[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.

[00:00:17] 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.

[00:00:34] 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 moving forward, You’ve come to the right place.

[00:00:49] Today, we’re excited to kick off a stellar episode with Arnaldo Cruz, deputy executive director at the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico. We start the conversation with how Puerto Rico revamped its entire approach to hiring talent with a skills-based mindset. One of their early findings was that the average tenure is 23 years, two-thirds spending that time in the same role.

[00:01:14] The problem was they didn’t have the insights they needed to move employees into new roles to address that gap. Arnaldo shares how Puerto Rico started documenting skills for more than 250 employees manually, then scaled those efforts with the help of talent intelligence. Today, Puerto Rico is expanding its talent strategies to include both acquisition and management for a completely holistic approach.

[00:01:38] With talent intelligence, existing employees can now find internal roles that fit their skill profiles. As a result, the workforce is feeling empowered, recommending jobs to friends and family, and it’s gaining momentum with other agencies looking to scale. So join us for this incredible discussion with Arnaldo Cruz.

[00:01:58] Welcome, Arnaldo. So nice to have you on the podcast.

[00:02:02] ARNALDO: Thanks for the invitation. Looking forward to the discussion.

[00:02:06] LIGIA: No, absolutely. It’s going to be a riveting, fascinating. But let’s get started as a way of introduction. We are fascinated by nonlinear career paths. We are firm believers that people can and should try new things in their careers and actually be hired for their potential.

[00:02:22] So with that, tell us a little bit more about your career path. Where’d you get started? And was this your goal, your ideal job always?

[00:02:29] ARNALDO: I got started a long time ago. I am a policy person. It’s my background, my passion. And I went to policy school for grad school. And after that, I had spent almost 20 years in the public sector in different areas.

[00:02:44] I was in Chicago, worked for the city government. I worked for Chicago Public Schools. In Puerto Rico. I work for the Puerto Rico legislature. I have been in the NGO world. I was second director of our community based organization in Chicago. And here in Puerto Rico, I also have worked being involved with non governmental organizations in areas of policy research and economic developments.

[00:03:06] So given that I have some sort of that policy background that gets me skillset to be able to dabble in different areas. For the last five, six years, I’ve been doing a lot of work on reforming government, right? And this is where working on the civil service reform in Puerto Rico has come about. And I am a reformer.

[00:03:28] That’s what really drives and gives me passion, changing the way the government does things in order to improve services and the value to citizens. And that’s what really is the biggest passion that I have.

[00:03:41] JASON: It’s amazing and you can see how it all comes together and you touched on a couple key words there, especially skill sets and how they’ve played out in your career, but also how they play into this story.

[00:03:52] Arnaldo, it’s such a wonderful opportunity to talk to you and have you share this story and the journey that you’ve been on, not only in your career, but for Puerto Rico. And the reason we’re all here is to learn something new. You know, To help us crack the new talent code. So today we’re going to talk about how the new talent code dictates that we take completely new and different approaches to hiring and managing talent in this modern world, using a skills based approach.

[00:04:18] And as you said, you’ve liked to reform and redesign new ways of approaching this. And as this relates to Puerto Rico, I think you have. Two different use cases for this. You did this both for the citizens of Puerto Rico, but also for the Department of Labor for Puerto Rico. Can we talk a little bit about the application of talent intelligence and this skills based approach for this initiative for Puerto Rico?

[00:04:42] ARNALDO: In Puerto Rico, we are taking full force, the whole skill based hiring, both at the private sector and in the public sector for government jobs. I’m working directly with the government aspect of the solution. There’s another agency that is working on the private sector and the citizens portal. So I am not so involved in that project.

[00:05:06] I’m definitely directly involved in the government jobs.

[00:05:10] LIGIA: Give us a little bit of context. I think that the story is fascinating. I know Puerto Rico had gone through some natural disasters. There was a lot going on. What were you trying to solve for? What were some of the key concerns around hiring talent?

