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To stay at the forefront, HR leaders need a deep understanding of talent in the context of work. Unfortunately, too many rely on processes, systems, and procedures built for a world drastically different from the one we face today.
To empower HR to take the lead, in this webinar, we’ll discuss how to reframe and rethink our approaches to planning and predicting future needs, looking at:
The speakers emphasized the need for HR to adopt a skills-based organization approach and gain a dynamic understanding of all talent in the work context. They discussed the potential of AI in talent-centric design, highlighting its ability to empower employees, improve succession planning, and automate less attractive tasks. The speakers also emphasized the importance of balancing AI adoption and human involvement in HR decision-making. They also discussed internal mobility challenges within organizations and the need for a more flexible and skills-based approach to talent acquisition. Additionally, they highlighted the importance of leveraging data to inform HR decisions and adapting to the evolving needs of organizations.
Ben Broomfield 00:07
Hello everyone and welcome to this HR Grapevine webinar in partnership with Eightfold AI Talent-centered Design: A blueprint for success in the digital era. I’m Benjamin Broomfield, editor at large at HR Grapevine and I’m joined for this session today by the wonderful Ashish Mehdi Retta, VP, and principal of talent transformation at Eightfold AI. And Rebecca Warren, Director of Talent center transformation, also Eightfold. We know that HR leaders require a deep understanding of talent in the context of work. But unfortunately, too many of us are reliant on processes, systems and procedures that were built for a world that is drastically different from the one that we’re facing today. So to empower HR folks to take the lead. In this webinar, we’ll be discussing how to reframe and rethink our approaches to planning and predicting future needs. Looking at how the evolution of HR has pivoted to talent and skills, the strategies needed to gain a dynamic understanding of all your talent in the context of work, and the impact that talent centered design can and will have on your entire workforce. But we also want to hear your queries and challenges within the context of talent centered design and skills based organizations and how to take a jobs first approach. So please do send any questions throughout the webinar. And we’ll have plenty of time to address them in a 10 minute period at the end of the event as well. And we’ll also have two polls running throughout today’s webinar. So lots of opportunity for audience participation. So make sure you are at the ready for all of that. But before we come on to the conversation, it’d be great to kick off with a quick introduction from each of our panelists. And I’m going to steal a question that Rebecca posed to me at a recent Eightfold talent table as well. So a quick introduction, and then maybe you could share the number one thing that you enjoy about summer. Rebecca, we’ll start with you.
Rebecca Warren 01:47
All right. Glad to be here. Rebecca Warren I, at Eightfold. I’ve been an Eightfold for about three and a half years, former ta practitioner, moved on over to Eightfold in customer success helped build out the customer success department and have recently moved over to a new team that we’re building out around talent center transformation. And I’m thinking and that we’ll probably talk a little bit about that. So I won’t share too much at this time. Thinking about summer, so I live in Phoenix. So summer is really something that you get through. But what I do love about summer, for me is where there feels like there’s a different energy at work. People are a little bit more full of grace, if you want to, you know, folks kind of have weekend plans. Everyone feels like there’s just a little bit of energy, especially trying to enjoy the three or four months of summer. So I think the energy around getting work done so people can get outside and do stuff. That’s me.
Ashish Mediratta 02:47
Hey, thanks, Rebecca. Hi, friends. This is Ashish Mediratta. I’ve been part of Eightfold for four and a half years. And before that been a former customer, I’ve been an HR practitioner for almost two decades now. And it’s, it’s in being part of the customer success team at Eightfold. My job is really around helping our customers go through that talent transformation journey, you know, and evolve into into the future, as it is looking with the help of AI. And yeah, what I love about summer is being in Dublin in Ireland, it’s it’s really amazing. The temperature is around what 1517 degrees C at the maximum in the in the daytime, you go for a walk, and it’s so pleasant. love it out here. Ben, back to you.
