Skills-based strategies require talent-centered design

Transformational skills-based strategies require a deeper understanding of talent in the context of work.

In a rapidly changing world, we are faced with choosing a path for the future at the intersection of business, digital, and talent reinvention. Unfortunately, too many of us are still using systems, processes, and procedures to manage talent that were built for a world of work that is drastically different from the one we are facing today. We are currently in the midst of a massive skills-based shift. According to the World Economic Forum, as many as 375 million people will need to be reskilled by 2025. As many as 83% of organizations are in the middle of re-engineering their career programs, according to EY, and Korn Ferry predicts as much as $8.5 trillion in unrealized revenue due to this skills crisis. With this in mind, we need to think beyond process and talent optimization and embrace transformation through skills-based strategies. We need to truly shift to reframe and rethink our approaches to planning and predicting future needs through gaining a dynamic understanding of skills mapped to talent in the context of work.

This is an approach that can only be realized through an AI-native talent intelligence platform built using talent-centered design.

We wrote this paper to explain why the evolution of work must be centered around talent and skills — and how an AI-native talent intelligence platform that delivers real-time insights is the only way to gain a dynamic understanding of talent in the context of work.

Welcome to this new way of working that will set your organization — and talent — up for success.

What we mean by talent-centered design

Talent-centered design means putting your talent at the center of everything you do.

Traditionally, organizations have centered decision-making around jobs. Listing jobs, matching candidates to jobs, and even eliminating jobs when they become outdated.

There is a better way.

Jobs can be broken down into skills. And once you have a complete view of the skills in your organization, you can start mapping work to skills — and bringing in the right talent with those skills to do that work.

Our definition of talent-centered design puts the talent profile at the foundation of everything you do. By integrating this complete understanding of skills, experiences, and interests, you create a dynamic understanding of what people are capable of doing, what they can learn, and what they want to do. This real-time view of your talent’s skills will help you match people to the work at hand — not a static job — and set you up for success in new and evolving ways of work.

Let’s dive deeper into what that looks like in practice.

We’ve found that as organizational leaders increasingly adopt skills-based strategies, they recognize the need to examine talent through a deeper lens. Skills are essential, but without context, these are merely data points.

Truly understanding the skills in your organization involves breaking down processes and moving beyond job titles and descriptions to gain a closer view of talent and work.

This approach is made even more essential because the skills people use in the context of work are rapidly changing. This demands a deeper understanding of your organization’s talent, beyond org charts or job descriptions, to a dynamic understanding of skills in real-time.

The concept of talent-centered design should be embedded in every workforce-planning decision. Talent acquisition, talent management, diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI) practices, and employee experience are all areas that can benefit from this approach.

By adopting a skills-based approach, you can focus on talent at a deeper level, taking into account skills, abilities, and career aspirations. This shift enables a more nuanced understanding of talent needs and facilitates better alignment between individuals and organizational goals.

Overall, talent-centered design emphasizes a holistic view of how to hire and manage talent through a focus on skills and meaningful work.

A new approach to talent

For years, the operating model in HR has centered around the job. Within this framework, the job and, more specifically, the requisition informed every part of the talent life cycle — who to hire, what they should do, and which programs, policies, practices, and technology to implement.

The typical process went something like this: Once a requisition was created, it became HR’s responsibility to fill it. As HR practitioners, it was your responsibility to maximize the exposure of a single job to as many people as possible and find the best candidates to present to the hiring manager — an “inside-out” approach. This process was designed in service of the organization with the hiring manager as the customer.

Once the role was filled, it was on to the next requisition, where you had to start from scratch. In this approach, everything revolved around job descriptions. Employees only did what their job description dictated, and historical data drove decision-making.

Talent-centered design helps reframe the process, the discussion, and, ultimately, the decision. Instead of starting with a job description, this model is built around talent. It uses AI and real-time data to answer questions like: “What is this person interested in?” “What skills do they have?” “And how do those skills, interests, and strengths align with our organization’s needs?”

Rather than broadcasting one job to as many people as possible, this method exposes one person to as many opportunities as possible — an “outside-in” approach. Likewise, instead of employees operating within the narrow confines of their job descriptions, talent-centric organizations match a person’s unique skills to projects, gigs, jobs, events, volunteering, and more. While this process is also being done in service of the organization, there is a heavier focus on the talent (applicant/employee) as the customer.

This new approach allows for speed and agility rather than inefficiency and rigidity, as it uses real-time data — not historical data — to reveal what someone can do and where to deploy them. It’s also done in the framework of expanding opportunities and identifying all possibilities within an organization, rather than making a decision through the lens of a single job. Instead, you’re finding the best possible fits for your talent to showcase their skills and help them grow.

