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Welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us. For the webcast, Talent-centered design: A blueprint for success in the digital era. Sponsored by Eightfold, this webcast has been pre-approved for HRCI and SHRM credits. Please be sure to attend the complete webcast. In order to receive your credits, you will receive an email from hr.com within two business days, it will include the certification credit information. You may also log into your account and view the credits that you have received. If you have any questions during the webcast, click on Q&A in your webinar controls and type them in, and now it’s my pleasure to turn it over to our presenter, Jason Cerrato.
Jason Cerrato 00:55
Hello everybody. Thank you, Kathy, appreciate the introduction, and it’s a great honor to be here with HR.com I’m excited to be presenting to you on this topic of talent-centered design. As mentioned, I’m with Eightfold, and I’m the Vice President of talent center transformation, and I really want to spend the time with you talking about this concept of talent-centered design, because it really is a different approach, or at least a different way of looking at a lot of processes and practices in the HR space as a result of a lot of the challenges and transformations that organizations are trying to accomplish with the rapid pace of change and New ways of work that HR leaders are trying to implement in their organizations. So in my role at Eightfold, I spend a lot of time working with organizations and traveling around the country and around the world, having conversations like the one we’re going to have today with talent leaders, because everyone is trying to address challenges around delivering to the business, potentially shifting and pivoting in their industry, or dealing with mergers and acquisitions, or dealing with talent shortages, or the competitive nature of talent acquisition. And in all of this, we are built. We are building the future of work as we are dealing and living in the future of work. So we are having these discussions together, as everyone is on this journey at the same time. So we’re lit. We’re living through this together and learning together. So appreciate you joining me today for the hour as we walk through this discussion and kind of share some of the things that I’ve been learning and the way we address this at Eightfold with some of our technology. But as mentioned, you know, what’s driving a lot of this discussion is this need for supporting business reinvention as a result of the digital reinvention that we’ve gone through over the last decade and now facing talent reinvention. You know, we have changed the way we work. We’ve changed where we work. We’ve changed how we work. Organizations have been disrupted, not just through the pandemic, but through technologies like artificial intelligence and especially generative AI. But think about it, hybrid work, asynchronous work, all of this is changing in, you know, real time before our eyes. And if you’re an HR leader, a talent leader, you are in the center of all of these discussions, and everything is on the table to be reinvented, explored, examined, and it’s not just technology, it’s leadership, it’s culture, it’s communication, it’s management, It’s how you measure success. It’s the policies and practices. Everything is on the table to be redesigned. So these are why these discussions are occurring, and why it’s so exciting to be in HR and working on these initiatives, but also why it’s so challenging because all of this is happening at the same time. So appreciate you taking the time to join me today as we walk through some of these topics. But that’s also why there’s been a lot of discussion around these demands for skills based strategies. It’s a new way to address some of these challenges as a result of the disruption, as a result of innovation, as a result of reimagining work, but it’s why everyone has been talking about it, whether it’s at the World Economic Forum or you’re one of the consultancies you know, Mercer, Deloitte. Your PwC, you name it, they’re all talking about ways they’re seeing skills based approaches, applied or new technologies, helping organizations uncover skills based strategies or skills based capabilities. And that’s part of how things like talent intelligence, which is what we do at Eightfold, has risen in prominence, especially in the HR space, in the HR technology space, it’s also been part of the discourse, especially here in North America. Several states have gone to skills based hiring, especially in 2024 and you know, in 2024 you have things like the Deloitte global human capital Trends report talking about how work is changing and increasingly becoming decoupled from the ways we’ve traditionally organized work and the way we’ve traditionally classified jobs, so as a result, looking at kind of the ways work is being done through a skills based lens is increasingly giving organizations ways to try to examine how this is changing in real time and redesign that work for the future. So I think this is why this is such a hot topic, and why everyone is trying to get their arms around this, but also why some organizations are finding this transformational, while at the same time, some organizations are having a hard time getting a foothold in this and potentially spinning their wheels, because there’s A variety of different approaches, a variety of different technologies, and not all of those things are the same. The other thing is that, you know, we’ve been constantly thinking about a jobs marketplace, but increasingly we are now looking at a skills marketplace, and this is leveraging the granularity of skills with the power of AI to understand those skills in real time. Because if you think about it, we have you’ve always been looking at the supply and demand, but when you think about demand, we’ve often been thinking about that in the construct of jobs and openings and supply in the context of people and talent, but if you break it down into skills, you now have granularity of what are those things made up of, and what are the different elements you can use to potentially address those things in new ways? Right? Are those demands? That always needs a job, right? And is that supply always a traditional worker, or can that be done in new ways? And where