Ben Broomfield 03:34
Fantastic. Thank you both for those wonderful introductions. And yeah, it is really good when everyone is just got that got that spring feeling in the air and definitely being based in London, you get that as well, when summer rolls around everyone is a million times happier and more glide. So yeah, I agree with you both. Wonderful. Well, let’s dive into the conversation today. And in the first section, we’re going to be looking at really how to go about organizing from our from organizing around jobs to organizing around talents. And the first place you want to start is with a poll, and we’re going to be looking at a topic of internal mobility. So what we want to hear from you is what do you think is the top cause for internal mobility challenges within your organization? That poll is live now, if you’re able to go and share your responses, the options are lack of visibility to job openings, employees, having limited exposure to decision makers and influences employee skills gaps with insufficient training and talent awarding by managers and finally, rigid organizational structures and job classifications or of course, if you have no idea, then that’s fine as well. And that’s an option for you. And we’ll just wait for some of those results to come through. But it’s looking that by far the most popular responses at the moment are rigid organizational structure structures and job classifications Rebecca sheets does that Does that ring a bell to you having to deal with those really stiff and strict structures are absolutely
Ben Broomfield 04:58
fantastic and certainly the The other areas that are coming up as really important as well, are employee skill gaps with insufficient training as well. And so we’re going to be coming on to to each of these areas across the course of across the course of the next 55 minutes. So, lots of time to dive into some of these frustrations. And again, if you’ve got any specific questions, then feel free to share them in the chat. But it’d be wonderful to move on to our first question. We know that a jobs best perspective has been fit for purpose for a very long time, but it seems like especially recently is beginning to present challenges for HR. So she’s Why do you think that that might be?
Ashish Mediratta 05:35
I think the answer is also hidden in in the poll. So you have a rigid org structure, job classifications, and I will say even the lack of visibility to job openings for employees within the company, and putting a hand on your heart. Actually, anyone can tell me, how many times has our manager even got to know, if we were applying for a job outside the organization? It’s almost that folks, you know, who are those recruiting agencies are are free to reach out to our people internally, while we are almost blockading them, and not letting them move for or for a career internally. So the experience that we talk about now for our talent is around how do you give them an exposure to jobs, where the most relevant jobs are made visible and available to them? Right, and of course, follow due process of the organization, there must be some eligibility criteria, etc, etc. So but based on this, why should we be coming in the path of people going forward, and the growth from here on I suspect will not just be vertical, it will more be in a lattice kind of structure, where people will be able to find more lateral jobs, you know, which which are focused around their skills, rather than in a vertical move all the time. Rebecca, any thoughts?
Rebecca Warren 07:07
Yeah, I think that I think you’re spot on. And I think some of the things that happen to is that there needs to be a shift inside of the organization, top down, bottom up side to side, right, I think about a when I was hiring at a previous very large company. And the criteria for what I was able to hire for was so rigid, they had to come from one of these six schools, they had to have this many transitions, and they had to work at this many different places. And these were the only companies that they were allowed to come from. I mean, it was really tough. And what happened, it was super interesting, is it felt good at the time, right? Like we knew what we were getting, we understood the path that they’d been on. But we ended up hiring like, and not it’s to no fault of their own. But all the same people, right, they all did the same things in the same way. And we ended up with this really homogenous HR group that didn’t have that diversity of thought and background and ways of acting. And so they realized that by limiting that we were actually limiting the growth of the company, were they, in hindsight, right? When they first thought out, like, Hey, we’re doing the right thing, we’re hiring this really narrow profile, because it works. But it might only work for one or two people because when you hire to a job, you’re hiring to a rigid set of criteria. When you hire around people, you’re taking into consideration all of the things that they did at work outside of work, people, interactions, organizations, you get a very different profile, which means you get more robust and more diverse actions and interactions when you’re at work. So that was really telling to me that those rigid structures have to be changed from the inside as well, because we feel like we’re doing the right thing. And we’re actually hurting the organization in the long run.
Ashish Mediratta 09:04
In fact, I just may add a lot of real life examples to what you mentioned, Rebecca, and I find that lots of heads of TA talent acquisition these days come from a background in sales or even procurement. It’s quite interesting to see that corollary that there are people who have adjacent skill sets, similar skill sets, which which are easily fungible, you can put them in a role in sales or procurement or talent acquisition, right? The skill sets are very similar. And it really opens the, you know, the gates for people to expand their career, rather than being stuck in one line forever. Now, you can really look around you and based on your skills, so that’s where we’re talking about a talent centered era these days, which is focusing on skills and skills being fungible, you can use them across the organization provide careers to people, when
Rebecca Warren 09:57
I try my background, As some of you may know, is actually in nonprofits. My undergrad is in Youth and Family Ministries, and I ended up in HR. Because if I could get people to volunteer to come work for me really sure I can get folks to actually come and work for an organization and pay them. But that’s not a normal career path. We all kind of fell into it at the beginning of TA because we weren’t stuck on your background has to look like XY and Z. And I think we’ve come to a point where where you’ve maybe limited ourselves to just so much that we’re now seeing the results of that and with those rigid organizational structures?
Ben Broomfield 10:36
Absolutely. And I think from everything that we said, we really know, it just seems like common sense as well, for organizations that anything to the contrary, is it really is stifling us and having those really rigid structures in place. It does, it just doesn’t benefit anyone. So why haven’t we been able to make that move yet to being talent focused before now? And what are some of the barriers that HR teams might be coming up against, whether that’s from managers from employees, or the areas of the business? What are what are some of the barriers that you think Rebecca?
