.
Christopher McCormick 06:21
I also enjoyed the predictive analytics piece that you were talking about, Tracy, because you can start to see trends over time. And it helps you start to see where do you have your pain points and processes across the across the life cycle?
Rebecca Warren 06:36
Yeah, and you can in TA, there’s so many pieces that you can knock out right scheduling, feedback, matching candidates more effectively on the front end, using AI and understanding skills. So there’s so many applications just to make the process more efficient. And then when you add in what you talked about, Tracy and Christopher, the idea of that analytics, and what are we learning, and what kind of trends are we seeing, and how are we going to adjust and make sure that we are staying ahead of the curve. It makes a huge difference in terms of process, but also effectiveness. And really turns the corner from just checking boxes to actually being engaged and ahead of the curve.
Tim Young 07:16
It’s amazing. Agree? Yeah, you know. And so this kind of gets so so there’s where it can be useful. Let’s talk about maybe our biggest fear now a little bit. And Christopher, this one’s over to you. So we’re worried that when we pass all this over to an AI that we start to lose the human touch, the human judgment involved, and we stop thinking critically, or we’re out of the picture
altogether. So as you think about streamlining processes and avoiding that loss of the human element, how are you seeing yourself or other companies work to ensure that AI driven hiring and retention strategies enhance rather than replace that human judgment?
Christopher McCormick 08:01
I think what Tracy is saying is great from the earlier question. I think where we see those moments that matter across the life cycle of an employee’s experience, whether it be from coming into the ATS to actually going through the interview process to onboarding to then coming in and understanding what you need to be doing, to your first promotion, to becoming a manager, to, you know, maybe even retiring or going out on leave, for paternal leave. There’s all kinds of things that need to happen in those moments that matter. And I think where we can sometimes struggle is, you know, one, one good thing that I think we’ve done well is our HR, AI and our technology AI are the same, so they talk to each other, but the other aspect of that is our corporate operations, so they have a different AI that doesn’t speak to that. So there’s sort of some gaps that we know internally that we can see are, are some flags that we need to be making sure that we start to look at and see where, where could things drop? Where could things fall through the system? And how do we need to have people plugged in to make sure that we’re not missing that human element? If you show up to your your work day, and you all, all of a sudden, you have your laptop and you have all your stuff and you have your benefits package and you have your onboarding and everything, and then you don’t have anywhere to sit. That’s a that’s a problem. So it’s, it’s, it’s making sure that we understand what, what’s in the ecosystem. Where do we potentially have gaps, and where do we need to plug in those human elements and have that high touch moment, and that’s really specific, depending on what your ecosystem looks like and where you work and what that is, but understanding how it all works together in a more systematic way allows us to then make sure we can plug in those human element pieces where and when needed, because we know. The process is a little clunky, or we know something along the way is still not quite worked out or talking to each other yet. So I think that’s where we have to come in. And, you know, we’re in human resources, so that human aspect and that human element is never going to replace be replaced by technology. We just need to make sure that where we are leveraging technology, and we’re not so reliant on it that we don’t forget, oh yeah, we still need to do some things around that, building connection, building relationship, making sure people feel like I’m not just dealing with a robot or a computer, that I’m actually dealing with human being on the other side.
Tim Young 10:36
But, I love that. One of my favorite duties every Monday morning is to kick off our new hire orientation as a human right? I want to automate the whole process up to that point. But when it comes to getting you excited about joining our company and filming warm and welcome, I wouldn’t put an avatar up there to do that. And I think also on this concept of judgment, right, when we’re thinking about hiring decisions, it can pull in a whole lot of data, but there is a certain element that’s just very human that we need to be involved with. So I really appreciate what you said there.
Rebecca Warren 11:09
We work to keep humans in the loop and inside of the process as well, right? If somebody is calibrating the system when we’re looking at proficiency levels, looking at transparent and ethical AI, we want the humans in the loop to verify, because otherwise you’re going to end up with maybe Skynet, right? Like the humans have to stay in the HR loop. And it also starts to change the conversation we find being proactive instead of reactive when it comes to connecting with hiring managers, when you’ve got the hiring manager in the process, it makes a big difference in terms of the conversation. It doesn’t feel like, Oh, well, we’re just going to have a conversation every six months about your about your performance, right? It becomes a proactive conversation, because the humans in the loop with the AI folks are making choices in the system. But then your hiring manager is also connected as well. So I think the human in the loop is critical, especially, as you said, Christopher, we are in human resources.
