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 Lee Zora

Jason:

And I’m Jason Serato. 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.

Ligia:

So if you’re looking for practical, actionable advice to get your workforce future ready, you’ve come to the right place. Hello, and welcome again to another episode of the new talent code. I’m Leia. I’m one of your co-host and I’m here with my other co-host Jason. Hello, Jason. How are

Jason:

You? I’m doing greatly here. This is another good one. I’m really excited for today.

Ligia:

I know, I know we’re getting such great guests. It makes me jump out of bed in the morning, but without further ado, let me go ahead and introduce our special guests on the show today. Hisham za. Hi Hisham. How are you?

Hicham:

Hey, Leah. I am doing well. Thanks. Thanks for having me.

Ligia:

Absolutely. Give us a minute here. I wanna brag a little bit about you and your accomplishments for those of you who are just tuning in Hisham has worked as a digital transformation consultant across many leading organizations names you’ve probably heard before McKenzie, Oracle and even Gartner. He actually probably knew Jason today. He’s the head of insights and analytics at eightfold. Yes, he’s one of ours. He’s currently leading the effort to automate and leverage various business intelligent tools that help companies with strategic workforce planning, upskilling and reskilling.

Jason:

And on top of all that, he was recently named top 100 HR tech influencer by HR executive magazine. Uh, one of the most prestigious, uh, lists out there in the industry. That’s a, a list that I was named to last year. So he very proudly, uh, bumped me off the list, but nonetheless, we’re very proud to have him out there representing eightfold.

Ligia:

Yeah, more things you have in common,

 

Lifelong learning and transformation

Jason:

More things we have in common. Hihim we know you have a very fascinating career path and one that fits perfectly with our topic here on the new talent code. So before we get into our main topic today around the value of knowing your people, their skills and how to put that data at the center of the talent function and how HR leaders can use these insights to compete, we wanna have a little bit more understanding of kind of your own non-linear career path. How do you go from being a computer scientist to a consultant, to a data analyst and a team leader here with eightfold?

Hicham:

Absolutely. So thank you, Jason, and, and Leia for the, for the introduction, I’m, I’m truly humbled. So thank you for that. My path has been non-linear even physically. And I mean, by that, like I started in Lebanon, then I worked a little bit in Kuwait. Then I went to UAE, I worked a little bit there. I moved to the us, I worked here and then I moved back to UAE, worked in Dubai, and then I moved back to the us. So now I’m here and yes, I did have various roles across different domains. So interestingly enough, the main driver behind all that is learning, right. I am driven by learning. So that’s where, you know, I went to KPMG and I learned a lot about it, service operations, right? How does, you know, it service the business. Then I moved to Oracle at Oracle. I had, you know, various roles within the software asset management team.

Hicham:

The last role that I had at Oracle was, you know, working very closely with the senior vice president of that group on anything strategic that came his way, be it people related technology related data related. And that was really, really exciting to me after finishing my MBA, I realized, you know what? I wanna continue on this learning trajectory. I wanna learn more. And during my MBA time, I just loved being, you know, around my classmates who really pushed my thinking. So that’s when I decided to go back into consulting and I joined McKinsey. I worked on so many different engagements and different sectors and different topics. And I worked on digital transformation there at scale. And then yeah, joined Gartner led an organization of 65 people. I love to call them, you know, the problem solvers. They work with high tech companies on problem solving their mission, critical priorities, as, as we say, and mapping the Gartner assets to those priorities. But then again, learning drove me to eightfold and here I am.

Ligia:

So the underlying theme here in terms of your career has been lifelong learning this lust for learning. Where did that come from?

Hicham:

That’s ingrained in me since I was a kid, to be honest, my sister and I keep saying that even to my niece and nephew, my sister is the smartest in the family. She’s 11 years older or 12 years older than I am. And she’s really smart because she figured out how to learn just by herself. So again, I had very humble beginning, you know, in, in Lebanon, my parents, unfortunately didn’t have the opportunity to continue their schooling. Both of ’em. They did a great job, you know, raising us and, and it war touring country like Lebanon, cuz keep in mind for the first nine years of my life. I lived in a war zone, but you don’t know that you’re living in a war zone. You think like that’s how the rest of the world is, right? Like everybody is. Yeah. So, but the thing is my sister, you know, she, she instilled in me those values of learning.