Rebecca Warren 11:05
Well, I think we did the right thing organizationally, right. When when we moved into this office structure, in the what 40s 50s, where it was, a lot of people in one space trying to get work done, we had to put some kind of structure in place. So org charts at the time, I think felt like they made sense, like we understood, where do you go to get help? Right? I think it’s, it was built on that military structure of you know, who’s your who’s your who’s your next resource, right? And how do you follow those lines? And I think that was right. For the time, we started to figure out, hey, we need to understand what work looks like, let’s put together competencies, let’s put together skills ontologies. Let’s, let’s figure out what, what we need to do. And then let’s try to measure against it. But I think we made it a little bit too narrow, right? competencies are great, but we need to think about what skills are in those competencies. I think we we built ourselves a box that now we have to try to get out of for the right reasons. But anytime you have to come to a point and say, hey, now it’s an inflection point, and we need to do something different. So I think that was hard for folks to be able to, to shift. Because it felt like that was comfortable, right? We know our org structure, we know the career ladder, we know where people are gonna go. So it’s hard for folks to shift out of that and say, now we’re gonna go to the Wild West, and we’re gonna go to a chess board instead of a career ladder. I think that’s hard for folks to shift out of that. So I don’t know. See you. So what are your thoughts?
Ashish Mediratta 12:39
So really speaking, when you look back at what’s happened, the world of skills has changed so dramatically around us. As soon as we’ve had open AI and chat GPT. If you ask a software developer these days, and has them hand on art, how much of the coding are you doing yourself personally, and you will get a very funny answer. You know, perhaps 80 90% of their work is being done by Chad GBT, you know, so the world of work around us is changing how we do our work is changing very rapidly. And the skills needed to evolve, along with that are changing. So we are at a stage where we’ve got to now focus and focus sharp on skills is what I believe.
Rebecca Warren 13:29
Yeah, I think the pandemic really caused that shift in a much quicker way than anybody was comfortable for, are comfortable with. But we realized that we were able to do it when you think about how much we did in those like, what, three years coming out of the pandemic compared to the shifts that we had made prior? I think there were a lot of awakenings and realizations and shifts, where we said, Yes, we can work flexibly, we can roll out technology more quickly. I know the company I was working for during the pandemic, they had planned a two year teams rollout. And when that hit, they got it done in three months now. Was it a little hinky? Yes. But I think we all realize we could do things more quickly. And maybe it was okay to do it faster and learn from it than it was to take a really long time and not get the benefits. So I think that realization that technology was going to actually help us get work done was awakening. And I think there’s also been that shift in the market to you know, as soon as you talk about moving to skills, where we realized that if you’re working remotely, you don’t have to be in the office, there’s different ways we can get work done different ways that we should think about work. So that it becomes a an opportunity for us to bring our whole selves to work as opposed to feeling like again, we only can do this at this time in displace. Now it’s like, you might see a cat in the background, but I’m still getting stuff done. Right. So and I’m not commuting and I’m not spending my time doing things that maybe aren’t value added for work. And that sense of happiness, I think is also increased when folks realize that they have a little bit more control over how and where they work. So, but I think the, it’s also scary. It’s scary for folks to say, Hey, I, you know, I think it should look like this. And now it looks like that it’s hard for folks internally to say I’m used to going to an office and doing this same job the same way, processing paper moving things around. I think it’s hard for folks to say, I was going to retire doing this thing. And now this thing doesn’t exist. So I think it’s a challenge for folks to also jump on board of the changes because it’s uncomfortable. But I think that’s where our world is going where, maybe not maybe we don’t want to say that we want to continually be uncomfortable. But I think that challenge is how is it going to make us better in the long run?
Ben Broomfield 15:54
See, and you both sort of began to touch on that technology component as well. It certainly feels like since the 2000s that HR software’s it has been getting better it has been improving, obviously, there’s still, you know, some some frustrations that are out there. But it seems like Ashish that maybe the the world of TA and HR technology and software looks very different. Now sort of maybe compared to certainly when you were a practitioner or sort of in the in those early 2000s. And now maybe organizations are trying to think about that that talent problem slightly differently. But using technology to do that.