are you finding those resources? Are they internal? Are they external? Is it a traditional worker? Is it a contingent worker? Or can some of these things potentially be automated. So in today’s workforce, this granularity of skills with real time data is giving organizations a variety of potential strategies for how they’re addressing redesigning work and understanding how to respond to the needs of the business faster with greater agility in real time. So what we wanted to do was we wanted to partner with the hr.com team and see if we could engage you in some polls. So we throw up a poll here to see where you are on your own respective journey. So here’s the first poll question, where is your organization on the journey to becoming skills based. And I’ll give you a few moments here to see if you can respond and click one of the radio buttons. We have a few options here, exploring or planning or implementing, maturing or optimizing. And I’ll give you a few moments to respond. You and as we wait for those results. I think you know, one of the things is not everybody is in the same place, and that’s why it’s important to attend sessions like this and and listen and learn from each other, but also, depending on where you are in the organization or what industries you’re in, there are some that have been early movers and some that are just starting out on this journey, and you can see potentially what some have done to apply some of these, some of these technologies, as potential pace setters or trailblazers. So as expected, you know, there’s a lot of you in the audience here that are still exploring 55% some are. Planning. So thank you for joining us. If you’re planning, we have 5% that are implementing, 10% that are maturing. So appreciate your joining and 5% that are optimizing. So again, this is a continuum and a journey, but the other part about this is with the technology, the capability, the availability of data, and this concept of doing this in real time, a lot of these processes shift from being annual and cyclical to increasingly continuous. So those stages increasingly become a continuous evolution as well. One of the things that I forgot to mention is a little bit about me. Yes, I’m part of the Eightfold team, but in my background, I’ve also been a talent acquisition leader, leading talent acquisition for a Fortune 50. I’ve also spent some time as an industry analyst. As a result, I’ve been talking about this topic and studying this topic for quite some time, and I often keep up to date with what’s being said in the space and look at the analyst firms and what’s the latest research. One of the places that I often keep up to date with is Gartner. I myself am a Gartner alum, and one of the things that they say in their research, especially around becoming skills based, or taking a skills based approach, is the need for a dynamic approach. And part of that is because if you’re thinking about becoming skills based, and you think about the employee life cycle and your HR tech stack, there is skills information coming from the entire employee life cycle, and there are now skills coming from a variety of sources across your HR tech stack. So the whole point of this is it’s no longer this goal to try to find which is the source it becomes. How do you enable your organization to gather that data from across the life cycle and from all of those sources, and find a way to put it into a central place that can make sense of that all, a sense of all that data, and create, as they refer to it here, as this AI enabled skills engine. And what this approach and their recommendation refers to is creating this dynamic use of AI to continuously Hone, update and learn from skills data in real time. So that way, as skills evolve, as your talent moves, as the work changes, you’re gaining this real time understanding from all of these various inputs. But the other thing about this diagram that catches my attention is you’ll see the turquoise and the teal. The inputs here are talent and work, and not necessarily jobs. And we’ll get back to that in a second. But if you think about this, this is this AI enabled skills engine, creating a dynamic approach leveraging AI. The other part of their research that caught my attention is around how organizations have historically applied skills to the greatest impact. And one of the things about this piece of research on the right hand side shows that, as humans, we’re not very good at predicting and if we try to predict the future, we’re actually not very good and accurate at predicting the future, and when we do so, we’re not very good as a result in applying those predictions. As a matter of fact, what their research found was we actually are better at applying our reaction to the future. And if you can see here in their chart, you know the reaction to data proved more powerful than predicting the data. And what was the most effective was taking a dynamic approach where you combined the predictive and reactive approach, using AI to combine those methods and react and predict in a combined way to information in real time and continuously adjust and continuously react and continuously predict. So that way, this becomes a dynamically evolving, continuously learning process. And as a result, the resulting learnings are more readily applied and more valuable. So you know this dynamic approach is something that is being recommended and posited by the analysts, but it’s also increasingly being enabled by technology like AI. The other part about this is when you think about a skills based approach, skill. Are more than data points, and context matters. So this is also something that’s enabled by AI, because if you think about it, there’s a lot of organizations and a lot of consulting consultancies that have helped with mapping skills to jobs, and that’s how we’ve worked, and maybe our traditional way of working, but increasingly, with the pace of change, and especially going forward with the impact of generative AI, increasingly this is what the world looks like, especially in dynamic organizations. I was just talking with an organization this morning that is removing levels and increasingly becoming horizontal. And we’ve always known that work looks like this, but increasingly organizations are looking like this, and what really is powerful is when you can map skills to people in context, and