Tracy Salters 12:22
That’s one of the points, right? I mean, leverage the tool for the things that the tool can do better, faster, more efficiently, and leverage the humanity to bring humanity into the workplace. In many cases, we’ve we’ve substituted in in often in the past and error using the tool in place of humanity. And so AI gives us an opportunity to say, hey, we have a tool that allows us to take care of these routine tasks, but now let’s utilize the power of the humanity, the human spirit, the spirit and all of those things that we want to echo within the organization. I really liked him, the the idea that you reinforced of the excitement that you bring to that new hire orientation that’s not replaceable by AI.
Tim Young 13:12
Love it. No, really good. Well, okay, we’ve established so far. There is use. We need to limit that around the right things. But now, if I’m a member of this audience, or myself here, I see really great use cases. I see the right path. It’s the right thing for the company. But man, there’s a crowded field of plate of others who want to spend the company’s money right? There is a lot of different things, maybe customer oriented, product oriented investments. And now I’m in human resources, and I’m up against them, and I’m saying, Hey, I think there’s a really good use case in human resources, so or for our people, for the people experience. So Rebecca, if you could take a first pass as we think about AI powered HR transformation, right? Really investing in some of these tools and capabilities, we need to create a strong return on investment justification, and we need to take that to senior leaders, to decision makers with numbers and metrics and those sorts of things in order to gain executive buy in. So what key data points should I be thinking about when I’m going up when building that business case and taking it around the areas such as recruitment, retention and Workforce Strategy?
Rebecca Warren 14:32
Yeah, that’s such a good question, because there’s all kinds of talk about AI. But if it doesn’t actually come into your workplace, or it isn’t effective and efficient, then it’s really a waste of time and money. So we spend a lot of time with our customers, talking about and even prospects, talking about tying everything to a business outcome, understand what the company is trying to accomplish, and then making sure it’s tied to it right. HR isn’t just touchy feely. Let’s go plan event. And it is revenue driving. It is impactful. And so those pieces can absolutely be shown when you think about from talent acquisition, what does that success criteria look like? I have never worked with the CHRO or a CEO that says, hey, I’m so glad that you reduced your time to fill by one day. But what they do care about is that hiring speed and efficiency. Are we getting better people in the process? What about that hiring cost optimization? Are we making good choices with our money? Are we able, maybe, to bring hiring internally and not spend as much on agencies? Are we thinking about that improved candidate quality? I think any leader would say, It’s okay if it takes a little longer, as long as people are happy in the process and we’re getting the right person in the right role at the right time, right thinking about inclusion, how are we reducing bias in the process, making sure that we’re focusing on the right things again? What kind of insights can we share with the senior leaders that are going to help them understand the decisions and the data behind it, right? Thinking about better retention, career pathing, making sure that folks are engaged in the process. So I would say, overall, if you’re going to think about that business case, focus on current hiring and retention metrics before you implement something new. Showcase those case studies from companies that have successfully implemented AI. Look at those cost savings and efficiency improvements that hit that bottom line, and then looking at that strategic value. Maybe you’re not going to reduce head count, but you’re going to improve your talent pipeline. You’re going to have better workforce planning, you’re going to have better talent insights. They’re going to help you future proof your workforce. So I have a lot more to say, but I’m going to stop right now, because I’m guessing Tracy and Christopher probably have a point of view as well, but that’s some place to start.
Christopher McCormick 16:58
I agreed right on your great recommendations for everything you said, so I don’t really have a ton to add.
Tracy Salters 17:07
Yeah, I would. I would echo that as well. The points that you made are things that I talk about regularly when we’re talking with whether with our talent acquisition team or with leaders across the organization, you know, and we talk about process and the things that we want to incorporate to enhance the process. It’s all the things that you mentioned. It’s not simply I’ve I agree with you. I’ve never had a leader say to me, yay, you reduced your cycle time by one day. They’re asking, What am I getting out of this? What’s the benefit to me? Are the kin? Is the candidate pool better? Is my process more refined and more distinct? Not just did I reduce my cycle time?