Hicham:

So from J age of five to the age of 15, she was with me every day when I come back from school, teaching me math, you know, history and so on and so forth. And it’s not the subjects or the topics that she taught me that was valuable to me. It’s how to learn. And the fact that she figured that out by herself, that is impressive. Right. But the thing is I had to learn from her how to learn, right? How can I grasp that information? And then even during summer, by the way, it was very painful because she would bring a summer book and we have to finish that throughout the summer. So there are, you know, other kids playing on the street and I can hear them playing soccer. And so I wanna be down there, but she would ask me to finish those two to three hours a day of studying and then I can go and play. So,

Ligia:

So you couldn’t play until you spelt transformation, baby Hiam.

 

Digital transformation / talent transformation

Hicham:

Exactly. And that’s why I love learning. That’s why transformation resonates very well with me because there’s that, you know, continuous, continuous learning, but she did allow me a break to go and, and play and so on and so forth. But she made sure that I finished what’s important first because that put a lot of emphasis on education. She was a firm believer that, listen, if I teach you this, you’re gonna go and change your life. That’s why Lehi last week when I, when I wanted to go to Canada was very important to me to go and see my sister. I hadn’t seen her since 2016. That’s why I was very proud of my niece, making it through school and graduating a software engineer, one of very few females to graduate in software engineering. That is because we all followed the same methodology that our sister taught us. And apparently it works.

Ligia:

What a beautiful story. Thanks for sharing Hesham.

Hicham:

Of course. Thank you.

Jason:

So Hesham, you’ve been helping organizations for some time and you’ve talked about digital transformation and you’ve talked about working with business leaders. What is the reality of the challenges that most organizations are coming to you today? What are the challenges they’re addressing? Now?

Hicham:

Let me just put things in perspective as why digital transformation is important. So back in 2020, digital transformation was around 1.3 trillion in 2025 is gonna be 2.8 trillion and I’m talking business practices, products, organizations. That’s what it’s forecasted to be. So it’s very, very important. Now we talk about digital transformation by why is it important, right? Why digital transformation and why is the people element right skills and so on. Important for that topic? Well, digital transformation, a lot of people think of it as it’s about technology. Let me get the latest and greatest tools implement them and we’re good to go. Or when we take a process that I currently have, that I do it manually automate it, and I’m good to go, but it’s not the case, digital transformations about survival. And I’m gonna tell you other statistics, which is very, very important. And this is a recent study by McKinzie.

Hicham:

When I say a recent, I think it was back in 2016 or 2017, the lifespan of companies listed in S and P was 61 years in 1958. Today it is less than 17 years. And in 2027, it says that 75% of the companies currently coded in the S and P 500 will have disappeared. You need digital transformation to survive. And this is why, you know, I’m really passionate about this topic. I keep talking about it, cuz it’s not about technology. It’s about fundamentally changing what a company is doing, right? And I’m gonna just say one last thing. And this is by George Westman. Who’s at MIT as a researcher at, at MIT that describes digital transformation as follows successful. Digital transformation is like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. It’s still the same organism, but it now has superpowers. Unfortunately, when it comes to digital transformation, many senior execs are in thinking about butterflies. They’re thinking about fast caterpillars. And that is why transforming that caterpillar into a butterfly is important but challenging.

Jason:

So if I think about that, when people were first coming to you several years ago, was it more about applying technology? And now it’s about what they’re actually doing with it?

Hicham:

Correct. So before it was just like, Hey, value assurance, right? I’ve implemented this E R P solution or whatever solution can we make sure that we’re getting the most value out of it. Now it’s as scale right now it’s organization people, processes, technology, data, it’s everything, it’s holistic, it’s all or nothing. That’s what add transformation is about.

Ligia:

Well, I mean, I don’t think there’s gonna be a choice we’re gonna be in this hybrid world, whether you like it or not. Right. Whereas before maybe some organizations were, I wouldn’t say rejecting it, but taking it a little slower. I think this pandemic and lockdown has actually accelerated cuz it was, uh, the only way to survive.

