Jason Cerrato 00:00
My name is Jason Cerrato, the Vice President of Talent-centered Transformation here at Eightfold, and I am honored to be joined by the infamous Robin Schooling from Humareso, the Director of HR insights and Innovation. Welcome Robin.
00:21
Thank you, Jason. I am delighted to be here chatting with you today.
Jason Cerrato 00:26
I’ve been looking forward to this. I know we have been looking forward to setting something like this up for quite some time, as we’ve crossed paths on the various trails and conference scenes and various gallivanting around the HR Jet Set, as it was. But here we find ourselves at the beginning of a very tumultuous year, 2025, and in the world of HR, and I’ve always had this joke where I’ve been doing this for some time, you’ve been doing this for some time, and for all the time I’ve spent in HR, I’ve never had a single year where someone said next year is going to be easy. No, we’ve always said next year is going to be a difficult year. And it seems like every year just gets all the more challenging. So really excited to kind of pick your brain and have a conversation with you and field some questions from the audience along the way, but wanted to see just what was top of mind across these topics as we talked about what’s happening with the labor market, with all the disruptions and uncertainty that’s going on, what’s been a common theme over the last several years around empowering internal mobility with the people that are already in your organization. You can’t have a conversation for more than five minutes without talking about skills right in some way, shape or form, we wouldn’t allow that to happen Right? Right? As part of that underlying that is always, what does it mean to move that forward? And a big part of that is learning. So we’re going to talk about what does it mean to learn in this new world, because in many cases, learning is being turned upside down and disrupted as well. And then an underlying part of this, and a big part of why we’re happy to be having this conversation with you, is, how does technology enable some of this? Because a big part of his technology is disrupting this, but technology is also enabling this, right? So those are the topics that will guide us along this journey. Today, we promise we will bring you home safely. We may take some twists and turns along the way, but we will get there before I do so I wanted to Mayor. We also want to kind of pick your brain and see where you are along this journey. So we do have some poll questions, so kind of stay close to some device that will allow you to answer the poll questions, whether it’s a mouse or some device a keyboard that will allow you to answer the questions that we ask. But before I do that, I also wanted to give a chance for Robin to give us a little bit of background on your role at human reso and maybe some of the conversations you’re having with some of the organizations that you support, and kind of why this abstract and these topics were intriguing to you?
Robin Schooling 03:36
Yeah, absolutely. So human reso is, is a full-service HR consulting firm. So we offer everything from HR and Payroll outsourcing and tech consulting and tech solutions that are kind of under our umbrella as well. We do RPO, we have contingent search, we we really need meet a vast array of needs, and personally, the marriage between myself and the work we do at human reso is, I think it’s perfect, because I’m I’ve long been all about kind of humanizing HR and humanizing the work experience. And I guess that’s sort of where I, you know, get on my soapbox and raise my fist sometimes. And so working with with the varied clients that we work with, and kind of communicating with them, you know, we get to do that because, you know, we focus overarching in the work that we do on, how do we empower people? How do we empower organizations? How do we make sure that their HR or their talent strategies, their people strategies and their people operations are integrated, seamlessly integrated into their business objectives and to their business into their vision? And so that’s really kind of what we set out to do, whether it’s no matter the industry, no matter the size of the organization that we’re working with. And so, you know, a lot of the things that we’re talking about today, I would say, you know, really, every one of them has come up in some way, shape or form, over the last especially, I’d say the last six months. I think as we you know to your point, we look, we like to look to the future, and we like to pontificate and make predictions in our industry, right? And it’s been an interesting end of 2024 as we look ahead to some of these things, I think I see Well, as we dive into them, I think we’ll see, I think, I think the labor market disruption, I’m kind of glad we’re starting with that, because I think that’s that’s an anchor in a lot of this stuff.
Jason Cerrato 06:02
Let’s take off on the journey. So want to start with a with a poll question. So the first poll question for the audience here is what is your biggest focus area for 2025 and we’ve given you a couple options here, addressing labor market disruptions, empowering internal mobility, shifting to skill based talent management, building a learning culture and harnessing technology to drive success. So these are the topics we plan to touch on today. And just wanted to see of these areas, which ones are kind of your key focus, and understand that you may be trying to address all of these, but if there was you had to choose one, and we had to lock you in, what would your choice be. I always love watching the poll live, because it makes me Yeah, one of the things that we talk about frequently in the conversations that we’re having is how you need to kind of think, manage and measure differently. And I think for all of these conversations, that’s a big underlying premise of this. A lot of these conversations aren’t necessarily new, but the challenge the way you approach them and then how you actually measure outcomes and success, are what’s being disrupted and turned upside down. So this is why, you know, we may be using some of the same words, but how we’re defining them and how we’re approaching them and the tools we’re using are all changing. Yes, so interesting to see the results here. Give it a couple more minutes. One more minute or two, if you had to take a guess, where do you think people will fall?