Tim Young 17:50
I love that. I’m going to add another flavor to it as well, right? Because I think you will all hit on the right metrics, right? The right numbers, the right things to go after I find also an additional element to when you’re going up into those discussions about where to invest the company’s money, and trying to kind of shoulder your way in the art of storytelling here is very palpable. And I think if you can go in and kind of paint the picture to those executives figuring out what are their pain points today, things that they wish were better, and all of them have a list about HR, right? Like all of them know something they wish were going better, and really painting the picture how this can add value to that situation. We call them soft savings, right? They’re not, not something that’s really going to enhance our profitability as a company, but when you think about the ease of doing business, the ability to get answers faster, or to navigate and or transact with HR through the recruiting process or whatever, in a more seamless way, predictable way. This is where you know that should that can be part of your ROI story as well, along with the hard numbers, and most finance folks are only going to hone in on that side, but maybe some of your decision makers, including the CFO, might also be thinking, Yes, I wish, I wish that were better and easier for me. And there is value to that. And we’ve tried to, like, assign, you know, like, a specific amount of time savings to certain AI driven results, right? Hey, we’re going to save everyone in the company 30 minutes every time that, you know they think they’re gonna do this or that, usually that produces a big number, but no one’s gonna buy into it either way, though, it’s still again, with the art of the storytelling behind it, it starts, I think, sway opinions about the value of it. Well, really good. So let’s start to talk about the value of employees in all of this, right, and where they’re going to start to see value in what we bring to bear. And this is really evolving around workforce needs and the fact that we are focusing, and have been for a long time in HR, but I mean, this produces some increased or improved. Opportunity around internal mobility and upskilling, as those become more and more priorities for companies in HR. So Christopher, to you, how can HR leaders apply AI driven insights and to anticipate skill gaps? Right? So instead of all the layoffs and then rehires. How can we start to anticipate those skill gaps and create internal talent pipelines that reduce turnover and rehiring costs and those sorts of things?
Christopher McCormick 20:32
Question Tim, I think the one thing that I’ll say is, is we have to have really good data. I think it depends on how we’re asking for that data. A lot of companies are investing in talent marketplaces for people to go in and put in different projects and and have assignments across different spectrums of the organization and and while that’s useful and helpful, it’s also critical that we’re getting the right information from the employee and maybe even their manager. So I’ll give you an example. In our IT organization, we actually did an assessment of the skills that you think you’re good at today. Would you rate yourself intermediate? Would you rate yourself a beginner? Would you rate yourself an expert? Your manager would do the same. We could use that aggregate, that data, use AI to understand what are the skill gaps, and then also, what do you think their skills that you need for the future are? So then we could do the same thing around that. That gave us an opportunity to then look at where are those gaps, but it’s also around how we get that information in and what questions we’re asking. If we’re not asking the right things, then you just have a lot of data that that could be useful or not useful, and especially when we think about mobility and talent placement. I’ve been in numerous I can’t even count the number of talent conversations I’ve been with, with executive teams who will be like, You know what? I think we should send Rebecca to Asia to get an international experience, and we’re going to send Tracy to the UK to get that experience. And then, lo and behold, we go out and we say, Hey, Rebecca, we want you to go to Asia. And Rebecca’s like, I don’t want to go to Asia. I have kids who are in high school, and we I don’t want to uproot my family. And I have all these things going on, same with tracing, so making sure the employees have a right way to put in whatever hrs system you have, you’re pulling the data of like, what do they want to do? How do they want to do it? When do they want to do it? Using that data and using those insights to help be able to have robust talent conversations, mobility conversations, the life cycle of that employee. So all of those things make a difference and matter from an employee engagement perspective. And I think we have tons and tons and tons of data. It’s about using that data, extracting it to get the real insights that we need to make the right conversations really rich. When I do go to Rebecca and say, Hey, I know you don’t want to go to Asia today, we want you to have this experience. When would you like to go. Would you like to go? How would how many years? When do your kids graduate? Would you be willing to do that for a two year stint? So I think that’s where we can start to use AI to help us generate insights, but then also start to have more rich dialog and conversation from that human aspect that we talked about earlier.