Hicham:

Absolutely. But it’s really hard. It’s really hard to keep up with the business as usual and transform at the same time. This is where leadership has to come in. This is where culture becomes important. And people, you know, talking about people becomes important. The driver of the digital transformation or what you’re trying to achieve with the digital transformation is two things. Drive customer value and employee value. This is where talent intelligence becomes very, very important because if these are the two main drivers, that’s what you’re trying to achieve with the digital transformation, profit, Trev, and so on will follow. But if you just focus on profit, you’re gonna miss out on a lot of things and you’re not gonna be able to truly achieve a transformation, right? You can boost profit in so many different ways, but if you focus on those two things, I wanna drive more value for my customers. I wanna drive more value for my employees. Now you’re talking about a transformation.

 

What is talent intelligence?

Ligia:

Okay? So I’m gonna double click here as we say in Silicon valley. But for those listeners, like my mom, hi mom, I love where we’re going with this conversation. But what do you mean by talent intelligence? What does that mean? Because this is a new term, you know, kind of like the cloud it’s been thrown out in the market. A lot of people are talking about it, but come on Hisham. Tell it to me. Meat and potatoes ABCs in Spanish, hopefully. So my mom understands you. What do you mean by talent intelligence? What does that mean today?

Hicham:

It’s very simple. Talent intelligence is about basically acquiring or using technology and data to drive talent decisions. That’s what it’s about.

Ligia:

Okay. But I’m gonna, I’m gonna stop you there again. Cuz guess what? We’ve been doing that in HR. Gosh, Jason, you, you were an analyst for how many years we’ve been saying we’ve been doing this. So what’s changed because we’ve had data before we’ve had HR technology before. So what’s new.

 

Talent intelligence, upskilling and reskilling

Hicham:

What’s new is that there’s a lot under the hood that the old tools did not uncover. Let me tell you what I, what I mean there, people sometimes downplay for example, the skills that they have, right? A talent intelligence would uncover those, right? It has all the intelligence needed for it to say, person X would have these skills based on his or her experience based on his or her education and so on and so forth because we downplay what we can do. We downplay our skills. I told you earlier, for example, I help buyers negotiate with suppliers. Do I list negotiation as one of my skills? You know, when I’m talking about my skillset, I don’t right? Because I don’t even think of it. You know, people don’t put a lot of emphasis on, you know, Hey, here’s what I’ve done. And hence here are the skillsets that I have, but talent intelligence would uncover this. Plus it’s really, really hard for you to uncover any gaps that you have in an organization. And Le I’ve done this in an Excel spreadsheet and you, you barely get 30% of the data you need. And even then you’re still maintaining it in an Excel spreadsheet.

Jason:

And how long did that take

Hicham:

For us? It took us six months, but this is us to

Ligia:

Do one

Hicham:

Report. Yeah. To just do an inventory of people skills,

Ligia:

But that doesn’t even count the gaps you had because some people don’t report. There’s many, many studies out there that, you know, women under report skills compared to men there’s skills. People I’m gonna say gloss over or forget. But then there’s also the skills that I think people embellish and maybe over report, cuz there’s that as well. Right? Cause we all do that in a resume. If I want the job and the job says these, these skills are required. Guess what? I’m gonna put ’em on the resume or I’m gonna make up a couple experiences or stretch

Jason:

’em or how about free agent skills, skills that I have that are unrelated to the role or to the organization that I don’t report? Cuz I don’t think they’re necessary.

Ligia:

Like would make a good podcast cohost <laugh> yeah. You know like that

Hicham:

<laugh> that is true. Actually you cannot uncover those. That’s where you need intelligence. That’s why things are changing. So now the days of Excel spreadsheets and maintaining Excel spreadsheets and talking to people and by the way, when I said six months, that was only for a 600 people organization it organization. Right? So doing that at scale, I don’t know how feasible it is.

Ligia:

So give us a layman’s term. What data is it looking at? You said skills, where are you pulling this information? And you’re saying, you’re looking at a lot of them like millions of, of people’s information.