07:46
I think, just because I think the folks that we have sort of talked to about this, I think we might get a big, a big piece, a group saying, harnessing technology.
Jason Cerrato 08:02
Okay, let’s see. Let’s see where it landed. Oh, well, I was a three way tie. Three way tie, harnessing technology shifting to skill based talent management and empowering internal mobility. So I love that. I love that in many case, in many cases, they will overlap, and that just shows the connectivity between what we’re going to discuss today. Yeah. Okay, so let’s kick it off, addressing labor market disruptions and strategies to close the skills gaps, address industry shifts and attract and retain top talent, no matter what you read, no matter who you talk to, no matter what survey whole consultant white paper you’re downloading and printing and grabbing a cup of coffee to snuggle up with, attracting, attracting, retaining, understanding top talent is always at the top of the List. Always at the top of the list. And I think part of the problem is we’re seeing disruption in a variety of ways. And we’re seeing disruption traditionally within our four walls, just based off of discontent and burnout, within the way work is getting done. But we’re also seeing significant disruption, geopolitically, immigration in the labor market, with technology, with the way work is getting done, with the changing labor mix and the changing job mix, and all of this is happening all at once. Yes, right. We are definitely going through a shift, a big transformation. So I want to take that first piece first and talk about something that we just uncovered in our annual talent survey. So here at Eightfold, we do an annual talent survey, and as recently as the end of the summer, so August into September, we surveyed 500 HR leaders at the VP level and above at companies with 5000 or more employees across six different countries, and we asked them, you know, how do you feel about your efforts and your confidence that you’ve given tools and resources for your employees to grow in their roles, and With 75% confidence they felt they had done that. But we had also asked over 1200 employees full or part time in those same six countries, from that same audience that question, and 82% of them said they were looking actively for a new job. So regardless of what’s happening outside of the four walls within the organization, there’s a disconnect between effort and understanding and content and awareness of where I can go. So we’ve been kind of looking at this misalignment, kind of between all the best intentions and kind of understanding of who I am, what I can do, and where I can go, and trying to help organizations in making this meet in the same place in the future. But Robin, you’re not as close to this as we are. What is your reaction to this?
11:14
Yeah, and you know, again, we’re It’s this. It’s a perfect storm of all these things again happening at the same time, because we’re simultaneously at this moment where we have, we have employees saying, you know, I may be in this active search mode. And we have companies that, large companies. You know, we’re the ones that make the, you know, the papers and the headlines, more and more large companies. JP, Morgan Chase, just, you know, announced here the other day, right? Everybody’s come back to the office. So this whole group of job seekers that said, oh, I want to go and look for a new job for whatever reason, it’s professional development, it’s growth, it’s I don’t know what I want to do, how I need to get there, but there’s also this, oh my gosh, my current employer has changed some term or condition of my employment, and I’m no longer happy with that. So you’ve got those people going out there, and then you’ve got this uncertainty of, you know what’s going to happen, you know? We were kind of waiting through this uncertainty. What’s going to happen with the the elections. Well, now we’re, you know, now we got to get through the inauguration, and what’s really going to happen, you know? And so all of these things are happening at one time. What struck me though, with this, with this research that y’all did, is, once again, we have this disconnect of what, what we think. And I say we the collective we in HR, right? What we think we know, um, is, is not the reality when we go out and get that information from our employees. And there’s all I there’s always this disconnect on these sorts of topics. And why is that? How do, how do HR leaders get at, get at the truth earlier, before employees take their little feet and walk out the door.