Tim Young 23:19
Yeah, such a good answer, right? And again, it kind of folds in the human element, and the human, you know, like insights that sometimes AI is going to skip. I think one thing I’d love to add, and then love to hear Rebecca’s and Tracy’s thoughts as well is really around as an employee trying to navigate mobility as well, kind of coming in from their perspective, what are ways that AI can really enhance that? And one thing that we’ve been looking into, hopefully at some point this year or next year, is to really help with career pathing, and AI enhanced career pathing, right? Because there’s, there’s certainly elements here that managers have to be part of, talent reviews, talent planning, those sorts of things, workforce planning, all need to be part of, but as an employee, and just trying to navigate the big world of my career, understanding Well, what do I need? What needs to be true for me to be eligible, or, you know, for that job, for that manager to want to hire me into that job, to be attractive for it. And I think that there’s a place for AI here too, right? Like really assessing what where are you at? What do you need, what needs to be true, and maybe coaching, maybe above and beyond what managers can do. So anyway, I feel like that this is such a ripe space also for AI, especially as it becomes more agentic and we start to see more of the capability of thinking through processes and transactions and helping people through it. But certainly the lens you brought forward Christopher around, like, kind of the top down, like, how are we going to orchestrate this is super important. Any further thoughts Rebecca or Tracy or Christopher?
Rebecca Warren 24:56
Yeah, I think Christopher, I love how you talk about making sure that. And you’ve got the right things in place for your employees to feel, cared about, listened to, heard and that’s one of the things we have, is what we call a career navigator, because we know that careers don’t just happen in ladders anymore, right? The things that I want to do today may not be the things I always joke about resumes of list of things I never want to do again, right? The things that I’ve already done. Maybe I don’t want that career path to look like this. Maybe I want it to look like a chessboard. Maybe I want to do something that’s in between the spots on the chessboard, right? So how do we not look at an org chart when we’re thinking about those next steps? What? Maybe, maybe I want to move from finance to marketing. How do I do that? Right? So we have a career Navigator tool that does exactly what we’re talking about, where you can put in your interests, and it looks at your skills, your interests, the things that you do well, the things that you say you want to do, and it’ll map out what a traditional career path could look like, and what the what are those courses you can take? What are those skill gaps? Recommend mentors for you folks that are currently in the role, and what does that look like to get to that next step, but it also allows you then to put in that non traditional career path. Hey, I really want to do this. What is that going to look like? And like I said earlier, what it does is it drives proactive conversations with your manager. Instead of being afraid to say, Christopher, I really want to move into marketing, and I’m worried that Christopher is going to say, Okay, now she’s leaving. I’m going to torpedo her career and look for her replacement. It’s this positive
like and Christopher, I’m not saying you would ever do that, so please don’t take it that way. But that idea where we used to be scared of going into your manager to have these conversations, it makes it it democratizes opportunity. It takes away those shoulder tabs. It allows people to say, here’s what I want to do. I want to stay with the company, and then giving that opportunity for folks to be able to have those conversations, to say, what’s next for me in the organization, that doesn’t have to be I’m going to go from an associate to, you know, an employee to a leader, right? I may want to do something different. And so using AI to help map out those paths and to have those conversations and democratize those opportunities makes such a big difference in terms of retention and employee satisfaction and the opportunity to not lose good people in your organization, even if the skills are different from what they have right now. How can we again help to future proof that organization.
Tracy Salters 27:22
Yeah, that’s the, that’s the, I mean, it really is the idea of creating some openness, some space, and some awareness of where the opportunities might be, assessing where you are and versus where you might need to go, the skills that are required to get there, and then what might be the process. There’s not one defined path, but rather multiple web path that that people might take to get there. But it really does open up the conversation then between a team member and their leaders and a bevy of other leaders so that they can identify how they might go. And that drives retention. That gives people energy about retain, being retained within the organization, rather than seeking opportunities outside.