Hicham:

So the talent intelligence has the ability to infer skills, not only based on that person’s experience, education and so on, but also other people who work in the same role in the same industry, other people who work in the same company, what kind of skills do they have? So you’re not just, you know, looking at that individual in the silos. Now you’re really putting those other elements, the ecosystem around, around that individual to truly uncover all these skills. And now we’re looking at millions of these skills that we can, that we evaluate. And by evaluate and analyze, I say, we can look at the most penetrated skills in certain industries. We can look at the most penetrated roles in certain industries. We can look at the fastest rising skills, which is very important.

Ligia:

What does that mean? Fastest rising skills.

Hicham:

These are skills that over the last 10 years, right, have achieved a certain velocity. We see more and more people entering the workforce with those skills. Why is that important? If you have more people entering the workforce with certain skills, that means there is demand for those skills. That’s triggering those people to, to obtain those skills. So we look at it for a 10 year period, but we give more emphasis for the last five years. Why is that? Because the shelf life or half life of a skill is five years. But I wanna, there’s a caveat there in technology when it comes to technical skills, the half life of a skill is two and a half years. What? So it’s diminishing. Yeah, it is. It is going down. It is diminishing. So a lot of there’s a lot of research out there that talk about, you know, two to three years. So I’m gonna take the mid points here and say two and a half. What does that mean? It means a skill achieves its speak in two and a half years and then it starts going downwards

Ligia:

Like a muscle.

Hicham:

Yeah. <laugh> yes. So that’s why upskilling reskilling is important.

Ligia:

So is this what you mean when you talk about rising skills, declining skills, cuz it’s declining and demand about being future ready and then being able to prepare a company and be future looking rather than backwards looking in terms of understanding the skill sets in the organization.

Hicham:

Absolutely. The key there is for an organization to look at, not just backwards, not just, Hey, what happened 10 years ago. Right. But what is currently emerging and what’s currently emerging, doesn’t usually show the he because it’s, it’s truly under the hood. It’s very few skills that you see, you know what? These have been emerging very fast, but not a lot of people have them. So not a lot of people talk about them, but companies should be aware of,

Ligia:

Give me an example of like a skill that either disappeared or a skill that maybe wasn’t here five years ago from, from the studies that you’ve done and the research that you’ve

Hicham:

Done, cloud computing, for example, those skills who weren’t here 10, 15 years ago. Right. But if you look at, you know, how that emerged and if you look at it today, right, this is one of the most thought after skill, right. Be it cloud development, uh, cloud deployment and so on. And so, so anything that’s related to cloud that was not there, you know, a decade ago, not at this scale, not this important

Ligia:

Or like cryptocurrency maybe 10 years ago versus today. Yeah. Got it. Got

Hicham:

It. Yep. Blockchain cryptocurrency. We can talk about even AI and machine learning. Yeah. Was there, but you can only see high tech companies talk about AI and machine learning.

 

Strategic workforce planning

Jason:

Soham as we opened up this conversation, we talked about kind of pivoting careers and pivoting career paths is that why this type of view and this type of information is important as increasingly companies and industries pivot.

Hicham:

That’s a great question. When it comes to talent, there are two things that companies are trying to do. One they’re trying to create a good solid jobs architecture. And I know now that he is gonna ask me, what is the jobs architecture? I promise it’s not me.

Ligia:

It’s my mom. It’s not me. It’s my mom.

Hicham:

And

Ligia:

This you’re getting the hang of this podcast.

Hicham:

<laugh> I did. And the second thing, strategic workforce planning. Now a lot of people confuse one for the other. A lot of people think, okay, they’re one of the same. Let me put things in perspective. Okay. And why this is important to propel companies or prepare companies for the future. So a jobs architecture is about how a company organizes itself. So it can be successful. Right? And this is where we talk about the roles, the leveling, the skills, the hierarchy, you know, and so on and so forth. That’s what, where that thing comes into play. And you might tell me, Sean, but it’s, it’s easy, right? Like org structure. It’s not simply about org structure. That is not about structuring your organization. This is about truly architecting your organization, right? Architecting the jobs within your company. And for that, the atom of that, right? The, the common denominator, the smallest unit of that is the skill. For example, we talked about digital transformation, right? Well for companies to improve their chances of success, I’m gonna state the five things that were five categories that were listed. And let’s think about how many of ’em involve people. One is building capability for the workforce of the future. Two having the right digital savvy leaders in place three, empowering people to work in new ways, four giving day to day tools, a digital upgrade. This is the first time I’m mentioning technology, right? Five communication communicating frequently. That’s it? Four

Ligia:

Of your five involve talent.