Jason Cerrato 13:24
Yeah, and I think part of the shift that’s happening in the work that HR needs to do is, and this is part of technology enablement, and part of this move towards skills is skills is also empowered by data that this becomes increasingly continuous. So you’re saying, how do how do we know? How do we understand it’s breaking away from cycles and schedules that were tied to, in some cases, financial yes reasons, but in other cases, somewhat arbitrary calendar bandwidth, right? Just the ability to accomplish the work. Now, with technology enablement, you get more ability to get the work done and have it done continuously, where you can get the feedback, you can get the information, you can get the insight to understand exactly what are your people saying, what are they actually entering in their career development plans? How is the work changing? How is that aligning to their career development plans? Right? And all of this starts to feed into well, how does that need? How does that mean you need to adjust, potentially, your learning programs, or, how does that mean you need to adjust your career conversation or your or your pulse check ins as hiring managers or as HR managers, right? And
14:44
I think the really cool part about it, when you think about that, where we are now with with technology and with that data and that insight that we can get as a as an employer, as a company, to get that just in time, feedback and information. I mean, think about that’s that’s freaking cool, right, from what, what, what it used to be in the past. But we also need to maintain that I’m going to be a futurist, right? I’m gonna have that futurist outlook and be aware of what is potentially coming down the down the pike. We can’t be too much in the moment. Lose sight of, okay, maybe I do have to do some planning. I read an article yesterday, day before talk about timely Right? Um, from a from a group that just focuses on reporting on on education, and especially higher education. I forget their name, but they this article talked about, we are at this, this demographic cliff. We are at it. And they’ve been talking about this for a number of years, since, think it was 2007 ish when this was US based, when Americans stopped having started fewer babies coming in since 2007 not to, not to, you know, be like the owner of x, right? Who talks about that? You know, nothing to do with that. But we are, and so it’s been, we know this is coming. We are here, this coming fall will be we are losing 18 year olds. There will be fewer entrance into colleges and universities coming this, this fall than there have ever been for many, many years. And so colleges and universities, smaller ones already starting to close it. They’ve been, you know, losing enrollees and starting to close and and so, you know, eventually, of course, what that means we’re going to fewer graduates coming out down the road. Yet we’re going to still have jobs to fill. You know, shoe people will still be an issue unless we, you know, rethink immigration. So how does that come in? And so the estimate from the study was that by 2020, 4020, 39 somewhere in there, we’re gonna have, like, 15% fewer 18 year olds than there are now. So what does that do to our thinking? Well, one thing, it gets us thinking about, which I think we’ll dive into when we talk about skills, but it will get us thinking about, you know, degree requirements, certainly. But it is. It’s a it’s a sheer numbers thing. What? What role is technology going to is technology going to need to disrupt more and more jobs because we’re going to have fewer people, right? So, you know, yeah, it’s like we live in the moment. We have to address what we’re living right now. But you know, 1518, years from now, there’s a heck of a lot fewer people coming in, coming out of colleges than there are, yeah, today, you know.
Jason Cerrato 18:05
And this slide, I was looking at this kind of as, kind of within your four walls of your organization, almost. And it’s hard to think of it as the micro, but almost as the micro. And this next one was kind of as the macro. And I pulled this out of the World Economic Forum jobs report that came out last week, because this is kind of now looking at this, what’s happening in the world. And in a lot of the conversations I’ve had, we’ve been debating, will technology like generative AI replace workers or create jobs? And this is a little bit of an eye chart, but it’s kind of trying to show the purple boxes on the left are jobs that will be in their war and their words destroyed, and on on the right side, the green boxes are jobs that will be created. And what this shows is the Global Employment change by 2030 in the next five years, displaced, creating this labor market churn, yeah, where you have jobs, jobs that are going to be automated away, potentially, and jobs that will be created that potentially never existed before, right? Creating an entirely new structure of work, an entirely new skills mix. And when we talk about skills gap, we talk about redeployment. But you also saw the previous slide of people saying they’re looking for new work. We may not necessarily know as individuals what that new work is, or even as organizations, what that new work is, right? So this is when, when people said, Hey, Jason, what’s your prediction for 2025 I said, my prediction for 2025 is 2025 is going to be hard to predict.
19:52
Well, this, this, you know, because for a number of years I’ve watched year over year, as the World Economic Forum has kind of come out with this, the rise of technology and kind of their predictions around what jobs are going to look like in the future. And I And it’s fascinating to go back and look at, you know, the reports from 10 years ago and see how some things that, how things have come true, that they sound. But I think that this, you know, when you dive into and to think about what those jobs of the future, the future can be two years from now, right job of the future look like? It does get us thinking about, we talk about skill based hiring or upskilling or re skilling our current workers. It’s it takes us to that second step of what are the current skills, or, you know, skills that we need in our organization or in a group of jobs, but it’s also what are the future skills we need, and we need to make sure we’re thinking about that, because this type of information lets us know, you know, those jobs that will not be replaced or fully replaced, let’s say, by some sort of technology, are the jobs that require, you know, empathy and active listening and creativity and things of that nature, self awareness, you know, motivation, what not, you know, it’s those innately human characteristics, you know. So how do we how do we develop those? And what fascinates me when I think about that, is it’s often those are often the skills that you know back in the day, we are the soft skills, right? Sure, yeah, what does that? What does that mean? How do we think about skills? Yes, for now, but also for the future.