[00:05:23] ARNALDO: This is a reform that has been a couple of years in the making, and that’s how reforms are. I think anyone that has worked on reforming, even in the private sector, It takes a couple of years reforming the way you do things, the way you think, the whole mindset, the culture that takes years in the making.

[00:05:42] We started working reforming the civil service because we saw that if we wanted the Government of Puerto Rico to provide valuable services. If we wanted the government of Puerto Rico to have sound financial management, in addition to having the right systems and the right processes, you needed to have the right people.

[00:06:00] And that’s something that we didn’t have at the time. So if we were going to invest. In bringing talent, we wanted to make sure that we brought the right talent and not only that we brought the right talent, but we make sure that the talent stay there, motivated and having their skills up to date for the longest time.

[00:06:20] One of the things that we, when we started working with government agencies, one of our first findings when we were designing this reform is how outdated the skill sets of the existing workforce. We have the average turn here. Of a government employee when we started, this was about 23 years. And, interestingly enough, more than two thirds of their time was in the same role.

[00:06:45] So there was very little incentive for mobility, and most people stayed. We can talk about why that was the case. There were policies that certainly drove that sort of current state of thinking, mindset. But our theory was if we have folks that have been in the government for 23 years and most of their time have been in their same role, then we should assume that they have the skills for their existing role if they’ve been doing their role for that long.

[00:07:10] But one of the things that we found out right away is that two thirds of the employees that we were serving and matching skills that they needed versus skill sets that they had was that they actually didn’t have them. And then we started seeing that a lot of agencies were contracting for advisors and private firms.

[00:07:30] There was a direct correlation between the amount of contractors that an agency had and the skill gap of incumbent employees. And that’s when we felt that we need to bring The right talent, but we need to make sure that our incumbents, our existing employees have the right skills as well. And that’s what blew our minds that even people that have been in the same role for that long, didn’t have the skills required for the role that they had.

[00:07:57] And that really led us to rethink our approach to updating the incumbent skills.

[00:08:03] JASON: So we often talk about how talent intelligence can be transformational and based off of those details in this story. This truly sounds like it had the opportunity to be transformational. 23 years tenure addressing the incumbents looking at the existing skills versus the required skills.

[00:08:22] This definitely had the opportunity to transform. How did you first learn about talent intelligence and the potential to consider it for this application?

[00:08:33] ARNALDO: It’s a very nice story. We actually started. Creating our own sort of systems without the right technology, right? We develop a skill based employee evaluation system, and we develop a full cycle of the evaluation system using different tools.

[00:08:49] We use Google forms to use Microsoft power BI. We use this because we didn’t have the right technology, but we wanted to give the experience to the employee and to the supervisors. Sometimes you wait until you get the right technology and you sit waiting, but we knew that we needed to create the man for change and for skill based approaches.

[00:09:09] So we went and did it our own way with manual tools, and even though we didn’t have the right technology, we were able to create the experience with a lot of manual work that we wanted. And. We were able to create that urgency and created demand because you need to create demand for skill base. It’s not intuitive, particularly in the public sector.

[00:09:29] So we knew that our first focus was creating that demand. Once we created that demand, we knew that we had a gap between what we wanted and the technology. Even though we were able to do it on a small scale, we knew that we were not able to scale it unless we got the right technology, very by accident.

[00:09:46] We ran into the solution and it was just bizarre how we aligned to what we were trying to build manually and how. It really fitted into our vision and our goals for the approach we’re trying to take place, wanted to take place in the government of Puerto Rico. So it was by accident and then we’re starting engaging with the solution and with a team.

[00:10:09] It was like a match that it was. A perfect match for what we wanted to do in the government.

[00:10:15] LIGIA: How many employees were you doing this manually for?

[00:10:18] ARNALDO: So we have two, we started with two agencies. There was about 65 employees in one agency and about 200 employees in another. So it was less than 300. But think about it.

[00:10:30] We, we were building this. We were creating individualized training plans. We’re creating individualized reports. We did the whole thing as. So we’re trying to mimic the technology because we, we didn’t have it at the time, about 300 or so employees. And once we finished that, we knew we had a problem, right?