really not just rely on what a job description says, but what is actually happening in the work that’s being done. Because the way work is getting done and the demands of the work that is required are changing and evolving at a faster pace than how we’ve kept up with job descriptions. You know, job descriptions have always been a reflection of the skills that were used. You know, people and the work they’re doing in real time have always been the source of the skills in an organization. It’s that relationship and that context of skills and people and work that truly are the source of skills. Jobs and job descriptions have always been a reflection of skills. So it’s this kind of concept of lagging data and leading data, and using skills map to people in context gives organizations the ability to get at that leading data. So really, what skills based approaches are really trying to get at is understanding context in a sea of data. And I’ll give you just a couple quick examples. I like to use examples and try to make it simple so that I can understand it. If you think about it in organizations, coffee is a skill if you’re an organization that is an organization that potentially serves coffee, and coffee means something if you’re a barista serving coffee, but it also means something if you’re an organization that’s buying or procuring coffee, right? So coffee could mean something if you’re a buyer in the supply chain, coffee could also mean something if you’re a software programmer. So if you think about it, it’s not enough just to have the word coffee as a skill. It’s the context of coffee and the role and the job and the department and the talent profile in context that means different things. So it’s understanding context and a sea of data and in different contexts, anything can be a skill, but it’s also that skill is not just a data point. It becomes a relationship in context with the work and the worker and the profile and the environment and all of these things take on different components of understanding in an organization. The other thing is that this is how these skills turn into more than just data points. They turn into skills clusters and skill relationships. So it’s turning data points into context and understanding. So talent intelligence turns data points into data patterns, so you move beyond keyword matching and semantic understanding to contextual understanding and that predictive success. But this is also how you know talent and job knowledge starts to expand and become Career Knowledge, right? And the understanding of an organization or an industry can become talent intelligence, and you can look at talent as a broader concept of an industry, an organization, a career, and look at this in a variety of relationships. And it’s not just one dimension or two dimensions or three dimensions, it’s 100 possible dimensions. But all of that is enabled with the capability of things like AI. What’s also happening is this is being powered in real time. So you’re getting this concept of dynamic understanding and dynamic mapping, so it’s making sense of data in real time. So another example of this is, if you think about it, the concept of directions. I’m of a certain age where, when I was learning to drive, I had to know how to get places on my own. But then there was this advancement of this capability of things like MapQuest, where you can plug in an address and get a report out of directions, right? Then we had this functionality of GPS, right? You plug it into the cigarette lighter in your car, and basically you’d put a destination, and using GPS positioning, it would help you with that destination, and maybe along the way, it would give you additional information around, you know, places to get gas. But. But it was all based on a predetermined destination where we are now. Are things and tools like Waze or Google Maps, where this is real time mapping of skills. But the other part of it is using a variety of data points, such as other users that are ahead of you on the path, such as you as a dynamic data point, and such as time, place, scheduling a variety of things. And this is dynamic mapping that’s potentially adjusting a variety of things. So using the ability to process data quickly, using the ability to collect data from other users, using the ability to adjust the inputs from the environment and the variety of surroundings to create a dynamic understanding of the data around you in real time. If you can follow my thinking here, that’s kind of a nice, simple example of what’s happening with talent intelligence and what’s happening with kind of using skills as that granular, granular understanding of kind of skills in your industry, in your organization, in your talent in real time. I think we have another poll here, so if we can queue up the poll, how are you currently mapping skills in your organization? Are you doing this manually? Are you using some type of software? Are you using an internal database? Are you leveraging some type of AI solution? Is there an external service that you’re partnering with, or do you not have a formal process yet, or maybe potentially multiple solutions? But are you currently going down the road of trying to map the skills in your organization. I’ll give you a few moments here to try to answer this question. You have some manual tracking, some HR software, some internal databases, 63% no formal process, not surprising. But also it shows that, you know, this is still somewhat new in the space, but also, you know, there’s a variety of options here in the tech stack and we still are on a journey here. What’s happening in space is everyone’s trying to examine their talent through a deeper lens. And when you’re thinking about becoming skills based, what you’re really talking about is getting closer to an organizational view of your talent. And if you think about the tools you’ve been using, your HCM suite, your applicant tracking system, a lot of them have been organized and built around jobs and org charts. When you’re looking to get at skills you really need to get closer to your talent. And that starts this conversation around more talent-centered design over the last few years, from a talent acquisition perspective, there’s been a heavy focus around job descriptions and breaking them down into work and tasks to get at skills. You know, this came in the late 2010s especially