Jason Cerrato 21:57
And if you’re a organization or an HR leader looking at something like this, or trying to start rethinking or redesigning work, or looking at your jobs, this can become overwhelming. And you meant, you mentioned, you know, the jobs that will remain, or the skills that can be applied towards the new, the sustaining roles, right? And this makes me think, at the end of 2024 I attended the Gartner reimagine HR conference, and I myself am a Gartner alumni, so I always go back and try to take notes on what’s their latest thinking. And one of the keynotes, they were sharing some sample kind of leadership strategy from, I believe, the company was Walters Kluwer, and they were talking about this concept of, they were looking at it and how to tackle this in terms of the concept of dynamic jobs and static jobs. And they were saying dynamic jobs are jobs where things like generative AI and tech, technology will change the job entirely. That jobs are jobs where jobs where the work is going to get done differently, yeah, yeah, right. But even in that, the framing it as a static job doesn’t mean it’s not changing, also, right, right. So the whole point, the whole point of this is HR. People that are in this line of work thinking about work design and org design and Talent Management and talent acquisition need to get used to the fact that, if you’re just coming to grips with how your job in HR is changing, we have to understand how all of the functions and disciplines that we support are also changing, right? And how do we get visibility to that data and understand how that’s happening, because it’s happening, yep, whether we think it is or not.
23:52
And I had this thought a couple of weeks ago around the holidays. I don’t know where I saw I was, saw this online. Was this online discussion, and, like, you know, read it or something, I don’t know, following along. And someone was complaining, you know, as people tend to do online, right? And this message board, and someone was complaining, oh, I was out doing my holiday shopping and, oh, I was so frustrated, because while she was ringing me up the clock was, you know, on her phone, and, you know, so somebody was like, Well, did she was she rude? No, she said, hello to me. Did she bring you up correctly? Now she bring me up correctly? Made no, made no errors, but she was on her phone, and, you know, I really, you know, back in my day. You know, you didn’t do that, and it got me thinking about and that’s such a there’s a there’s an interaction that many of us have, and we have seen that interaction with clerks in the store change tremendously over time. You know, used to be not that long ago, but if you went to some sort of service establishment, a restaurant, store, whatever, you know, people used to get were fired if employees would be fired if their cell phone was sticking out of their pocket, right? I mean, that was just horrible. Now we expect them, yes, she was on her phone. But you know what? Her employer probably expects her to have her phone there, because there are work tools on that phone that she’s been required to download, and she needs to be on that phone to be able to do her job. And that has changed very quickly, and we haven’t as consumers, as the customers of these stores, we haven’t necessarily stopped to think about that or realize that. And so it’s as these things change so rapidly, and there’s just sort of an offshoot after effect of the job, the technology, how the person interacts with the technology. What that trickle down is, you know that that’s in our face every day, and we people don’t realize why that changed, how that’s changed that clerk is not being rude, a clerk is not being inattentive to you. This the way she has to do her job now has changed.
Jason Cerrato 26:23
Changed? Yeah, yeah. So we’re going to transition to the next topic around empowering internal mobility. And it’s funny, where I know of solutions that are delivered to through the phone, especially for desk list workers, where that’s where they’re getting that’s where they’re getting their training from. That’s where they’re getting their learning from. Or in some cases, the organizations are requesting feedback from the field through the phone in real time, right? But around empowering internal mobility, if they were developing an internal marketplace, the internal marketplace could also be delivered through the phone. Yeah. Many organizations are trying to develop this. Often talk about, first, how are they defining it? Because in many cases, people often just think, this is employees applying for jobs, yeah. And I think I this has a much broader definition, yeah, right. It really is. Could be projects. It could be, could be gigs. It could be a variety of different ways of mentoring and learning. It could be this whole concept through, like the, the Rob and Jesse Jason work without jobs, the John Boudreau, kind of, you know, thought leadership there with flowing towards flowing towards work and more organizational agility. But you know, this is something we’ve been talking about for 1020, years, this project based employment, yes, and there’s one way to think about it, when you think about freelancers or gig workers working on projects themselves, but within the construct of an organization, and how you do that on the same payroll, on the same paycheck, within the same four walls, real or virtual, still has been something people are trying to get their arms around before we jump into the few slides we have here. Do you have an immediate reaction to this topic, or maybe some of the conversations you’ve been having, yeah, no, it is.