Ashish Mediratta 16:28
Honestly, speaking, I think that landing on the moon moment has arrived for HR tech, you know, we’ve been looking at HR systems for far too long, right? And if we ask that question to ourselves, are we rarely using that product? Or are we rarely using the product? So those are the questions that I would encourage HR folks to ask for themselves? You know, ask your talent acquisition team. Frankly, I’ve had that experience sometime in the past years ago. I’ve not say where I joined the new organization, I asked the team, the TA team over there. So guys, are we using the ATS system? The answer was yes. A very big, resounding yes. And after a few weeks, I found out that yes, we are creating a requisition in the ATS, and we are releasing an offer through an ATS. But everything in between called the entire hiring process happens offline. So that came as a as an eye opener for me that real life can be very different. So the way the technology is evolving, and the way we are able to get automation in with the help of even open AI, right, it’s like talking to your own assistant giving instructions, find me the top 10 People with this skill set in my database, reach out to the top 10. Right, those who respond schedule for my next My first interaction with them, the software has a view of your calendar chooses those spots, you know, and those meetings are set up for you imagine the future like this, where an assistant is running behind the scenes working for you, and providing with you, you have all those goodies that you need, right, whereas you can then move on to do more important stuff that you have on your plate, you know, perhaps absolutely increase your productivity, look at the best of candidates, you know, improve your NPS internally, your net promoter score in terms of the hiring manager experience, right, improve your time to hire, improve your cost of hiring, improve your engagement with the external world talking to candidates, you know, talk about running campaigns, running events, which can really make your organization top of the mind recall for the external world. Right? And if you really get into those experiences, right, I think this is the time when technology has evolved so rapidly and so fast, it’s time to make that change.
Rebecca Warren 19:00
And what you’re talking about is Sheesh. And that I think what we’re saying is that allow, instead of trying to solve a problem with filling a job, let’s try to solve problems with focusing on talent, right? We can’t solve a talent problem with jobs mentality. So how do we focus on what people do best? Right? If she’s you’re talking about that. I want to talk to people I want to use my skills to the best ability and taking away that the stuff that could be automated, the stuff that’s non value added to what we bring to the table, I think is that difference. It’s centering on what the talent can do, as opposed to what a job description says you should do.
Ben Broomfield 19:46
Absolutely. Well, I think that’s a great time to move the conversation on to really what we mean when we talk about talent centered design. It’s definitely one of those phrases that has the ring of a potential buzz word about it. And I’m sure there’s a couple of alarm bells going off in those who are not The HR buzzwords, but let’s let’s talk about it in tangible terms. What do we actually mean at an organizational level when we talk about talent centered design?
Rebecca Warren 20:11
Yeah, so the talent center design is really that idea of HR systems are architected around the talent profile, where that talent profile is that foundation that that component that integrates skills, experiences and interests, to create a more dynamic understanding of talent that can be used both within a traditional construct of jobs, but also new and evolving ways of work. So it’s a holistic view of talent, beginning with an end to end understanding of inside and outside of the organization, right. So instead of putting a job at the center, and then making all your activities flow around a job, you’re putting talent in the center, putting people in the center, so that the skills that they have, and the things that they not only the things that they’ve done, but the things that they want to do, then you match those opportunities together. So it’s a very different way of thinking about how work gets done. Again, because we’re shifting away from that thought of here is a linear way of doing work, you put out a job, you post it to many you pray, you know, and even if you actively work to get people in the funnel, you’re praying that the right person falls in the funnel, and that you can mold them enough to fit the job description. When you center it around what people do or have done, then you end up with a completely different way of doing work. Like I think about, for me coming into Eightfold, I didn’t have tech background, I’ve never worked in customer success, like when somebody reached out to me and said, Hey, you should do this. I’m like, I don’t even know what customer success does, right. But then when you look at the skill sets that I have, that it made sense for me to come in and move into that role, same thing. Now moving into the role that I’m in because of the skills that I have, and the things that I like to do, it makes sense to put me over here, right? So if we focus on what people bring to the table, as opposed to saying you have to fit a very static list of criteria, it changes the focus and opens up the world, not only for your talent, but also for you as an organization to succeed and add more diversity and interest into your what your talent does and what they can do.