as talent acquisition got very competitive, and everyone was going after the same roles as part of digital transformation, and the cost of talent went through the roof, and everyone was going after the same roles and trying to figure out new ways to do this. Do we change our employee value proposition? Do we go after CRMs and campaigns? Do we drive candidate experience? But a big part of this also said, Maybe we look at skills and figure out, do we diversify the skills profiles and look at skill adjacencies and try to do some of this? So this started a few years ago. From a talent management perspective, we also started looking at internal talent marketplaces. We shifted from simply looking at performance and promotions to start to look at mobility, right? How do we hire from within? Drive cross pollination, move internal mobility and look internal first, and then that started to expand into discussions around proficiency, right? How do we develop it? What does it look like? How do we speed that up for speed to productivity? This is really trying to get at what is that profile of the skills makeup we’re trying to invest in and we’re trying to develop, but also what is, what is that proficiency we need for the future of our organization? At the same time? And we were looking at, you know, job descriptions and marketplaces. We also had a heavy emphasis on de and I at the end of the 2010s as people started looking at their job requirements, to say, were we setting up potentially unnecessary barriers, where our job requirements were potentially inflated? And we looked at degree requirements. Were degrees truly required for certain roles or were we setting up unnecessary barriers for inclusion? And people started looking at skill requirements. When you break it down into skills, then you can start to look at other things, like skill adjacencies, capability based on the potential to learn and learnability, and you know, one or two steps removed, how fast could someone upskill or reskill into some other areas as a result of doing that, you open up the audience for consideration, and by opening up the audience for consideration, it has natural impact on diversity, equity and inclusion as A result, but all of this can be driven through this skills based lens, getting closer to a view of talent. But I love this fourth column here, around what does this mean for employee experience? You know, we’ve had a heavy focus around experience at work, with employee engagement surveys, trying to get at sentiment and as part of digital transformation, we’ve had a focus on experience with work. You know, what tools do you have to use? How do you get your job done, especially with remote or hybrid work, or with AI or virtual assistants? But as part of this kind of skills based approach, you can also try to look at understanding your talent, or helping your employees and your talent understand your organization to drive better experience from work. So what meaning Am I deriving from working at this organization? Does my organization know everything I have to contribute? Or do I know how my skills align to the organization, or if I’m trying to develop myself, do I know which skills to develop to align with where my business is headed? And how do all of this come together in a way, whereas I prepare for my future, it’s better aligned with where my business is going, so that the two of these things are more likely to align in the future. You know, we have an organization that we partner with that uses our technology to do some of this, where they’re using that concept of an internal marketplace and and personalized talent management combined with skills based talent acquisition to guide, you know, employees with personalized career paths, while at the same time driving skills based talent and business strategy in the hopes that those things come together as the business moves towards the future. And they’ve called that program harmony, right? How do they make those two things come together and a greater likelihood that they meet in the same place in the future? I love that. Just a nice little example. So part of this is around, how do you accomplish this? So we’ve talked about this concept of talent intelligence, and the use of AI. Talent intelligence is a broad topic. It’s a hot topic in the HR tech space, and in the HR space at Eightfold, we define it a certain way, because talent intelligence can mean a lot of things to a lot of people, and talent intelligence also takes a variety of shapes. It could be the product, it could be the function, it could be an entire category for us. We refer to purpose built AI insights and automation that’s derived from our technology leveraging your organizational data combined with our ability to bring market data and a globally curated data set combined with user interactions that are driven on a technology platform like Eightfold, to gain a dynamic understanding of talent in the context of work, as we’ve been discussed, been discussing, and all of this is aided by the fact that this is occurring across all the stages of the talent life cycle. So for us, what this creates is this understanding of talent in the context of work. And as I shared with you that definition, this is kind of a visual depiction of that. On the left hand side you have those various inputs, enterprise data, that market data and public sources, and kind of the third leg of the stool, those user interactions, and what those three things do, in essence, if you remember, we talked about that Gartner research, those three things do is they create this kind of regenerative wheel where you are making better sense of your existing organizational data. You’re comparing and infusing that with information from your industry. Community and aggregated, anonymized information across a variety of data sets, but then also potentially feeding that with real time understanding of what’s happening with your users, right? What are some insights and suggestions and recommendations coming from the decisions being made in your organization, the updates occurring on your employees, talent profiles, the decisions being made in your hiring process, the information sitting on your succession plans. What’s all that information happening in the context of your organization that, when combined with this data, can feed kind of the understanding of skills