28:25
It is yet another one of those things that is, I think people are still struggling with, how do we, how do we set this up to be robust and meaningful, beyond the some of the things that I think we’ll see on the side where we talk about, yeah, okay, we’re transparent with our job openings and yeah, you know, we’re letting people, you know, try out and a new gig or be mentored. I see it, I’ve, I’ve long called it the need to to adopt work and treat it as the Hollywood model, which is, yes, treating work as if we’re a Hollywood we’re making a movie, and we’re no longer in the studio system where everybody’s an employee of the studio. Right before I make a movie or a TV show or whatever, I bring together these, this, these talented people from, you know, different areas, bring them together, we make our movie or our TV show, and then they go on, and they go make the next movie and and it’s, it’s thinking about it That way, which is hard for organizations to do. And it, and I think where I’ve seen it, where people, where organizations are find it easier to do, are those who have been used to either allocating people’s costs in some sort of labor model already, right? Oh, you’ve got billable hours. Oh, that’s easy enough to move you here, there and the other work, or where they have multi jobs, if you will. So I’ve worked for several over the course of my career, several casinos, and so we had restaurants, and we had, you know, you know, all the bells and whistles, right? And it, but it was very easy, because we could develop, you wouldn’t think of that in that sort of fast paced, you know, service oriented, sort of organization. But we developed this internal without even calling it, that we were very good at internal mobility and developing people and helping them get skill sets that they wanted in some other area, because it was easy enough for us to say, okay, Susie, you want to, you want to learn what it’s like to work, you know, in in security, and instead of, you know, in food and beverage, okay, you Know, as long as you have the right gaming badge and you can get whatever we can have you start, you know, maybe you you’re multi job, we called it, right? You get a shift or two over here, and if you don’t like it, no big deal. You come back and stay working in food and beverage. I mean, so those are the types of organizations that I think have done this for years, but don’t even think about calling it internal mobility.
Jason Cerrato 31:28
Yeah, you know, I used to lead talent acquisition for a big conglomerate, and it had multiple divisions, and I always used to love to read the leadership executive announcements on our internet, and they would always provide kind of their career history, and there usually was they had worked in multiple divisions, and almost every time they may have done an international assignment. And as part, as part of that, we would have these development programs that would try to repeat that and develop, you know, leadership rotational assignments, and go across divisions, and maybe have an international assignment, all these different things. And I think part of what we’re trying to enable with some of these new capabilities and new technologies is the ability to do some of that at scale. Yes, right. So how do you unlock that for people, and make the organization more transparent for what paths they could have, yes, and maybe break down some of those requirements for some untraditional ways of achieving that, if someone can’t do the International, international stint, or can’t relocate their family or all those different things. And funny, you mentioned the Hollywood model at Eightfold here we have a very popular name in the Hollywood movie making industry, who’s a client, and we offer talent acquisition and Talent Management and contingent staffing functionality, and they approach it that way, right? They when they’re working on building a movie, you know, whether you have the key grip or the craft services, or all those things, people that are part of your organization, but then you also bring people that are brought to the project, and then move on to the next project. So the way they look at talent is very kind of dynamic and agile, yep, yep.
33:22
And I, you know, and I think another aspect of of strengthening one’s internal mobility, again, is to kind of look to the to the, you know, the world of consulting, right, where as an organization, you know, if I wouldn’t, in order to allow people to go try something new, or go take this, you know, go on a rotation or trying a new assignment for six months or whatever, as an organization, in order to allow people to do that, I need to have built An internal bench, if you will, right? So that you know Bob in accounting, can, can can step away and go for 10 months to marketing or whatever. Bob’s work still needs to be done. Do I have that bent bench strength, right? Do I have folks, other folks I can deploy there? And so it’s thinking about that because it’s overcoming then there’s a cultural component to it, which is the managers of the Bobs of the world tend to want to hoard who they have, and that’s a big thing to overcome when you’re looking at saying we really want to promote and be this, this culture where, you know, we develop and we grow people and we we let them, you know, try new things and all of that. The first group you’ve got to convince and get on board are the managers in there who feel that, you know, well, I’ve hired somebody, and I’m going to lose them and they try to hoard, yep.