[00:10:48] That we had the right vision, right? We were able to convince the government that this was the right way to go. But we just didn’t know how to scale it. And that’s when the solution came into the picture, we knew we could scale this and we could do more things than we initially intended, because when we were designing the initial solution, we knew we had the.

[00:11:09] The constraints of technology. So we were not thinking so big, right? And now that we have the right technology, we are able to expand much more of what we initially intended to do because we have now the capacity to do more things.

[00:11:25] LIGIA: So you talked about starting small and you talked about creating demand in order to engage decision makers and stakeholders in the process.

[00:11:34] So after you did this manually for roughly 250, 260 employees, what benefits were you seeing so that you could make the case to bring in a technology to do this in an automated fashion?

[00:11:45] ARNALDO: So, yeah, that’s a good question. If we would have started from scratch. It would have been much harder because by the time we brought in artificial intelligence and by the time we brought some of these new concepts, although there was some hesitation, right, there was a lot of folks in the government, particularly at the legal areas with a lot, that’s where always the headaches come from, there was a lot of concerns.

[00:12:09] But we were already in stage two, the whole skills based approach has already been ingrained by the results that we show. We did a lot of serving with the employees of participating in that initial pilot. And the results were really good. The governor’s office was really happy. And by the time we got into artificial intelligence, we had half the battle won.

[00:12:32] And it was much easier to introduce something like artificial intelligence. Once we have already walked through some hurdles around skill base and having skills, the currency for HR management.

[00:12:47] JASON: Can you talk about the difference of the before and after of doing this manually in reports and spreadsheets versus doing this on a dynamic platform, what the outcomes are and how that’s a different kind of in, in real time.

[00:13:02] ARNALDO: Let me just tell you that beyond the automation and the reporting, it’s just really impossible at a large scale to do skill based without artificial intelligence. It’s just not possible. I mean, if you have a small firm, you can, and we were able to do this at a small scale, right? And we Put a lot of resources, right?

[00:13:24] Because our focus was not scaling. It was just selling the idea. So we knew that we needed to win the battle of messaging first. So we were not thinking so much about how to scale this at the time, but now everything that we know, there’s just no way for a large or midsize entity to really move to skill based without.

[00:13:44] Artificial intelligence, because there, there’s no way humans can do this at a large scale. There’s no way an HR department can match skills per transaction, per candidate, beyond all the benefits you get from having an integrated technology, which you can get from any HR information system. The fact is in order to really realize skill-based hiring and skill-based talent management, you need artificial intelligence.

[00:14:12] There’s just no other way to do that. It’s not possible because of how many resources it would take to be able to do a skill based evaluation for one job requisition. And if you have a hundred candidates, you just imagine putting that responsibility in a small HR department or agency. So I think that’s the biggest thing that we knew that was the right way.

[00:14:37] We just didn’t know it was possible to scale it. And once we were able to realize that the technology does exist to do this, then the scaling was no longer an issue.

[00:14:48] JASON: As you’ve rolled this out to your talent acquisition teams and the people using the technology, have there been any kind of aha moments or surprises or outcomes that you’ve achieved that you didn’t plan for?

[00:15:00] ARNALDO: It’s been a challenge, right? Even by the success we had when we were doing things manually at the beginning and just getting the idea out there and socializing the idea and evangelizing to some extent around the need to have a skill-based approach to HR. For us, the power of data, because Now that we have about four agencies, demand for the solution has picked up, and now we have three or four agencies that are going to start the onboarding in the next couple of weeks.

[00:15:30] And there’s a lot of agencies that are asking to be part of the pilot. We started with three agencies, and now we’re going to add the seventh agency in the next couple of weeks. And there’s, there’s a lot of agencies that are asking us to be added to the pilot. But once we started using the data. And the governor’s office started seeing and started looking at which agencies were going faster and how much the time to hire was being reduced in certain agencies, just getting non database or not data driven folks to, you know, Utilize data and to react and respond to data reports has been unexpected.