to create this concept of talent intelligence. And on the right hand side, it shows you how that intelligence plays out. And what it does is it creates intelligence for both the individual and for the organization. And as a result, this is how this concept of talent intelligence is often described as creating a win win, because in this kind of concept of being regenerative, regenerative, it creates not only personalization, but continuous learning for all of the touch points in the individual experience, but also all of the decisions and processes in the organizational experience. So as I’m an employee or a candidate, as I’m looking for jobs, as I’m trying to understand my career, as I’m potentially looking to move around the organization or looking for training or mentoring, but also as I’m a leader in the organization, and I’m trying to figure out, how do I source for talent, how do I market my organization to my talent audience. How do I do workforce planning, how do I unlock and seed a very powerful internal talent marketplace? Or how do I do continuous succession planning? Or how do I prepare to do a re org or a redeployment of talent, especially if my business is being disrupted, or I’m going through a merger and acquisition or or if I’m applying, you know, generative AI and it’s redesigning the way work is going to get done, all of this becomes this regenerative system for AI enabled understanding of skills in real time as work is changing and evolving. But the other part about it is using a dynamic system and this kind of AI native approach, as data is collected, as actions are occurring, as understanding is gathered. It continues to learn and grow and understand and understand context over time. So increasingly, it understands the context of your organization as it understands the context of your industry, as it understands the context of the insights and recommendations and the decisions it’s being asked to assist with. So this is no longer, you know, a static system of record. This is a dynamic system of understanding and intelligence and insights that learns and grows and understands as it’s exposed to data, as it’s exposed to interactions and as you use the system, because it’s this dynamic skills based system, this is what it looks like in our context from an Eightfold perspective. Again, you have those three elements, the enterprise data, the interactions and the market data. We have a platform that sits at the core, and then different areas of interaction. But this speaks to the fact that it’s not just a source of labor market intelligence. There is an engine for an understanding of skills dynamically, as well as systems of interaction where you get those user interactions. So just wanted to share that with you quickly to kind of show how this becomes that regenerative capability for this dynamic understanding of skills. But ultimately, what this gets at is the ability to do something called Talent centered design. And this is this concept that really starts to flip certain processes upside down, and it’s as a result of this approach, of this HR architecture, where, unlike some other approaches, historically, the job and the org chart are an input, but not necessarily the center, of how this system has been built. Increasingly, the talent profiles, the skills information, the employee information, is increasingly a foundational component of our approach from a town intelligence layer. And what that creates is it creates the ability to account for this dynamic understanding focused on. Work, projects, tasks, events, learning equally to jobs, and as a result, you can start to look at things from a variety of ways through a variety of lenses for both traditional constructs of jobs as well as new and evolving ways of work. So it’s not just always looking at things through the lens of a requisition or through the lens of a traditional org chart, and you can start to potentially address the needs of the business and strategic planning for the future in a variety of ways, because the concept of how you’re going to address work can become a variety of different things based off of how you’re organizing, understanding and evaluating talent, because you’re starting to, like I mentioned, the Deloitte human capital Trends report, decouple some of these explorations and some of these discussions away from How we’ve traditionally done this with jobs and org charts. So if you think about that, when you change the discussion and you change the inputs, you change the decision, which can change the outcomes. And as I’ve mentioned, historically we’ve been doing this in systems that were organized around jobs. And when you do this organized around jobs. You can see the inputs on the left, which are designed for some of these outcomes on the right. And as a result, you know, this creates this process of working from the inside out, right? It’s designed to be rigid. It’s designed like a procurement system, right? It’s designed to be reactive, and when you are working organized around jobs, you lead to discussions and decisions that are framed and done in service of the job. So they lead to job based decisions. We created a slate for interviewing for talent, and we’re having discussions like, how does this person compare to the last person to do the job? How does this job compare to the job they had at their last company? Right? So you have discussions and decisions that focus on job title level, because the inputs were focused on job title level, cost center, you know, job description, this is all based on a process where, you know, as a result of that process, those inputs, that discussion that drives a decision determined to lead there. If you shift that, it becomes a little easier to kind of change the discussion. And when you organize around talent, it changes the discussion, which changes the decision, which can change the outcome. If you organize around talent and you look at it through a different framework, the inputs become different. The inputs instead are skills, personas, adjacencies, preferences, also now you’re maximizing the availability of talent to the organization, and you’re working from the outside in. You’re no longer kind of encumbered by the framework of a job. You’re now maximizing the availability of talent to where in the organization can this talent go, and where are all the places in the