Jason Cerrato 35:04
So this goes back to that same survey that we mentioned that we conducted, and this was asking those employees to provide their levels of importance against their levels of satisfaction with the tools that were provided. And one of the things that jumps out here is the quadrant on the top left are the things that were the most, the most important to them, but we’re also the lowest in satisfaction. Yeah. And if you look at the topics, they’re all related to promotion and mobility, yeah. So opportunities for promotion, transparent promotion and career development process, the opportunities to pivot into new roles, opportunities to work on projects outside of their existing roles. So this is around the ability to have the opportunity to see over the wall right, to see and understand how they map to the organization. And I think part of this deals with communication, part of this deals with transparency, part of this deals with how these job ladders and job families and competencies have been built historically. And you know, if people are having trouble understanding how they were, how they fit to the organization today, and the organization is having trouble predict where it’s going to be in the future. People are having trouble predict where they’re going to be in the organization in the future, right? So all of this leads to that, that disconnect on that previous slide. So one of the things that I’ve been talking about, and I kind of live this personally, is I think it’s this shift from these strategies around pipelines, because back when I was leading talent acquisition, I had a specific remit to deal with critical skill and diversity pipeline strategies, yes, and I think even that name pipeline specific outcome in a specific direction, going to a specific place. And I think when you’re talking about internal mobility, and you’re talking about a marketplace, and you’re thinking beyond jobs, and you’re breaking down kind of how these promotion based career architectures have been built. You start to enable things like more of a portfolio strategy that allows for this type of movement, especially as organizations are increasingly becoming horizontal and starting to remove layers. But I think the other reason why I’m thinking along this way is because that previous chart from World Economic Forum of those green jobs that are going to be created are increasingly these green circles that are not visible today, that are going to appear in between jobs, in between functions like, I think the jobs of the future are increasingly hybrid roles that may not exist today, that are something in between HR and IT and finance, or in between ops and sales and supply chain, or some mix of functions and technologies, Right? I you know, maybe it’s caught my ear because of the work I do, but I’m hearing that one of the new roles on the leadership team is a chief transformation officer. What what department or discipline does that role come from? Is that an HR job? Is that an operations job? Is that an IT job? Is that a finance job? It’s probably a mix of all of that. So I think shifting the mindset and kind of creating this structure that allows for the agility is a part of, kind of this new operating system.
38:50
And, I think, you know, one of the, one of the cool things that you know, smaller organizations get to do. And you know, because they’re just they’re more nimble, right? And as you’re growing and you’re adding positions, you know, it’s a whole different world, and you’ve got 10,000 employees, and you know, you are what you are. But I think out of that and out of that portfolio concept, comes more and more people, like more and more employees, candidates or existing employees, creating their own jobs as well. And so I think it’s organizations, um being open to that part of that portfolio concept is the powers that be, whether that be the department leaders, whether that be, you know, HR, where, where they’re they are in the mix of those conversations finance, when they’re budgeting these things is, is as part of that internal mobility? Do you have the openness for your employees to come and say, I want to create something. I want to create this job that doesn’t exist. And you listen to them and you maybe realize that is, that’s one of those invisible green circles there.
Jason Cerrato 40:18
Yeah. So that brings us into our next section, which is kind of shifting to this skills based talent management approach, and kind of looking at this through the lens both from the employee experience as well as from the organization experience. And I’m going to go back to our friends over at the World Economic Forum, I pulled another chart from their report, kind of starting at the macro but this was their chart around disruption to skills. And again, this was progression over time, so from 2016 to 2025 but this 2025 kind of bar on the right hand side was from a 2024 survey. But this just shows the evolution of kind of the mix of skills with core skills, which will remain the same, and skills that will change. And I think even with this turbulence, this 2025 bar is coming from 2024 before we saw kind of the expedited adoption and and expedited learning of generative AI, yeah, right. We didn’t think it would take off this fast for all the use cases and outcomes and and the just the exponential way that it’s learning, right? So I think, I think if we were to look at this today with real data, real time data, that disruption may even be more severe, but I think this is why going back to that misalignment, moving to more continuous strategies, and learning from the data and getting feedback in real time is so important. Right to break from the cyclical and the annual. I was having a conversation with Betsy Summers, who you know from Forrester, who leads, who leads some of their thought leadership there. And we were talking about, when you think about the concept of skills intelligence and talent intelligence, it creates the ability to not just kind of lead from top down, but learn from your organization from the bottom up, yes, and kind of test and retest and kind of meet the business in the middle. Right? What’s your reaction to that? Do you think that’s something realistic, or do you think that’s challenging?
42:40
No, I do think that’s realistic. And I think that that becomes, that’s like the first step, really, and it’s almost, it’s almost like saying it’s okay to do, you know, you make this plan. How am I going to start sort of adjusting, right, and thinking about skills? Yeah, I need to have a plan. Because, okay, maybe I need to go and present it to my, you know, C suite, whatever. We’re gonna start going down this path. But it’s like beta testing. It’s like a pilot, right? And, and so starting with those, those steps, there’s, there’s a department, or there’s a group of jobs, or there’s a, you know, a program that’s in a part of the business, maybe that’s hard to recruit for, has high turnover, whatever it is, right? And so I think it’s, I think that becomes the first step, that’s the first hurdle, is, as I start to explore skill based hiring, it’s okay to start small. And you know, instead of biting off the whole oh my gosh, let me create the skill taxonomy for, you know, the 3000 jobs I have in my organization. Okay, let’s focus on whatever you know, you know this group in it, or whatever it might be.