Ben Broomfield 22:32
Absolutely, and certainly from from my perspective of that, before I became an editor I worked in I worked in recruitment, which you again, would probably think are two very different backgrounds. But actually, and certainly from talk, I spoke to a lot of recruiters when I wanted to move to a role within sort of within editorial and content production, you said, well, you’ll you’ll have to completely start at the beginning, retrain everything all the way up. But actually, I had one conversation with one company who said that we need someone who you know, has always has that recruitment background, you can go out and build relationships with different people in the industry and go out and meet with them and connect with them. And it was sort of that organization who really took an opportunity to say, Well, hang on, there’s a lot of skills that overlap here. The other stuff that you know, is still a part of the role that there’ll be plenty of opportunity to train on that. But we know we need this skill. That’s the skill set that we need. Let’s just throw this traditional job description and sort of experience that we would typically require out the window for a moment. And I think hopefully they were happy with it. But it seems to go well as my point. But I think it’d be really interesting as well sort of move the conversation to to really how this helps create that that skills based approach there to HR we’ve we’ve been hearing this sort of skills based organization for for quite a long time now. And again, it’s one of those things that a lot of a lot of folks, if you ask them, honestly will probably say, well, we want to be more skills based but we don’t actually know how to sort of go about it in practice. I think most people think well, let’s just take a you know, a degree with Prime Minister job description and pay were done and dusted. We’re a skills based organization. Obviously, there’s there’s a lot more to it than that. So, Ashish, how does talent centered design create a real foundation for true skills based HR?
Ashish Mediratta 24:07
This is a fantastic question. And I think there are two or three important facets to it. First of all, as HR practitioners, we really need to know, what are those unique roles, and within those unique roles, the skill set are needed for every single role in the company. That’s the starting point of the conversation from your job architecture. Right there, you know, the skills needed by the company. For example, the company may want 100 data scientists next year, because or AI experts next year, because that’s the nature of the beast, you do require AI experts in various areas. So perhaps if that’s one requirement, the first thing you would want to do is get into your skill based planning. Right? What are the skills that I have internally with my employees? Right, what’s my ready pool now? What is it that I can make ready soon, right, so looking at the adjacency of skills. So for example, you’ve got maybe, you know, 200 people who are expert in Java, but you got to get them trained on Python, this could be perhaps a two month of certification program. Further, it could be maybe two months of project hands on experience, right. And you’re getting people now ready to pick up the next job internally, right. So with this, what you have done is you’ve got a clearer view of the skill tool that you have internally ready now, ready soon. And then you can also see what’s available in your own company’s database of let’s say, if you have a database of 1 million, I’m sure you can quickly find out in terms of skills, who are a match for a close match to what you need. From there, in terms of your planning exercise, you then only need to see how much of the gap is what I have to hire from outside and open your requisitions based on that, but the primary point of this entire conversation was, it is focused on skills. And the way for example, I use skills in my job, in my job, I have, let’s say 20 things to do. Right? Perhaps I do 15 things well, and I am a disaster, and the balance five, right, the future of work, the way I see it is that this each job will be broken up into pies. And those pies can be handed over to people who are expert, real good in terms of doing those pies, giving, doing justice to those pies and giving good results from those is what I see. So to my mind, it makes absolute sense to look at skills for each role, and then breaking up those jobs into relevant parts that can be performed by people who are experts with with respect to those pies. And I think the way the jobs are evolving, it’s only a matter of time. It’s not a question of if, but when, to my mind, Rebecca?
Rebecca Warren 27:05
We, I love all of that. And I think you’re right, I love the idea of breaking things up into pies, right? What are the things that you do? Well, and what are the things that either you don’t do? Well? Or maybe you do? Well, but you don’t want to do, right? And how do you get the right people in the organization to do the work because the things that you love to do might not be the same as someone else’s. Now I was chatting with a mentor of mine last week. And one of the things that that he had done when I was applying for a role is in the job description. Then he put you know, all the standard stuff. But then he put the KPIs in there. And he said, you know, here are the things that you’re going to be expected to accomplish in the next six to 12 months. And I don’t know that I would have applied for the job. Outside of that, because it was in a different industry still in, in talent acquisition, but it was leading a team in the restaurant industry, I hadn’t done restaurants. But when I looked at the KPIs that he put on there, there’s what you’re going to be expected to do. I was like, I can do that. And that snowballed super fast after I applied got in there. So he’s one of my mentors, right, former CHR o of this organization. And we were chatting last week, and I was giving him props. I’m like, Dude, that was really awesome. Because that helped me understand what I needed to do, as opposed to looking to a very static list of things. And he said, Yeah, he goes, when I think about things, and this is what I tell folks now, that I work with, is if you if you take that job description and set it aside, and you ask the question of what does somebody need to know, to do this job? And what does somebody need to know how to do, it’s a completely different way of looking at filling a role when you boil it down to those two pieces. Because there could be a lot of different ways that folks get to that, that know and that know how to do. So it doesn’t have to look like you’ve come from this background, or you worked in this organization, or you have this degree, what do you need to know? And what do you need to know how to do as she used to your example, right? I know Java, what do I need to know how to do Python? Can I do that? Yes, because those adjacencies are really close. So asking different questions. And of course, using technology to help make those connections faster, makes such a difference when you’re thinking about how to do it. It’s not. It’s kind of rocket science, but it’s kind of not right. Like, it’s pretty simple. When you say what do you need to know? What do you need to know how to do and how is that going to drive the industry forward? Your organization forward? I think that’s one of the other things is when we think about how do we make HR more valuable to the organization if you take away that administrative work, and then you put them in that advisor role? What does the business need? Right if we start tying the things that happen in HR, to what the what the organization needs that revenue goal that that long term expectation, it also changes how you look at your talent because you’re looking at an outcome as opposed to looking at a rigid set of requirements for particular job in a particular department. I
Ben Broomfield 30:03
think that actually ties in nicely to a question that we got from from the audience from Claire kampsen. So thank you for for sharing that question. She asked how we can practically put skills and people that are dissenter organizations need their stretch charts. So how do they organize themselves differently? I was obviously we spoke a little bit there about some of those different models. Were you thinking about it in terms of pies in terms of projects, obviously, individuals coming together around sort of specific skills rather than around their traditional job structures and hierarchies? There’s obviously going to be a bit of a cultural shift and a shift in the way that organizations organize and think about things. So how can how can they begin making, you know, a fairly drastic shift to the way that they begin to organize their work towards more of a skill centered model rather than a job centered model?