[00:16:11] We created the reports for our own internal reporting and management, but the fact that the government and non data people in the government are responding to the data and what the data is saying that has been pretty encouraging for us and pretty surprising as well.

[00:16:28] LIGIA: Can you speak to some of these amazing stats, amazing outcomes, and obviously, hence the ongoing success as other agencies sign up.

[00:16:36] Can you mention just a few of those?

[00:16:38] ARNALDO: Yeah. So one of the most important things, and this is something that marketing folks understand very well, the importance of having good email marketing campaigns, right? And the fact that we, we told the government that, so we asked the government. To give us all the data they had collected about people who have previously applied.

[00:16:58] And since we obviously have a skill library and we’re linking skills to each job, we know what skills are required for each job opening. And then we have the relationship between jobs. So we were able to get historical information from the government on people who had applied in the past. And we were able to create targeted campaigns for each job opening.

[00:17:18] And the government was okay and we don’t know if that’s going to work. People apply a long time ago and we started using the platform to send email marketing campaigns through the platform. And when you look at the data, when we started seeing the data in the spike on applications, the day that the email campaigns were going out, that was, I think, one of the biggest moments as well.

[00:17:41] The fact that our actions were influencing behavior. And that behavior was being reflected on the data. And when you look at the reports, right, there’s spikes on the graphs and the spikes are in the days that, uh, email campaigns were sent to different candidates. I love that.

[00:17:57] LIGIA: A couple other thoughts I had, as you continue to roll out different agencies, you talked about.

[00:18:02] Getting buy in and doing a pilot earlier, doing it manually to create demand and essentially dealing with aspects of change management. What else are you learning now as you rolling out additional agencies?

[00:18:14] ARNALDO: Yeah, I think that change management has been a key for us, even actually. The only reason we were able to have some success when we were doing this manual is because we were doing a lot of change management, right?

[00:18:26] We were doing change management the old fashioned way, right? Like work on site workshops and trainings for supervisors and employees. But we were also started dabbling into videos and newsletters and things that are a bit maybe in the past. Private sector that might be used, but in the public sector, very foreign concepts of how you market that has been key so far for us.

[00:18:50] We develop our own branding around change management, like the, the participants get a newsletter with the latest in the project. We have online office hours with HR leaders and HR personnel that are part of the agencies, but we have a very, very. Fun and inviting onboarding system for new agencies. When a new agency wants to get added to the pilot, there’s a lot of exciting things that we do to get folks excited about participating in the pilot.

[00:19:20] So change management is key. Old fashioned ways are still very useful. But you have to think very creatively about how you want to convey your message. And we’re using videos and we’re using different approaches to get the message out.

[00:19:34] JASON: Is that part of how the word is spreading across the leaders in government?

[00:19:38] ARNALDO: Yes. The leaders in government, when they meet and they start talking about. They’re participating in this project. Then the other leaders are like, Hey, what about me? What about us? So everything that we have received so far of agencies that want to be added to the pilot has been to referrals, referrals from agencies that are already in the program, but it’s just amazing.

[00:19:57] Obviously we are in a very sensitive moment. We have elections coming, right? We’re very conscious of that and how we grow in a very sensitive time, particularly in issues like recruiting. But so far, like. We were having very successful conversion rates within the agency and from the government itself.

[00:20:17] LIGIA: So you talked that initially your pilot, at least the manual effort, was to define skills as a currency, but to prove, right, that this was the way to go.

[00:20:26] So, Where you are today, what does success means to you? Is it number of agencies that have signed up? Is it a specific metric that you’re looking for in terms of time to hire? How are you defining success now, given you’re well past the pilot phase?

[00:20:42] ARNALDO: Yeah, so we are a little more ahead on talent acquisition, which is we started with talent acquisition with recruitment and yeah, I’d be a success for us.