Jason Cerrato 44:08
And with skills intelligence, you can do things like dynamic career pathing, where based off of people’s profiles, and as they’re adding skills, they can start using the technology to develop these career plans. But those career plans aren’t static, and this is no longer being done in a spreadsheet. So as their profiles change and as their skills compile, it’s also being done in a data set, where as the roles are changing, and the roles evolve. All of this becomes a living, breathing thing. So what happens is it’s also showing them how to get there and providing learning opportunities and mentoring opportunities. But as the journey changes, it’s always showing them how it’s changing and what’s in it for them, and also potentially introducing those new roles that may or may not exist yet. And it doesn’t have to be a posted role, it could be something the organization’s planning, planning,
45:13
and I think that that that is so key to the conversation around skills based talent. Because, as we started, when we started talking about this, right, x number of years ago, skills based hiring, skills based hiring. And yes, that’s part of it, you know, because that’s part of shifting, oh, maybe I don’t need a degree, because I’m looking at skills whatever. You know, the degrees are, you know, perhaps not. You know the be all and end all, whatever. So we start, we think about skills based. Hiring becomes the default. But it is. It doesn’t end with hiring, right? You know, to your point and and creating that, that company you know ethos where you know that skills are developed and championed and understood because they are living and breathing. And we can, we can dive in and take a look at that and understand that evolution while it’s happening.
Jason Cerrato 46:22
So I think that’s part of, kind of the next section around building a learning culture. And in the past, I’ve heard this kind of phrased as, how do you from a from an employee perspective or a personal perspective, how do you learn to earn? And I just saw this a day or two ago from kind of an organizational perspective, how do you build a learning culture to learn to avoid the churn, right? So use whatever rhyming technique or liberation or phrase you want, but I think this is a big part of what we’re talking about. But also when you start to do this, and you use this data, and you use this in real time, and you’re using it with a dynamic tool like we just saw. You’re also not necessarily pushing out learning. You start to get a pull of requests for learning and programming, for what people need, based off of how this mapping and how these connections are being drawn, right? So this starts to operate very differently from that same annual survey that we did, we had 69% of HR leaders told us that they’re concerned about the rapid pace of change and evolving employee needs. So I think that’s why this ability to have the data and have the feedback and have the input is so important, but also why it’s important to recognize and understand some of these economic factors, these market factors and these organizational factors that are happening all the Same time, yes, for the organizations that you’re dealing with, how do they avoid not boiling the ocean? Do they try to break this up into small pieces? Is there something that they maybe address first?
48:12
Or, yeah, I, you know, I think I see that more and more actually, you know, and I’m thinking in different, different iterations. There’s one, one group I’m working with right now that it’s, it’s, it’s a technology implementation. But of course, as we know, with with technology, with a with work technology implementation comes, you know, it’s the, it’s the change management piece. It’s the, you know, the pre work that gets done all that. And you know, the beauty of it is this organization realized now, do they? Would it be lovely to have everything ready and turned on by, you know, June 1? Let’s say, sure. But the reality was, okay, let’s take our time. Let’s think it through, because there’s this pre work and this ongoing work as part of the process, so that there’s kind of these different iterations to the project plan as we go down this path. And so it’s not, here it is. Let’s launch, let’s, you know, implement whatever this operational change, or a technology, or whatever, um, that it’s okay to kind of do this thoughtful approach, spread it out a little bit more, and realize you’re going to do some different iterations along the way. And so I think that that becomes part of Yes, whether it’s a system, whether it’s a process, whether it’s a wholesale kind of philosophical change that, you know, yeah, have a plan, but be be agile. You don’t have to do it all at once. Yes, you know HR leader, you may you especially when somebody’s new at an organization, this is new HR leaders are, are the best and the worst. They’re their own worst enemy. Sometimes, because they’re new to the organization, they’re new to their role. They are so excited. They’ve just come out of an interview with all these things that that are priorities, you know, from the C suite, and they’re so excited because they’re the person chosen to come in and lead this. And I’ve had many conversations with HR leaders over time where I said, Okay, calm down. You know, this all doesn’t need to be done in quarter one or quarter two. While you’re there, you need to stop and map it out. And so, yeah, they get it’s easy to be overwhelmed.