Rebecca Warren 30:47
Well, I’ll throw one thing out here. And then Ashish, I’m sure you’ve got some ideas, too. One of the things to think about is that transparency, right, when we did that poll in the beginning about what might be a challenge for internal mobility or that shift, and one of the things that we talked about was talent hoarding, right, I know what this person does, I know how they do it. When you think about transparency across your organization, whether you do it manually, or whether you do it through a fabulous tool, like a fold. But when you think about that transparency of your talent, right, I would much rather have them in the organization helping us do the things we need to do than having them leave, right that the only way that I can move forward is leaving the organization, when you are transparent. And you feel like you’ve got that trust with your manager, here are the things that I do well, right, you and your manager can agree on what your proficiencies are with particular skills, not looking at a one time a year review, but doing a regular assessment of the things that you do the things that you do well, and the things that you want to do, identifying what those skill gaps are, and then working closely with your manager to get those close based on where you want to go. Right. So when there’s that transparency of saying, We want what’s best for our talent, and while I want you to stay on my team, I want you to stay with the organization and continue to grow, it takes away that sense of your mind, you belong to my department. And then you get that opportunity to try things in different areas and different departments. And that transparency then allows folks to know ahead of time where they might want to go, as opposed to getting to a point where maybe they’re frustrated, or they feel like that the rest of the rope, they don’t have visibility to what’s happening in your organization. And they say it’s easier for me to search for a job externally than it is for me to work internally. So opening up and doing that transparent look, and also giving opportunities for folks to try different things. You know, we did a hackathon inside of our organization two years ago. And we in customer success, were like, Oh, we’re not developers, we don’t know what we’re doing. And they opened it up and said, Hey, we want folks who don’t have the development skills are not engineers, we want you to come on board and help us think about it differently. And so a lot of us folks who didn’t spend a lot of time on the back end, were able to join projects, and add in valuable thoughts, where if you’re just developing something in a bubble on the back end, you don’t know how it’s going to be used or how it’s going to come out. And so adding that valuable feedback into a project that we wouldn’t normally be a part of made a big difference in not only the work in, in this space, but also how it was implemented. So I think that transparency is a really long way of me saying transparency in your organization. What do you think?
Ashish Mediratta 33:37
In fact, let me give an example. And I’m sure everyone can Google this while we talk. Please search for D S. O, dynamic shared ownership at Bear. So this is a global organization. And this point goes to what you were saying Rebecca transparency, and to an age old term that’s kind of beaten to death, change management. But this is talking about a new way, a new vision of working with the CEO of the organization has talked about right to the question that was put up, I think a fantastic question. The fact I would say around that is, is this something which is being driven from the top is the is the CXO, that the leadership of the company is totally bought into it? And is this what you want to aim for? If yes, and if it’s a stated objective, and it’s communicated very openly, transparently and understood well by employees, then this will be successful. It’s only a matter of time. But it just cannot be an initiative which starts in a block in a corner where a few people believe in it and the others don’t. That’s my That’s
Rebecca Warren 34:49
right. And I’m glad you mentioned that example from bear. So one of the things that we learned, we did our cultivate our internal talent, or I shouldn’t say internal but our eight pulled sponsor talent summit a couple of weeks ago and one of our clients, Trimble said that their internal mobility increased from I’m looking at my notes here, from 17 to 28%. So a 65% increase, in part, because before there was transparency, folks had to apply to express interest in roles. And now that there’s visibility to people’s interests before opportunities arise, they’re able to proactively put those pieces together. So and that’s that was not using our crew Navigator tool inside of Eightfold. It was because of that transparency, and then understanding of what people want to do before it was time to do it.