[00:20:51] We want all the government agencies and we have about 55 of those. Well, we have a long way to go, but once you get everything off the ground. The good thing about the pilot is that we’re starting slow, we are making adjustments, and we’re making the product and the solution better as we go along. Are going to be seven, eight or nine are going to have features that the first two didn’t, right?

[00:21:12] Because we’re, we’re, we’re applying continuous improvement as we go along. So with talent acquisition, we want all the agencies to be fully onboarded and to be using the solution. And yes, time to hire is a critical metric that we’re using. Unfortunately, the government. Doesn’t have, uh, this is a benchmark, so it’s, it’s hard.

[00:21:34] So we’re using poll surveys through the agency so they can tell, uh, things improve is the time to hire. So hopefully now that we are digitalizing transactions, we’ll be able to have, uh, benchmarks, uh, going forward, but, but it was a challenge to get benchmarks at the agency level. We’re a little behind on talent management because we wanted to make sure that talent acquisition, we got talent acquisition off the ground.

[00:21:59] So now the biggest challenge is talent management because this is an area where there’s still Public sector is in the private sector. You guys know a private sector still behind on talent management, skill based talent management. So we have two agencies that we started deploying the talent management solution, very good results so far.

[00:22:20] And we’re going to be adding two more in the next couple of weeks. The important thing about talent management is we want it. So this is the case that we’re trying to prove, right? That. By having an integrated solution, the employees in the government are being incentivized to move and to accept opportunities when you have a, and this is very typical in public sectors, not just Puerto Rico.

[00:22:44] When you have in public sector, you have. Big tenure and very low mobility. This is very typical, not just in Puerto Rico, anywhere in the States. If you ask for public sector, how many years you’ve been in the same position or in the same family of your position, right? So it’s really, you stay, you start as a junior, then a senior, and at best you are at a principal level after 30 years.

[00:23:07] So we are testing to see. If our vision of breaking with the traditional thinking of staying within your family actually is realized. So we have very strategic job openings that we have put in place that we are anticipating that those talent management employees apply and move. out of their job family.

[00:23:32] So we’ll find out very soon if we’re able to realize that theory of change that employees, once given the opportunities, once given the visibility, once given the platform to grow and to expand their career horizons, they actually do it. If we’re able to prove that, then we have a real case here for reforming public sector in general.

[00:23:54] JASON: I love it. When you started the conversation, you talked about the importance of the recency of skills and with incumbents being in position for a long time, uncovering some of the challenges and assumptions around that, and I was going to ask if this capability is helping you have more strategic conversations and some more proactive discussions around how to align talent and prepare for the future, and maybe you just answered that.

[00:24:23] But is this also allowing your organization to prepare for the future and unlock some of this mobility and kind of align people to what’s needed for the future now that you have visibility to emerging skills and more recent skills?

[00:24:39] ARNALDO: Yeah, and this is the interesting thing, right? In some cases, the gaps are so big between what the incumbent has and what’s required of the role that this is where mobility becomes very important because the gap might be smaller for another role.

[00:24:57] By having this platform and this ecosystem that is able to better match what you can bring to the table and how, if you can close your skill gap closer to another family, job family, then I would rather have the employee go there than try to, particularly in the area of technology. We have folks that have a bachelor’s degree in information systems.

[00:25:20] In the government, they were hired 23, 25 years ago, and they don’t have the skills to code right now. So how much do I have to invest to get that person to a quarter versus moving that person to another role where the gaps might be smaller. And then I can bring a new talent to code and I can be more strategic about my sourcing for talent, right?

[00:25:41] This is why In large or organizations where you have a lot of folks, we have, you have a lot of legacy skills and it’s important to be strategic because the solution cannot be like, let’s just fire everyone and bring everyone new, right? That’s not, and that’s even harder in the public sector to do. So we’re trying to, to tell everyone there’s a place for you and it might not be.

[00:26:05] Where you think or you always thought you were going to be, it could be in another area and we’re giving you all these opportunities, we’re giving you the resources, we’re integrating e learning so you can take the courses, you can get trained, you can get the skills, and you can move where you can be happier and be more motivated.