Jason Cerrato 50:53
So there’s a there’s a key word you said there around iterations, the new kind of a from continuous of evolution of the idea, the concept, the process, right? So moving from kind of product managing and program managing, something that you designed in a lab that’s going to live forever, to kind of iterating a process that takes different shapes and evolves based on feedback and getting information. And, you know, it’s, it’s okay to kind of take different shapes and kind of see the world as it’s taking form, yes, versus, however, everything had to be neat and tidy and eyes dotted and T’s crossed in the HR world that I grew up in, right? Yes. Getting back to your kind of senior leader comments, there one of the things that also came out of our annual survey. We had asked those 500 HR leaders, how frequently are you involved in overall business strategy? 52% of them said they’re frequently involved in overall business strategy with their C suite peers. And then we had asked, How frequently are you collaborating with your C suite peers? And 50% of them said they’re frequently collaborating with their C suite peers. And then we had asked, How well do you feel your strategy is aligned with business objectives. 44% said they felt that their strategy was so strongly aligned with business objectives, which isn’t that great, right? Obviously, you’d want it to be higher, yeah. But the key thing, the key, the key thing that we found in that survey was across that population, only 18% of that audience answered in those buckets to all three, right? So the misalignment around kind of involvement and collaboration and alignment, right? So all of these things are weighing on the execution. So nature, the iterations, the learning culture, right? All of this is kind of dealing with uncertainty. Is a big part of what HR is going to be working with in 2025 with that, I do want to move on to kind of harnessing technology to drive success as we as we head home here, I do have one last poll. Where do you see technology and AI making the biggest impact in your organization. So we have a couple options here, recruitment and TA, upskilling and re skilling, talent management and retention, reducing bias and improving decision making or optimizing workflows and productivity. Again, we get to watch the horse race here, if people can, that’s right. Yep, take a moment and pick a pick a horse. Where do you see technology and AI making the biggest impact in your organization?
53:58
The all the recruiters and TA professionals on the call are cheering for a to come through at the front.
Jason Cerrato 54:04
Do you have a horse in this race? Robin?
54:07
I think we are still, by and large, optimizing workflows and productivity.
Jason Cerrato 54:16
We’re still there. I’m not sure if our audience will pick that, but I think there’s definitely a large audience in the organizational HR world that would pick that let’s See how we did. We have optimizing workflows and productivity to the front.
54:43
Look at me. Look at that. I win.
Jason Cerrato 54:47
But I think part of this is, I think part of this is, it’s the immediate promise of the technology. I think part of this is people are tasked with doing more with less. Yes, right, especially in HR, we’re all working with smaller teams, even relative to scale, if organizations are growing, the ratio is smaller, right? Yeah. So part of part of this is, it definitely is finding the right use cases and understanding the problem to solve. I think part of this is using the technology in a more continuous way. I think it’s understanding that there are different flavors of AI. I think it’s understanding that there’s different layers to this. I think to bring it home more specifically for us here at Eightfold, we have, we have kind of this concept of guiding the process with the user experience, but then the data layer underneath and this becoming a dynamic, living, breathing thing, where you have the skills profile, you have recommendations, you have a future role, but underneath it, you Have this curated data set that’s informed by talent intelligence and skills intelligence and market insights. So it’s incorporating the macro and the micro. It’s incorporating the hopes and wishes of the person with kind of the strategies and needs of the organization, and it’s trying to bring these things together in concert, to align in a more agile way so they have a greater chance of meeting in the future. And I think this is increasingly how organizations are going to have to operate in an uncertain future. Because when we talk about, you know, short, shorter shelf life. There’s a shorter shelf life on everything. The windows of predictions and plans and strategies are getting shorter and shorter because the iterations and the gaps are getting broader faster.
56:55
And I think we’re this, this is like, this is like, the so exciting part about using technology. And so I think even going back to that survey where where I see the it’s moving faster than we really even thought it would a couple years ago. But the Let’s optimize workflows and productivity and all the factors, all the things that go into why that’s happening, that is happening very quickly, like within organizations, within HR operations, right the adoption of technology and AI into processes and to adjust things is happening now this. The things that that Eightfold can do this is people are getting to this quicker than ever now, because we’re getting past the All right, I can see very quickly we’ve adopted an HR, okay, The possibilities of technology and AI and seeing the what it can do is that’s where we are, and we’re this is being adopted quickly.
Jason Cerrato 58:10
So I appreciate your participation in joining us for the conversation, Robin, this has been a lot of fun. We would love to do it again for you and have you join us. And thank you for everyone who joined us on the other side of the camera here, appreciate everyone that’s listened along or people that may watch.