Hicham:

Exactly. This is where talent becomes very, very important. This is where jobs architecture becomes very, very important architecting. And the next thing is strategic workforce planning. Now I know if I was gonna ask maybe what is strategic workforce? Like, I’m gonna explain that for your mom. So strategic workforce planning is truly deriving a plan, right? That is aligned with your strategic ambitions, right? Your goals. Yeah. Your goals. Exactly. That’s, that’s aligned with your goals that has the people as its core element, right? And strategic workforce planning. This is where you need to look outwards. What is happening in the market? That’s where you need to look at your competitors. What is it that they’re doing? That’s where you need to also do an inventory within and see what do you have, right. What skills do people have? What skills are rising? What skills are declining? What skills are stable, this is where you also need to make some decisions strategically in terms of, okay, what do I need for me to be successful from an upskilling reskilling standpoint? So strategic workforce planning. This is where we start talking about hiring for potential upskilling, reskilling and so on. When it comes to jobs architecture, this is where you can think about how can I architect my jobs for me to be successful.

Jason:

Now your team has been doing various research studies for these different industries, looking at emerging skills, declining skills industries that are being disrupted. You’ve done banking compared to FinTech, and you’ve done healthcare as you’ve been doing these research studies. What are some of the findings or the biggest surprises that your team has found as you’re looking at kind of the states of these industries or emerging skills or where disruption is occurring.

Hicham:

That is a great question. And by the way, I’ve been seeing, I’ve been witnessing a very common theme there and let tell you what the theme is. Jason. So first, sometimes we look at the roles, let me just tell you one high tech, right? We did a study on high tech and we took the top 10 high tech companies. And we looked at some of the roles that they have, some of the key roles that they have across cloud computing, cyber security, and so on and so forth. What we were seeing is that, you know what, those roles have been rising exponentially, right? When it comes to how important they are. Right? But when we double click and we look at skills and we’re only looking at, at skills within those high tech companies, I don’t believe their future ready. I don’t, I don’t. I see a lot of steady skills and keep in mind, steady skills are not bad skills.

Hicham:

Steady skills means that skill is maintaining its importance over the years. But I also see a lot of declining skills and you really need to keep scrolling down with the data and looking at the lower penetrated skills for you to see those skills that are rising. What does that tell us that tells us a couple of things. One, the skill mix is changing. Jason. Like if you look at a software engineer and what a software engineer, the fastest rising skills for a software engineer 10 years ago versus today, entirely different. And then the other thing that we’re seeing is there is not a lot of emphasis on upskilling, reskilling . And that truly, that truly bothers me, right? Because let’s go back to the fundamentals. I mentioned two things for you to be successful at transforming customer value, employee value, employee value, meaning one, I wanna attract the best talent.

Hicham:

Two. I wanna retain the talent that I have. How do I attract the best talent? Let me ask you something. If you’re a tech company that’s not innovating as much and you’re a tech talent, are you gonna join? Or you gonna look at a company that’s actually innovating in technology because that’s gonna make you more excited. And you wanna look at, you know, work on the latest and greatest. So you wanna be innovating from it. Then when it comes to technology, this is how you can attract that tech talent retaining that tech talent that is with upskilling and reskilling. Now that I got you, I attracted you to my company, with my value proposition, with my mission, with my vision, with what we’re trying to do. Now, I wanna retain you. An employee employee relationship is just like a couple’s relationship. It needs maintenance, right? You need to really nurture it. You need to really communicate. You need to listen. You need to understand what they, what they want, what they need. They wanna feel that they’re appreciated. And they wanna feel that they they’re relevant. And the company is giving them the tools they need to upskill themselves.