[00:26:21] LIGIA: Yeah, I like that. You’re enabling and empowering them in their career progression, Arnaldo. I know you mentioned, and it’s a great part of your success story that your success has gone viral within Puerto Rico. And so the different agencies are approaching you and new ones are coming on based on referrals.

[00:26:39] But if you were to give advice to any other government or a state, how would you go about maybe prioritizing the agencies? How would you think about segmenting it?

[00:26:50] ARNALDO: We were very intentional that we wanted to prioritize financial management roles, right? Because we, Puerto Rico is coming out of bankruptcy, financial management is an area where critical to for Puerto Rico to have sustainable growth and a good governance.

[00:27:09] We prioritize what, what it was. Important for the oversight board and for the government as well. So we prioritize financial management, procurement and technology, three areas that were key. So that’s one, right? So we prioritize the roles where we felt that we needed to close the biggest skill gaps. And we prioritize agencies that provide services to other agencies, for example, Department of Treasury, Office of Management and Budget.

[00:27:38] Office of HR, Office of Personnel. These are agencies that once you make the investment, then that’s going to theoretically spill over to all the agencies that they do serve. So those are two priority exercises that we did initially based on the priorities that the oversight board and the government had at the time.

[00:27:56] LIGIA: You had mentioned that legal had some concerns over the use of artificial intelligence internally. Any advice that you have for the podcast listeners on how you went about convincing them or what arguments you used, what research you did, what information you obtained?

[00:28:14] ARNALDO: There’s some lawyers you’re never going to convince.

[00:28:16] LIGIA: Yeah.

[00:28:16] ARNALDO: So it’s very important that these discussions are not just with legal. Legal needs to be an important part of the discussion, but you need to have other stakeholders, right? You can’t have just legal block an initiative, right? Because the legal analysis is critical, and you need to make sure that it’s aligned to existing statutes, rules, and regulations.

[00:28:37] This has broader implications. So we had a broader coalition of folks in the government, part of this discussions that included legal and ensure that all perspectives were being heard and we made the decision in the best interest of the government and the people of Puerto Rico, right? So that’s the one thing.

[00:28:55] The other thing is that when you have this discussions with the agencies that do the regulation themselves, then. That’s the other thing, right? Even if it’s not legal, the agency, the office of personnel, usually, surprisingly, sometimes HR is the one that has the biggest issues with making a change.

[00:29:16] Sometimes HR is very conservative, not just in the public sector, in the private sector as well. We went directly to the end users, right? The agencies themselves that are the ones who have the benefit or the drawbacks or not. Retaining talent so they were part of the guiding coalition that we have when we’re having these discussions and we were able to sell this to the end users simultaneously that we were having the conversations with legal and HR that ensure that we were not alone in the conversation.

[00:29:47] And then you have broad perspective, but we also had the folks that are benefited in our organizations. Example, it could be the finance department, the IT department. Those are the ones that struggle because they can’t find talent or they take too long to talent. So they need to be part of the discussion.

[00:30:03] You need to be able to sell this to them, and they are going to be some of your biggest champions when you’re having the tougher conversations with legal and HR.

[00:30:12] JASON: Now, you mentioned champions, and you talked about talent acquisition and some of the outcomes, and you mentioned some of the momentum you’ve received around seeing the reduction in time to hire.

[00:30:23] But in terms of other types of champions, what kind of feedback have you received from applicants and candidates going through the process with town intelligence?

[00:30:32] ARNALDO: The amount of applications have been out of this world, right? So it has surpassed all our expectations in the number of applicants since we launched the pilot in April.

[00:30:43] And the people who work in government are citizens, right? And their friends, their cousins are users. Government services and solutions, the biggest benefit was it wasn’t us telling the government folks. Hey, this is really good. And candidates. I love the easy to use and how quickly their cousins, their friends were telling themselves, right?

[00:31:06] That, Hey, wow, this is really cool. I was able to apply quickly. I was able to apply to multiple positions. This is what really drove everyone crazy. When you were going to the PCS, You were uploading your resume, and then the system was just telling you, Hey, now you’re here. You can also apply here and here.