Christopher McCormick 28:07
And I just amplify too. Rebecca, you said, democratizing those shoulder taps, which I think is speaking to the spirit of inclusion, which I know in our space, in this safe space that we have inclusion is still very much valued, maybe not in our current eco political climate, but, but that really does from an employee engagement perspective. I think we’ve heard from the past like you always pick Tracy to do the next project. You always go to Tracy to do this. You always go to that. And I never get tapped. But if we have an opportunity to bring the tools in place that allow us to understand, where does Rebecca want to go? Where does Tim want to take his career that allows us to do a lot more unlocking and a lot more retention, so we save really hard dollars from a recruitment and retention perspective. In that case,
Tim Young 28:59
That’s so good well, so action, then is for Rebecca, and here I am. I am. I’m trying to decide what I should invest in, right? I see this flooded market of options out there, and startups galore, and all sorts of charts that show me who’s the best and the worst, and I go to events, and I’m, you know, I hear a lot from Ai providers. So since the market is flooded, and it’s great, right? Competition is fantastic. It’s really driving things forward, but I need to, I need to invest my dollar wisely. So what red flag should HR leaders be aware of as they’re going to market and evaluating AI vendors, and what really critical questions should they be asking of these providers to make sure that they’re getting what they want?
Rebecca Warren 29:50
Such a great question. So timely. I actually just did a webinar on this. We run a monthly webinar series called The talent table, and we just talked. About that, right? What does that look like for picking HR tech? How do you know what’s real and what’s not, what’s good and what’s not, and AI specifically. So one of the things that was very interesting is that we’ve all agreed that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is right. There’s a lot of claims that folks can say, and it can do this and that, and wash your dishes too. And I think we really have to ask a lot of questions about what that looks like. And I’ve had some personal experiences with that, where I was looking at one time to choose an ATS vendor, and the things they said, I was like, This is amazing, but there was just there wasn’t enough data underneath it to make me feel comfortable to say yes, the cost was right. All of the promises they made were right. The implementation timeline was fantastic, but it didn’t necessarily all come together with the data, and I think that’s where you have to start. You have to start asking those questions. So instead of, instead of giving you a list of all the red flags, I’m going to give you the things that are important to look at when you’re thinking about AI in HR tech. And one of those things, as we talked about this is only going to get bigger. AI is not going to go away, and the ways that it is used across organization is can is going to continue to increase. And so one of those first things is looking at flexibility and scalability. You have to look at not just what is it going to do to going to do today, but what, what does that look like for the future, integration with other systems? You know, Christopher, you talk about, you know, we’ve got some AI that talks to this group and some AI that talks to that group, but the AI doesn’t talk together. That’s important. And so what does that integration look like? How are you going to make sure your systems do talk to each other? What does that stability, that sustainability and that credibility look like? Building trust and making sure that you actually believe what the organization does and says they can do? Looking at governance, that’s a huge thing that we’ve spent time talking about, making sure that you’ve got an AI council or a governance council, somebody’s watching the watcher, right and asking those questions, what does that Customer Success and Support look like? I came to customer success before moving into this role that I’m in currently, and that was huge, having a partner for life making sure that it wasn’t just making sure that your support tickets were complete, but also, what does that look like for your long term strategy, when a company joins as a partner with a vendor. Usually it doesn’t stay that way, right? The idea is, where are we going to grow? Where are we going to go? And so making sure that you’ve got that support, you’ve got that strategy that’s going with you, the education and the training is really important. I don’t know about you all, but I have gone with vendors where they’re like, Okay, your lights are on, and then they disappear. And I’m like, I don’t know how to use this. And when I have questions, I don’t know what to do. So what kind of proactive education and training is available? And then this is one that’s really big for us here at Eightfold, and we look for this and other partners when we connect with them as well. Is what does that thought leadership content look like? Are they not just putting together a piece of tech, but are they actually putting together thought leadership content that goes beyond just using their particular platform? So again, lots of things to say. I’ll take a pause there and let somebody else jump in.
Rebecca Warren 33:29
Sorry. I’ve sucked all the air out of the room. I apologize.