Ben Broomfield 35:40
Fantastic. I think maybe now is a good, good point, just to move on to our second poll of the day, which is how open is your organization to shifting to a certain talent centered approach, it would definitely be interesting to just to take start from moments of folks in the audience and see how ready they are to make this type of shift. As we said, it’s one that the the industry has been prepared for in some way for a while, but maybe there’s there’s been a few challenges along the way. So that poll is live now. And definitely feel free to share your responses there. So far, we’ve got one response, and it says we’re already on the journey. So that’s fantastic. But I hope there’ll be others that come through. And I’ll update on that in just a second. And once it
Rebecca Warren 36:18
oh, sorry, I was just gonna ask, what’s your guests on? Where are we going to land on that one?
Ben Broomfield 36:22
I think it’s going to be a fairly even split between we are you know, we’re already on our journey. We’re actually working towards the shift. And we’re interested, we’re not actively participating, I think, probably if anyone is going for we’re far away from the starting line, and they’re, and they’re, you know, they’re not there on this webinar, then I’m a little bit confused as to why. So they Yeah, but I think, Okay, we’ve got a couple of sort of, you know, we don’t know where to start, or we’re interested, interested, but not actively participating. So I think, a small amount of hesitancy, but some folks who are sort of actively working towards making that shift are already already embracing that model. So I think that’s probably fairly reflective of the industry, as well as maybe not quite as many folks as we would like you’re already there. But there’s certainly a lot of interest, just with some of those those challenges coming through. And that’s why it’s so great for us to come together on on platforms like this, just to go through some of those, those challenges. Wanted to sort of look at in this third section that we’ll move on to really creating the foundation for for skills based HR. And certainly thinking about some of the benefits that we’ve been that we’ve been speaking about as well. So I think it’s it’s really important as we talk about transparency, as we talk about communication for everyone, everyone involved in in a major shift like this is going to be thinking, Well, what’s in it for me? What are the benefits here of completely leaving how I’ve been thinking about jobs? How I’ve been thinking about work? Why is that going to be something that’s beneficial to me? So, Ashish, what are some of the benefits that you think talent centered design? And, you know, by extension, skills based hiring bring to employees? And what about for the business as well?
Ashish Mediratta 37:51
That’s a great question. I think like you said, this is all about being talent centered, right? So talent is right at the center, this is aligning to the personal goals and the business needs, you know, and from there, if you look at employee development, this is about giving that empowerment to employees to really transform their own career, their own life. And this primarily is because now HR is in a position to offer employees technology, which will be making them self enabled, right technology that tells them guys, these are the courses you could look at, these are the projects you could look at, these are the mentors you should be talking to. And this is in line with where you want to take your career, right. So you first decide where you want to go. And then the system can start telling you already to point you towards the relevant courses, projects and mentors within the company. And I think that is a very powerful way to ensure that employees are always aware that they are being cared for. Next, I would say it empowers internal mobility, the moment you’re skilling rescaling yourselves for your next role. Of course, there is no promise around that. But definitely what you are able to do is upskill yourself on the job, and you’re ready for the next move. We talked about the skill based planning right? Employees starting to get a visibility of what kind of you know roles may be appearing in the organization in some point in time, and start prepping for those in advance imagined succession planning. You know, we have seen being very open and candid here. Most organizations end up doing succession planning on an Excel sheet. Right? And that also is driven by what was the remembrance of people. So somebody in HR, remember that XYZ could be a good fit for so and so rolled, and you’re also looking at the top 20% positions or that Have 20% talent over there, you’re not even digging it across the organization, I will say hence, the the past was highly limited from what the system could do. Now imagine a situation where in a large company, perhaps 50k 100k employees, right, suddenly you have an option where you could take succession planning down to the level of even managers, people, managers within the company, right. And for each position, you are able to identify replacements, potential replacements, ready now, relator, etc, etc. Because AI can really show you the path and show you people who are potential replacements based on skills that we may not have even imagined. The Canvas has suddenly gone huge. And it’s up to us, folks in HR to really take it as an as a risk, or as a massive opportunity. To me, this is an opportunity like never before, right? We have seen how there have been apprehensions about AI, right, and how bias could be induced by AI. So there are I would say enough and more reasons to believe that there are safeguards in place. And there are audits in place, which can help you secure a, you know, an unbiased sort of solution for your employees. Right. And I think those solutions are right out there for your evaluation today, that the canvas, like I say, is open. This is sort of a landing on the moon moment where we’ll have to take some bold decisions around accepting AI, and not let it bother us saying that okay, can this take away my job? I would say most certainly not. What we do today will be perhaps very different from what we will be doing, actually, in terms of tasks or activities a few years down the line. But that doesn’t make us less value. I think that’s where I am in terms of this point of view.