organization that need to meet this talent and consider this talent. This creates agility. It creates speed. It creates synergy. This is how you shift from being reactive to being proactive. And you shift from being an order taker to being a talent advisor. It also allows for more personalization, because now the whole conversation and communication is more personalized to the talent, rather than specific to the job. But also now, when you’re having a decision and a discussion, the discussion is in service of the talent. What’s the best role for this person? What’s the best team for this person? Right? Not how does this person compare to the last person in the job? So the focus is on the work, the task, the skills, the match, the fit, all of these different things, the runway. And it’s a different conversation that can potentially lead to a variety of different outcomes. It’s a simple concept, but you know, words and frameworks have power, and they can drive different outcomes. But what this also does is it shifts this framework of shifting from thinking of jobs and pipelines to skills and work and talent portfolios. And I say this to you as someone who was responsible for pipeline development for more than a decade. So, you know, we talk about pipeline strategies, and they’re called pipelines because pipelines have a specific shape. You know, it’s this kind of form with a specific goal in mind, with a specific end point. Um. Um, but what we’re trying to enable with more of a skills based approach focused on talent, is more of these portfolio strategies that can go in a variety of different ways. And it’s not from to it’s what, when, why and how, but it’s also an analysis using skills, because those potential paths are increasingly unclear. And when you think about the roles of the future, they’re not necessarily these circles. The roles of the future are potentially these green circles that are hidden. You know, the jobs of the future aren’t necessarily the jobs we know today. Increasingly their job titles we’ve never heard before, and increasingly they’re hybrid roles that don’t exist right now, there are hybrid roles that sit between traditional functions. You know, it’s going to be a combination role between HR and IT and finance, or a combination role between legal and operations and procurement. The roles of the future are increasingly specialized and increasingly hybrid, and may even be a new function that hasn’t existed before because of a new technology. So by looking at it through a skills based lens, it gives you the agility to potentially prepare for a variety of unknown futures, especially as the future is potentially unknown, but also fast approaching. So okay, but also it helps us overcome how we got here, skills, understanding through AI helps unlock the organization. The concept of internal talent marketplaces isn’t new, but they haven’t been that successful in launching because historically, how career ladders and how and how jobs and competencies were built was built within a function. So this is actual real data from a fortune 100 company where, when they looked at how their competencies and how their job kind of families and job ladders were built. They were built within function, and when they looked at the number of jobs, referencing those competencies within function and outside of the function, it’s no surprise that there’s very little overlap of what goes on within that function and what made it over the wall, and as a result, what you see is we have a lot of people that potentially are doing similar work and similar jobs, but it’s not been organized, categorized and called the same thing because it wasn’t designed in a cross pollinated way. It was designed in a vacuum. It was designed in a silo. So what AI helps us unlock is AI doesn’t operate that way, and AI can help unlock all these cohorts of people that potentially are in different parts of the organization, that can be considered for roles as a mutual audience, that can be considered as potentially a group of mentorship or a group to share best practices that in the way we had been doing work before were previously either unknown or previously named in a naming convention or an organizing convention where they were exclusive and never joined. So what this allows is we talk about unlocking internal mobility. That’s part of how this skills based approach helps overcome that. What we’re also helping to achieve here is creating this new supply and demand equation. In the past, we’ve always been analyzing this supply of people to jobs, and what we’re really helping to unlock is this supply of skills to work. So it’s no longer a one to one, it becomes many to much, right? So as people are looking at talent shortages or skills alignment, or maybe even you have too many people, and you’re trying to figure out, how do we redeploy them into other areas where there aren’t enough people? This becomes a way to have a better understanding at a more molecular level, or granular level, to figure out a variety of potential strategies for how to do this. So instead of just having a one to one relationship in that supply and demand relationship, like how we started the presentation, you can actually look at skills to work. And also, in many cases, sometimes work can be work, and sometimes work can be a job, because when you start to organize around talent, you can break that job down into pieces. Sometimes it’s work, sometimes it’s jobs, sometimes it’s a project, sometimes it’s tasks. And when you look at this, you can figure out, how do we address this? Are we addressing this with people in the office? Are we addressing this with remote workers? Are we addressing this with gig workers? Because it may be something where the work at hand is something. We need to get done to move the project forward. But it may not be skills or work that we want to invest in as part of our IP or maybe there are tasks or things that we can automate and we want to redesign the work so part of what talent intelligence and this skills approach allows is the ability to understand the characteristics of work and allow for true recruit, retain, redeploy and redesign planning. To give an example of this, is getting at talent agility through understanding your talent and this kind of skills based approach. I’m sure some of you out there in the audience have seen the book, work