Tracy Salters 33:33
No, you’re not, no, it’s because you, you added so much great insight. I mean, I’m not sure that there’s anything that I could add to what you’ve you’ve already conveyed.
Christopher McCormick 33:42
I’ll just amplify the thought leadership piece, because I really do think that’s sometimes what we see missing the most is actually having people to step back and look at the bigger ecosystem and see it in a bigger way.
Tracy Salters 33:59
Yeah, I think the point that you made about, you know, having you know that that governing body, you know, the watchers, of the watchers, you know, I think that that’s an important consideration that many miss and don’t understand until later, just how critical that role is.
Tim Young 34:18
Great. That’s great. Well, excellent conversation so far. We’re actually going to take a little step and review some of the questions coming in from the audience and and hopefully be able to address some of the things that are on the mind of the folks who are watching at this point. So the first question, Tracy, I’m going to turn to you on this one at first, is really thinking about how we use AI to review talent, skill sets and proposals, right? So, like we’re again, back to this internal mobility concept. How, in what ways could you foresee, or are you currently using AI to really look at the skill sets a American Airlines is huge, right? Relatively. Speaking. So how, how you know, like with that in mind? How? How can we as practitioners really leverage the capability of AI to look at these broad talent bases and the skill sets associated with each human in them that is unique and has different attributes and different skills and experiences? How does AI help us to break the barriers that we’ve had in the past.
Tracy Salters 35:23
Lots of organizations, and ours is not unique in this space. Are challenged with the idea of, how do you up skill, your talent workforce inside the organization, preparing not only for a higher level of competence and efficiency in current tasks, but identifying the skills that are going to be needed for future tasks. So first, using AI to identify what those future skill needs are, identifying within the the existing workforce, how much of that exists and how much of a gap you might have, identifying within the places in which you are sourcing potential workers of the future and determining where those skills exist, but also leading that into ongoing workforce planning mechanisms and strategies, identifying learning and development strategies. How do you prioritize the different modalities in which that can be delivered? So you know, really starting to look at a skill level, assessing and doing gap analysis to identify where those those gaps and skills exist, and using AI to help drive some of your decision making around the tools, the modalities, the timing, the priorities, all of those things, when you look at a workforce as large as ours, being able to make those decisions at scale very quickly and identify that it’s not a one size fits all within one part of the organization, the priorities may differ from other parts of the organization, so being able to really use AI to to do that, that skill mapping, to determine where talent acquisition strategies may need to be different to look at behavioral analysis to identify culture fit in different parts of the organization. That’s where I really see the opportunities, because you can leverage the data skill and power from AI to help drive some of the strategy based decisions.
Tim Young 37:19
Love it. Fantastic answer. Thank you, Christopher. I’m going to go to you for this one. This one, it gets back to our business case topic, and I’m wondering maybe, if you have a kind of a real life example, right, that would be great. But if not, we can be theoretical on this one. But how can HR leaders effectively build a business case for integrating AI and in the topic of the day, right recruitment and retention strategies. What does that look like, building such a business case that HR leaders need to bring together from your experience?
Christopher McCormick 37:53
I think that it is always important for us to be thinking about this, the business strategy, and rooting anything that we’re doing from an HR perspective, and where we’re headed for the next three years from the business. And I think anytime that we start to do that, and then we sort of back into it and look back and say, This is how we’re going to achieve these targets for the business by such and such, and looking at how we can build these processes to be more efficient by leveraging tools, systems, AI. That’s where I think we get more of the senior leaders who who are going to pony up the dollars to invest and make those decisions. That’s where I think we sometimes as HR can get get get stuck, because we’re thinking about it, about our own processes and in our own house and in the own in our own way of how we want to evolve is an HR function. And I think the the pitfall is, is not including the business or the business outcomes or the strategies we’re trying to to make happen for the business. And so I think that’s really where you should focus first, and where we need to focus first as an organization, as professionals, is having it tied to the business, and where we can drive business outcomes for you know, in health Life Sciences and Health care is about patient outcomes, and if we can help drive patient outcomes in a way that allow for this person to be in a said seat quicker, faster being more efficient in due time, so that we can help drive drugs to market or clinical trials more quickly, or, you know, more judiciously, that’s going to improve patient outcomes over the long term. So it’s really tying it to that business outcome versus just thinking about it from a human capital perspective.