[00:31:25] And that was mind blowing for the applicant. And that’s the sort of feedback we were getting from the government folks that their friends and their family members were raving about. The solution,

[00:31:37] LIGIA: if you had any piece of advice for other public sector agencies, considering talent intelligence or scaling down their own adoptions and acquisitions, what would that be practical?

[00:31:49] Two or three things

[00:31:51] ARNALDO: start with a pilot that is definitely don’t try to do this at once. It’s, it’s a big change. The pilot does give at ease. To folks that have legitimate reasons to have concerns, like I said, legal and HR regulators, you have to design the solution correctly. This is not like something that you just plug and play, right?

[00:32:12] There needs to be thinking about how you deploy the solution that is adjustable to the realities, to the, Statues of the regulations to the right culture where you’re implementing this. So this is not something that you just turn the switch. So start with a pilot because that would allow you to get everyone comfortable that, Hey, if it doesn’t work, we won’t do it.

[00:32:32] Everyone just goes and says, okay, fine. We’ll just do it in a couple of agencies. So not big deal. Lowers the stakes from folks that might be blockers. And the other thing is that you have to do a lot of change management. If you don’t have the resources to do change management, you have to get the resources, right?

[00:32:50] So if your HR department or your HR agency doesn’t have folks for the change management piece, you have to get them. Because if not, then you won’t be able to deploy this successfully once you start. Deploying the solution. The communication is definitely key and spending the time to design the right workflow and the right rules and the right forms that you’re going to use.

[00:33:17] And we spend months working with the company on the right solution that we felt was going to be successful in our use case, spend the time. It’s a couple of months, but they are going to yield high benefits. Once you start going live and running real HR transactions.

[00:33:34] LIGIA: I love it. Let me double click a couple questions on what you just said on the first part about making sure you start small.

[00:33:41] How long did you set expectations before you’d have some level of results?

[00:33:47] ARNALDO: You have to be very flexible, right? So we went live in April. Our launch date was delayed as any technology solution. This is like a very big deal. Public sector is very harsh, highly regulated. There’s a lot of politics involved.

[00:34:01] You have the legislature you have. So it was far more complicated deployment than if you would do it in a private setting or a smaller government agency. We went live in April. And we knew that for us was going to be key to have within six weeks of going live. We knew that we needed to have at least one agency in position to start hiring.

[00:34:24] And we were able to, we have one agency that had a very strong HR leader and a strong HR team, and we knew that our hopes were that agency that they were going to deliver the other two have more limitations in terms of resources. So. If we have one that was able to meet the six week mark of starting hiring based on the solution, we knew that it was going to cause a sort of spillover effect on other because we were, obviously, as I said before, we were showing the data, the data was going to the governor’s office and the agency heads were speaking to each other.

[00:35:04] So once we have one agency, Hiring, even if we had two laggers, we knew that we were in position to have successful deployments.

[00:35:12] LIGIA: Creates a little competition between the agencies too. And they are

[00:35:15] ARNALDO: competing, they are getting the reports, the agency heads are getting the reports and they’re getting them by email, by WhatsApp, by text.

[00:35:24] We’re being very upfront about it. So everyone understands where everyone is at this moment.

[00:35:30] JASON: It’s all wonderful advice and very actionable, which is why people enjoy listening to this podcast. As you’ve talked about this, is there any difference in nuance or in messaging or positioning in words of advice or in gaining buy in talent acquisition versus talent management?

[00:35:47] ARNALDO: It was important, even though we were not deploying talent management at the same time as talent acquisition, but it wasn’t that they were so far apart, right? It was still maybe a month to six weeks apart from deploying, maybe about two months between deploying TA and then deployed TM. But regardless of deployment, TM was part of the story of TA because.

[00:36:08] Our target was not just new people that didn’t work in government because we have such a big government, right? And we have so many employees. Our target was the incumbents, and we cannot tell the full story to incumbents without TM. So even though they were deploying at different times, they were part of the same communications.