Even better, with this enhanced visibility into talent, you move from order taker to strategic adviser who can help ensure the organization has the talent and skills it needs for ongoing success.

The ripple effect

Every HR function — and the entire organization — benefits as a result. Talent acquisition moves from looking at job descriptions to looking at people and their skills. Talent managers shift from focusing on performance and promotions to skills-based mobility, succession planning, and proficiencies. HR thought leader Josh Bersin calls this “the Big Shift” in his research on the post-industrial economy.

This approach also improves DEI efforts. By focusing on what someone can do and their learnability instead of degrees or professional experiences, you can broaden the aperture of who qualifies for a role. Even the employee experience benefits as the focus shifts to matching employees to what they love and do best, fostering fulfillment.

The rise of AI-powered talent intelligence

This new approach is possible today because of talent intelligence and its ability to understand skills in real time. Of course, organizations have always known skills were important, but quantifying and describing them wasn’t always simple or easy. Historically, organizations would use a skills taxonomy, or a static listing of skills, to guide talent decisions.

However, the typical skills taxonomy exercise takes months and stalls organizations from making headway in their talent initiatives. In the usual indexing process, organizations partner with a consultancy, which can take over a year to generate a skills taxonomy, ontology, and inventory. After several months, organizations receive a spreadsheet report that is virtually outdated from the day it’s created.

This static approach simply can’t keep up with today’s pace of change. Worse, organizations get stuck in this exercise because everything has to be just right for this one-and-done report — for example, legal has to review it, and it has to fit within rigid systems.

Talent intelligence helps you understand skills in real time

Enter AI. With the launch of the Internet of Things, everything came online and started generating data, which meant everything could be tracked — and improved. Talent intelligence solutions use AI to accomplish something similar. Talent intelligence solutions use AI and billions of global talent data points, talent intelligence platforms examine the entire life cycle of thousands of careers to provide real-time data on what skills someone has, which skills your organization needs, and how to best acquire and develop those skills.

These insights are continuously updated, self-learning, and automatic. Our platform even provides insights into adjacent skills, learnability, and capabilities — all within context. For example, our Talent Intelligence Platform knows the difference between a program manager for a media company versus a program manager for an aerospace manufacturer, even though they have the same title. Talent intelligence makes real-time insights into talent possible, which helps you make sense of large amounts of data to make talent decisions in real time.

From a system of record to a system of intelligence

Shifting to a talent-centered organization powered by talent intelligence doesn’t mean you don’t need a system of record. It’s impossible to operate a multinational organization with thousands of people if everything is moving and sporadic. You need to have a stable record for recordkeeping, audit trails, and compliance.

But now you can add an additional layer, a system of intelligence that’s reading and reacting to the environment in real time. It incorporates skills and talent data to let you know what’s happening not only today, but also emerging trends to prepare for. This creates a left-hand, right-hand approach where systems of intelligence can enhance and inform systems of record as organizations begin to understand and organize what the AI is surfacing.

How to become a talent-centered organization

With skills as the underlying connector and talent intelligence as the AI-powered mechanism to make sense of them, these insights don’t just inform one piece of the talent life cycle — everything becomes interconnected. As a result, understanding grows over time and talent decisions are informed by the entire talent cycle. Here are four steps your business can take to become an agile, talent-centered organization.

Step 1: Gain greater visibility

Talent intelligence can help you create and implement a dynamic skills inventory to monitor and manage skills in real time. You can analyze skills trends — including rising and declining skills in the workforce — to see how your skills mix compares to the overall industry and even specific competitors.

Once you do this, you can start to build a standardized role library. It’s important to remember that even when standardizing roles, because your data is stored in an intelligent system like Eightfold, it’s continuously and automatically updated. Talent intelligence dynamically updates as employees learn and develop their skills.

This also enables you to calibrate and recalibrate roles. As more jobs are increasingly transformed by AI and automation, organizations can make the most of their talent by redefining roles to free workers’ time to focus on their areas of specialty — that is, the work they are uniquely qualified for that AI can’t replicate.

Step 2: Put your strategy to work

With real-time skills insights and a standardized role library, you can start to inform your talent practices. You can choose to hire talent with the skills you need, develop those skills in your existing talent through upskilling or reskilling, or make other workforce plans that align with your short- and long-term goals and budget, including hiring contractors.

Step 3: Empower your existing talent

A key aspect of this new process is finding new ways for your existing talent to grow their experiences through upskilling, reskilling, and talent planning. Dashboards powered by talent intelligence can reveal skill gaps so you can determine your risk levels based on how many people have a certain skill and the attrition rate of that audience.