Tim Young 39:45
That’s brilliant. I love that. That’s such that’s really gonna turn the heads right of leaders and decision makers. Rebecca, this one’s been on my mind too. So this one’s really around. Well. Leverage candidates and how they’re using it, right? So candidates are leveraging generative AI tools to craft resumes, cover letters, their application materials, and how is this impacting the authenticity of candidate profiles? How are candidates using AI to automate job applications, etc, and then kind of, what’s the counter to that? You know, like, if, if it’s super easy for someone with no experience to look like they’ve been a CEO right on paper through Gen AI, how do we sift through that? What sorts of tools have you seen are you guys using?
Rebecca Warren 40:35
Yeah, and that absolutely is coming up in a lot of our conversations, of folks saying, hey, there is no friction in the interview process. We have, you know, folks coming in and applying for these roles. I’ve got 3000 applications overnight, and 500 of them look almost the same, right? Because they’ve chat GPT the resume, which I would do too, right? Like, why would you not use the tools that are out there? But that also will force ta leaders to change their processes, instead of just looking at a resume, you know, we used to talk about, when I was in TA like, you know, we’ve got, what, seven seconds and we look at a resume, we’ve decided what, you know, if they’re in or they’re out, it’s got to be a different way to look at it. And it’s, it’s what both Christopher and Tracy have talked about, is, how do you keep that human in the loop. So instead of just looking at a resume and saying in or out, using AI to help push those ones that look the best to the top, and then having different conversations, right, asking some different questions after they’ve come into the process, whether it’s sent out by an AI questionnaire, or maybe it is a an agentic AI conversation that happens. And then one of the things that I started to do when I was moving into especially looking at a hourly workforce, is doing on the job interviews, right? Or like, what does an on the job profile look like? Doing experiential interviews you’re hiring for a recruiter, ask them to to actually do your recruiting process as part of the interview. If you’re looking at an hourly role and you’ve got a dishwasher, instead of saying, Hey, can you, you know, wash dishes, it’s saying, hey, you’ve got seven things in front of you, and you’ve got people yelling at you and saying, what do we, you know, we need plates and bowls and serving, you know, utensils. What do you do first? It’s asking different questions. So I think the interview process needs to look differently. And another just quick thing is when we think about what that talent pool looks like, if you had a system such as Eightfold that were was able to make it less complicated to get people into your system, but then you had a different way to look at that talent pool. Instead of saying, we want to add all of these hoops, I was just reading someone saying, hey, like, if you can’t spend 45 minutes applying for a job, we don’t want you in part as part of our company. And I’m like, That’s crazy talk, right? Because if you get everybody in your talent pool, those are more people for you to talk to. And if you have a system to help move them around, ask questions, put them in communities, and then you get a chance to get to know them, and then make those connections, it makes all the difference. So yes, there’s a lot of tools out there that that candidates are using to make their lives easier because they want to get in the door. The job market is hard right now. So how do you use technology and AI to make that easier, to ask better questions, but keep that human in the loop to understand what somebody’s really done, as opposed to just putting something on a piece of paper. Amazing.
Tim Young 43:20
Thank you. Well. Appreciate the audience for the participation, for your time with us. Really want to thank Tracy, Rebecca and Christopher for their excellent thought leadership and answers, and I’m going to hand it back to you.
Vicki Lynn (Argyle) 43:36
That was fabulous. Thank you so much, Tim, Christopher Tracy and Rebecca for this insightful, timely and so practical panel discussion. I want to thank everyone else for joining us today for this session. This session, along with all of today’s content, will be available on demand following the event. And as a reminder, please do check out the prizes and raffle rules section to see how you can earn points to win a prize. Our next session will begin at 12:35pm Eastern Time, and that will be a keynote presentation titled human first HR, innovation strategies for a complex workplace environment. Please click on the join button that will appear on your screen to be directed to that session, and we look forward to seeing you there. Thank you all again. So much applause.