[00:36:30] They were part of the same story, the part of the same change management. And what we’re telling folks is that. We believe in you as an employee, and we’re going to be opportunities to grow, even though TA is really right now at the forefront of implementation because we started and we have more agencies, it’s really TM was driving our messaging, right, because that’s the message and most, I think, two thirds of applications from government employees.

[00:36:54] LIGIA: Do you have a policy that for any opening, you always consider internally first?

[00:37:00] ARNALDO: So with the two laggers, we went with internal first versus external. But the problem is that it just makes the process longer. So we were able to prove this is why having multiple agencies have different approaches to evaluate.

[00:37:15] It’s important. With the agency that’s far ahead on hiring, they’re hiring internally, even though they went external internal at the same time, but it’s really making the workflow much shorter. So we had about 170 job openings at one agency at the same time. And we were able to. Deploy TM in two agencies.

[00:37:38] It’s almost simultaneously in a sequential order in order for those TM employees to see all those positions in the job market. Right. And that was so fascinating. That’s at a TM employee, you log in and you have your profile and now you’re getting hits all the time. And that’s why my recommendation is that you can’t just do recruitment by itself.

[00:38:00] That’s really not going to drive your transformation of your human capital. You have to see it in an integrated way. You have to recruit them, but you have to motivate them, and you have to make sure that they keep their skills up to date, particularly when you have Big workforce. A lot of employees. You can’t close your skill gaps by bringing new folks.

[00:38:20] You have to close the skill gap. You have to motivate people to get skills. You have to put people in the right place when they’re not. And that’s why my recommendation is definitely to even if you deploy them at different times that they’re part of an integrated solution and they’re part of the story you’re telling your employees.

[00:38:39] JASON: Arnaldo, we always get three questions and you’ve already answered two of them. The first one being, how do I start? And the second one being, how do we get senior buy in? I think you’ve answered them very successfully. The third one is, how do we address kind of the existing culture and the new capability with current managers?

[00:38:57] So as you’ve talked about positioning the employee story and the talent management initiative, how did you address this with the existing managers? Was that part of this change management in this kind of adoption journey?

[00:39:10] ARNALDO: Yeah, with managers, it’s a big challenge, right? Because And one thing that we didn’t talk about at all is that we did make a switch from a performance based evaluation to a skill based evaluation, which is a big shift, right?

[00:39:26] We did that, and we can spend a whole podcast about why skill versus performance, because I know there’s still people debating that we should do performance. In the public sector, I challenge anyone to the debate. Uh, they think that we can do performance in the public sector and private sector is a bit easier, but public sector is much harder.

[00:39:45] I think that with the supervisors is getting that understanding of the skills. It’s the biggest challenge, right? Because it’s a big change. Supervisors are thinking about bachelor’s degree and years of experience are really not thinking about skills. And getting the supervisors to understand some of the skills, it’s a big challenge that we still have, what we call skill literacy, not just understanding skill based approach, just understanding the skills.

[00:40:12] Some of the supervisors don’t know the skills themselves. How am I able to judge and evaluate skills if I don’t, I might not have the skills, but I might understand the skills and what skill proficiency is. The biggest challenge we are going to have, and we have a plan to address that to a lot of change management training is how you get more skill literacy at the manager level, because at the end of the day, that’s the person that interacts the most with the employees.

[00:40:39] LIGIA: We’ve covered so much, and I think that the government of Puerto Rico, you and the team are just at the forefront. And again, it’s not about just about technology and adopting artificial intelligence, but it really is about the transformation, the change in thinking, the approach that you’re taking that’s going to have such a huge impact on your citizens.

[00:40:59] I just think there’s so many other public sector agencies, but also even. Companies in the private sector that are going to get a lot from this podcast. So thank you so much. 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 www.eightfold.ai.

[00:41:20] ai. And you can find us on all your favorite social media sites. We’d love to connect and continue the conversation.