Armed with that data, you can then make plans to upskill or reskill talent through AI-powered learning and development programs. These include curated courses, mentorships, gigs, and more.

Step 4: Lead the change you need

All this comes together, as Josh Bersin says, to do the four Rs: recruit, reskill, retain, and redesign work using AI-powered talent intelligence. With dynamic insights into your talent and the skills they possess, your risk profile, and skills trends in the industry at large, you can make strategic, data-driven decisions to build, buy, borrow, or recalibrate (automate) talent.

As an HR professional, you are no longer an order taker. With talent intelligence, you become a strategic adviser who ensures that your organization has the skills and talent it needs for long-lasting success.

Attract top talent

Most recruiting solutions are built to screen people out — Eightfold is designed for inclusion. Skills-driven guidance not only helps you pinpoint top talent and rediscover past talent, but it also helps candidates apply to the right jobs so that the talent pool is stronger from the start.

Our platform integrates with your careers site and uses talent intelligence to tell candidates every job they’re qualified for and why. And if a candidate isn’t yet qualified, our platform even recommends courses to help them develop missing skills.

Develop the skills you need

In addition to hiring top talent, our platform can help you develop critical skills within your organization. Our platform tells employees exactly what skills they need for certain jobs or opportunities.

This helps them understand where they are and what they need to learn. Managers can then partner with their employees to create development plans to track and improve these proficiencies to tangibly improve performance, satisfaction, and retention.

Engage every employee

By developing talent and showing them different career paths, you’re opening their eyes to new possibilities and opportunities that align with your organization’s goals and their goals. Our platform also offers employees a skills-informed career portal that makes it easy to curate and find internal opportunities.

This career portal is where our talent marketplace resides, a hub that surfaces jobs, projects, gigs, events, and mentorships. In addition, hiring managers can use this hub to instantly identify employees with the skills they need to complete critical projects.

Mobilize your workforce

Our platform can help you strategically mobilize your workers, whether through promotions, skills-based succession planning, or reskilling to put their knowledge to work.

What makes the Eightfold Talent Intelligence Platform different?

A skills-based approach

There are many talent intelligence solutions, but most use job-level information. When trying to find, acquire, and develop the right skills, job information is a lagging measure. Dynamic skills intelligence is a leading measure. To understand what talent you need, you have to focus on the work that needs to be done and the skills required.

Once you understand this need for skills insights, it becomes clear that other tools might not be as agile because they’re building on a foundation of job-level intelligence — everything relates to and centers around the lagging measure of jobs.

With our platform, you can build a talent-centered organization where everything revolves around your talent and their skills. You can then measure your skills mix against benchmarks and make a data-informed talent strategy to shore up any gaps.

At the end of your plan, you’ll have created any necessary requisitions — making a job listing the output of your strategy, not the input. In this outside-in approach to talent, there’s a forward-looking, data-driven purpose behind everything — and it’s only possible with our AI-driven approach.

Unprecedented skills insights

With our platform, you can continuously ingest data to iterate on and validate their skills library over time. Instead of taking that one to two years to make things perfect — an impossible task — you can use talent intelligence to immediately gain skills-based insights that are continuously refined and improved over time.

Our platform also understands skills and data points in context. For example, in a coffee company the word “coffee” may appear millions of times in data. But coffee isn’t just a simple word or skill; coffee means something different when you’re talking about a barista who’s serving coffee versus a buyer and supply chain who’s doing commodity management for beans. It’s also different for a software programmer using CoffeeScript as a coding language.

Our platform puts the word coffee into context to understand what it means as a skill for an individual or career. And because our platform is dynamic, the more you use the platform, the stronger and more accurate it becomes.

From pipeline to portfolio

Many HR teams are focused on building a diverse pipeline of talent. However, pipelines are very linear objects with a narrow opening, and that’s because they’re built upon specific jobs or career paths.

With our platform, you can create a talent portfolio. With a real-time understanding of your skills, you can evaluate all the different career paths a person could take. Your talent strategy moves from a 2D pipeline to 3D portfolio with tons of options. The questions around talent and succession planning move from who and when to who, what, when, why, and how. This 3D view opens up a world of future opportunities for your organization — rather than limiting pipelines to one job and one person.

End-to-end talent intelligence

Other talent intelligence solutions offer standalone pieces of skills data or information, but our platform offers end-to-end talent intelligence. All the skills data resides in the same place where you’re building your strategies and doing the work. This allows for the combination of industry insights, organizational insights, and operational insights that come together to power talent intelligence.

One talent intelligence system can include everything in your talent process, from talent acquisition to management and succession planning. Our platform also easily integrates with your existing ATS, HRIS, or other systems of record.