Ligia:

Okay. So now let’s get to brass tax Hisham though, from what do you think business leaders can do to make progress here? The thing is sometimes we get really excited with this stuff and we tend to overwhelm our listeners. So for those of us getting started in this, in the transformation or in they’re in the middle of this transformation into a more skills based organization, what kind of advice do you have

Hicham:

For sure. You need to recognize your employees. Fear of being replaced. There’s a lot of fear when you’re transforming. Am I gonna have my job next? Right? Am I, am I gonna be part of this change? And that fear is detrimental to the digital transformation. That is one of the things that can basically hinder the success of a digital transformation. But then how do you overcome that? Fear is reassuring the employees that you know what, there’s nothing to be afraid of. You’re gonna stay with us in the long run. How do you do that? If the employee is saying that the tool that they know that they’re familiar with, that they’ve worked on for the past decade is no longer gonna be in the roadmap of that company or in the future of that company. You need to upskill and reskill your employees. This is the first thing that I recommend to business leaders, to HR leaders. One is upskill and reskill. Look internally. You, there are gems in every company. And I truly believe in the lifelong learning. People love to learn. It feels good to learn. So upskilling rescaling that helps companies retain employees. And that helps them get the most value out of, out of employees. How do you do that? You cannot do that in Excel spreadsheet anymore. Unfortunately those days are gone. You need talent intelligence and why? Because talent intelligence, links everything together.

Ligia:

Yeah. The old model of hiring is, let me hire someone who’s done this job before who looks exactly like the role that I’m looking for. That’s the opposite of hiring for potential.

Hicham:

Correct. And that doesn’t work anymore. Let me just give you one, one statistics. So there are around 1.5 to 2 million people with Python skills in the United States Python skills. I’m not even getting into the proficiency of, of such individuals with Python, but the thing is there is a lot of need for Python. What do you do? You look at Adja skills. That’s when you look at skill adjacencies and you hire people with those adjacent skills and you upskill reskill them from within, and that becomes very important. Now you’ve expanded your talent pool. And that’s what we mean by hiding for potential.

Jason:

Was there a

Hicham:

Third? There is the third. So when you are looking at architecting, the jobs do not architect those for today. Today is gonna be passed tomorrow. Do you wanna architect those jobs and those roles for the future, right? This is what we call calibration nowadays, right? So you wanna calibrate for the future. What’s been emerging in the market. What are skills that are under the hood that not a lot of people have, but has been increasing in importance. We see more and more people entering the workforce with those skills. You need those skills as you’re doing your jobs architecture last but not least is look at those companies that you think have the best talent when it comes to certain roles or you think they, they set a certain high bar, you know, for skills needed for a certain role. Because again, let’s suppose now my aspiration is to get to the next level, in my role.

Hicham:

I’m gonna look at who’s at that next level and see what skills do I need, right? For me to get there. It is the same for when you’re looking at your employees, when you’re calibrating roles, your aspiration is to match those companies, what those companies are doing from innovation standpoint and so on. So it’s important for you to look at them and benchmark yourself against them and set the bar high for when it comes to the skills that your employees need to to acquire. So that was the third point is calibrating with the future in mind,

Jason:

Three actionable insights to help our listeners crack the new talent code. This has been a phenomenal conversation

Ligia:

Soham to wrap up. We have a tradition of ending our show with a question about potential. If someone had believed in your potential to pursue a different career path than the one you’re in today, what would that have been? What other passions are you hiding that you have not pursued?

Hicham:

That’s a deep, deep question, but I told you that earlier Le when I’m done working afterwards, I’m studying, right. There’s something that I, I wanna learn. I’m curious, right? I wanna, I wanna nurture that side of mind. So for me, I worked on so many different things for me to get to the point that this is what I enjoy doing. I enjoy working on transformations, digital transformation to be specific. However, I wouldn’t have chosen a different path. Every job added something to my, to my skill set, and I wouldn’t have chosen a different path.

Ligia:

There’s something to be said for following your passion. And it actually comes across when you speak about your career. So with that friends, this is the end of this podcast. We will see you soon for another episode of the new talent code. Thanks for joining us. 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.