without jobs. I’ve been referencing Rob and Jesse Dawson and John Boudreau a couple points in the presentation so far. They’re from Mercer and MIT. They wrote this book, work without jobs, and this is what they’re talking about when they say this. I’m sure we’ll never operate in a world that’s entirely without jobs. But what they’re referring to is increasingly, you know, organizations that are creating flow and agility in their organizations, and what happens is, you can start to look at this concept of when we’re looking at talent and evaluating how we’re delivering to the business. Are we operating within a requisition, or are we able to address this outside of a requisition? Is it a project? Is it an event? Is it a task? Are we automating this, right? Is it just work that can get done off the side of someone’s desk? Do we have untapped capacity, right? Do I have 10 people on the team, but I’m only using 80% of the capacity, where I’m really only utilizing eight people instead of 10, right? Back when I was an analyst, I was working with an HR leader who was trying to transform their organization, and they were doing an initiative that they referred to as going reckless, right? I love that phrase, and I used it here on the slide to say this is kind of the next evolution of that acting reckless in our in our former world, if you didn’t know your people, and you didn’t know what you had, and you didn’t have this granularity, if we needed something to get done, our instinct and our reflex was higher from the outside, create a wreck, right? Everything was a wreck. If all you have is a hammer, everything’s a nail. That’s that phrase. And what happens is you end up over hiring, and then the next reflex is you have a reduction in force. This gives a better understanding of your existing capability, your existing workforce, but also gives you a better understanding of a potential way to fill that need where not everything goes through a wreck. So I have another poll here. How has your organization begun to think about becoming project based? Or Is anyone out here exploring this? Has anyone dipped their toe in the water? Not yet, early stages planning, implementing, fully adopted? I am interested to see the results on this one. I uh, 59% not yet. 22 9% early stages, 18% planning, 14% implementing. Again, across the spectrum, I think everyone is in different phases of the journey. People can learn from others. I’ve talked to some organizations that are just starting down this phase. A lot of organizations are still thinking of internal mobility strictly through the lens of jobs, but on the other side of the coin, I’ve talked to some organizations that have 1000s, if not hundreds of 1000s of projects and are moving towards more of a project based approach, especially as they try to remove layers in the organization and expedite decision making and drive more agility. So this will continue to be a topic of conversation as we transform work. And you know, as HR leaders like yourself work to build the way we’ll be doing this going forward. What I want to talk about next is this concept of reengineering work. And at Eightfold, we have a podcast called The new talent code, and I’m one of the CO hosts. We had Josh Burson, the world renowned analyst, on the podcast last year, and on that episode, this was one of the quotes he had. Recruiting, re-skilling, retention and re-engineering are not separate things anymore. They’re all interrelated and need to be interlocked with this talent intelligence strategy. And I want to just walk through a couple quick slides on how this can be done and what that looks like. But. This is in this framework of not just recruiting and re Skilling and retaining your talent, but also re engineering and redesigning work. So the first part is using talent intelligence to understand the problem. So the first part is getting a better grasp of your existing organizational data. The second part is getting that skills based lens, so you’d get at the granularity of deconstructing jobs into works and work and tasks, and getting a more robust profile of your talent beyond just the jobs they’ve held, but maybe their full capability, but then also potential solutions. By looking at your organization, your industry, your peers, and combining all of that data in one comprehensive view, but beyond that, then using that data to understand potentially, what is the business problem that you may have in front of you, and how you can potentially address that. Is it a skills gap? Is it a capacity gap? Is it a talent misalignment? And you know, Josh Burson has the Josh Burson company, and it’s this Research Institute, and they partner with Eightfold and use some of our data for their global workforce intelligence project. And as they’ve done that, they’ve looked at a couple industries by vertical and use the data to look at things like banking and healthcare and technology, and looked at skills throughout the industry to figure out what’s happening in those industries, and how are skills moving, and what are some of the issues for how organizations in those industries really are trying to address The talent needs and prepare for the future. And sometimes it’s a matter of high skills, velocity, and skills and roles changing rapidly. Sometimes it’s not necessarily skills and roles changing rapidly, but sometimes it’s the impact of what’s happening in the industry or what’s happening in the generational demographics of the talent, and sometimes it’s a misalignment of the existing workforce and what’s happening in the industry in terms of the technology and the demands of the customers. So what happens is, as you look at that data in concert, like I showed you on that previous slide, you can start to understand kind of what’s at your feet to address, and what levers to start to push are you, do you have to start to re skill your talent mix? Do you have to start to redesign the roles and the jobs in your organization? Or do you have to do a mixture of these things in different pockets of the organization? And one example of that that I highlight, that kind of brings this to life, is healthcare, and they use this example, especially on the heels of the pandemic with the shortage of nurses in healthcare, it’s been very difficult For organizations and HR leaders in the healthcare industry, tons of demand on nurses, tons of burnout people working in the healthcare industry, and also retirements for nurses in the healthcare industry. So when they look at the kind of talent data, and look at this through a skills based lens to try to figure out, how can HR leaders start to address this for their organizations? They found some really interesting data, and there’s a significant gap in the amount of talent available for what will be needed going forward. But when they also looked at that gap and figured out this kind of for our approach, recruit, retain, re skill, redesign. Some interesting observations. The first part was, they would never be able to recruit their way out of that problem. If the only answer was recruit, right, if every response was, create a wreck, you’ll never address the shortfall. The other thing was, you can do a lot of significant things to retain your existing workforce, but again, you’re never going to address the full need to fulfill the gap. You can re-skip from other areas, maybe some adjacent roles. Maybe there’s some assistant positions that support some roles where you can very easily do some skill adjacencies, or some learning and capability to move people in relatively quickly. But one of the things they found was when they actually looked at the work that those people were doing and where they were spending their time and the skills that they were using, there was a ton of work that nurses were doing that was not nursing. And one of the things that this initiative started to identify and drive was, how do they get nurses able to operate at what they refer to as the top of their license, and how do they get them able to get other things off their plate? That is what was more administrative or. Are there other things that were causing the burnout that was not necessarily what they went to school for, where they thought they’d be spending their time. So a big part of using this skills based approach to start to address this going forward, is this other element of redesigning the work and start to figure out, does this create, potentially a new role that is called something different and a new skills profile that creates a new career path. Or is this potentially work that can be automated and falls off of their plate and is no longer part of that job, and by doing that, does that free up their time to be allocated towards operating at the top of their license, or does that help free up the ability to help reduce stress and strain and burnout, which has impact on retention? Right? So all of these things create these four elements of talent transformation, but also a better understanding of the skills involved to create these more agile strategies. So I like that example because, you know, we all can relate to it. We all can understand why this is needed and mission critical. But also it’s a very nice visual to understand kind of the four elements and how thinking beyond looking at one of these silos at a time gives an organization the agility to address, you know, no longer with one silver bullet, how to have a more comprehensive, agile strategy, using town intelligence, understanding skills in real time, with a more comprehensive profile of the work in context the people doing the work and the skills that they have able to do. Another example of that Vodafone is an Eightfold customer, and they called on us, call on us, get that funny to help them as they pivoted in becoming more of a digital company from a telecom company, and one of the things that they did was, as they rolled out their talent marketplace, using more comprehensive talent profiles, they were now collecting more information on what their employees could do beyond just the traditional jobs data and the jobs they had held for the company, And as a result, they started identifying 15,000 more skills that they now had visibility to in their existing workforce. Another thing is that with that more robust skills profile and skills information, this resulted in personalized career paths and learning recommendations that increased the learning hours per employee because not with more robust profiles. This was helping with AI enabled personalized career pathing and learning recommendations for employees. But as a result, this also helped the talent acquisition team, because they were using people recruiters to have an employee first mentality for internal mobility, but also potentially not everything became a requisition and understanding who they had they were removing potential wrecks from the process, to remove stress and strain from the system. To achieve this ability to have a 56% decrease in time to hire from a better understanding of their talent with that kind of for our strategy, recruit, retain, re skill, redesign, through all of these things coming together. So you know, it’s not just improving one area. It’s this more comprehensive view of the talent in front of you, this more comprehensive view of how to address the demands of the business, all in concert with each other, helping organizations achieve very dramatic business outcomes, but in some cases, potentially flipping some of these processes upside down from how they’ve been done traditionally. And with that, I have just two more slides. One is we have an ebook that walks you through how you can potentially do this with some vignettes that you can scan here if you want to scan this QR code to expand on this concept of talent-centered design. So if you want, I’ll pause here for a couple seconds and let you scan that QR code to download this ebook. It’s a really great resource. It’s a nice read, rather proud of it. It’s a nice expansion of some of the topics we’ve touched on today. And then the other thing I would offer is, if you like some of the stories and you like hearing some of these examples and learning from others. I mentioned that I’m a co-host of our podcast. It’s called the new talent code. Those were some of the talent leaders from organizations that we speak to, organizations like John Deere, am Dox, Vodafone, moderna, Bristol, Myers. Squibb was Madeline the RONDO from aptitude research. We publish new episodes every other Tuesday. You can access it anywhere you find podcasts, or you can scan the QR code there. But with that, I appreciate you joining me for the time today, and I’m happy to throw it back to Kathy.
1:00:19
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