Ben Broomfield 42:02
Absolutely. Well, you touched on AI there. And I think it would be it’s so important to obviously how a lot of the software operates. When we come to the HR technology side. Obviously, it’s the topic of a lot of conversations. And I think we’re certainly looking for those avenues for a lot of this almost some of the some of the grunt work or the less attractive work to be to be automated throughout this process. So that obviously HR plan really focuses time on on being a very valuable partner to the business. So what role do you think that AI can play in talent centered design, but at the same time, how can HR teams still make sure that there’s that that human involvement in the process and that their time and that is freed up is then used for sort of strategic guidance and really sort of high quality decision making rather than just saying let’s throw it over to the robots and leave it stewards?
Rebecca Warren 42:49
Well, I think what you said is exactly right, and she she set this up well, is that are the roles in HR. I think in a lot of areas, the roles are shifting to becoming that strategic adviser, as opposed to that order taker or paper pusher. And so when you think about the role of strategic advisor, so we’re letting technology get us to a different point faster. And then that’s where as a strategic advisor to make sure that we’re double checking that work, right, we’re never going to have the automation AI making those decisions for us. So that’s where that human element comes in that final approval authority. So AI can provide those recommendations. But the final decisions need to come from a human in what’s the best interest for the business, because as we know, AI can make those connections, but there isn’t that human element. So humans are always going to have that final say, putting together those content, that context, ethical considerations, empathy, all of that. So making sure that the AI generated insights are reviewed and interpreted in the right way for the business, you can have the exact same information, but you’ve got five different businesses that would interpret that differently based on what they’re trying to accomplish and what they’re doing. I also think that using that from a talent, intelligence perspective, right, going from data analytics to, to getting insights from things that have already passed, to moving more towards that talent, intelligence, right thinking about using dynamic real time data, to create those business insights and help the business move forward more quickly. So I think our role in HR and a lot of roles, I think, are moving into that advisor as opposed to that doer, but we are now making those strategic decisions more quickly and then helping the business move forward.
Ashish Mediratta 44:51
Rebecca, I think that’s a fantastic point you’ve touched and I was just reminded of, of what’s really happening out there in terms of The changes in our industry, and the point that he had talked earlier about the skills and the skill taxonomy. You know, all of us know that, you know, many organizations end up paying so much of, you know, premium to consulting organizations in terms of knowing what are the skills relevant in the market, what’s changing, etc, etc. This used to happen, and this exercise couldn’t could be done perhaps every few years, in terms of getting the affordability, right. What the business needs today is to know what’s happening on these skills, what’s changing in the market, and I want to know, now real time live. So that’s one trend that we are seeing change and change dramatically, very quickly for organizations. Everyone wants to know, which of these skills are getting redundant? They are on a declining path in the external market, and which skills are going on the ongoing on the upswing? And is there a way for a system to tell me these roles of yours are becoming full of old skills, which are declining, you better start thinking about this, talk to your business, and be that strategic partner and advisor to the business saying that friends, something is changing out there in the market, you better look at the skills, what kind of people you’re hiring for in your in your team, right? I think that’s where I see the role of an HR partner evolving, who really understands skills and is empowered with relevant data and analytics, which they can use to be a partner with the business and tell them guys, something is changing pretty fast in the market, do something about
Rebecca Warren 46:49
when we talk about right the half life of skills right now for tech skill is two and a half years. So by the time you figured it out, you need to start changing. So if you’re not ahead of it, guess what you’re going to be behind, and the organization’s, it’s not that you know whether or not you’re going to use AI, it’s how you’re going to use it and how well you’re going to use it because it’s here. So if you choose not to use it in the most, you know, optimal way, someone else is going to bypass you, right? So you’ve got to figure out the right way to do it for your organization and use it to your advantage to help you get to that next level and stay ahead of the game.
Ben Broomfield 47:29
Absolutely, it’s appointed sort of mentioned briefly on the a fall timetable that we were speaking on a couple of weeks ago, Rebecca, that you’ve got all of these distinct areas as well, from sort of recruitment and hiring to talent acquisition to learning and development teams focused on performance management, and retention. We’re all working towards the same type of objective that the organization needs to have the right level of skills, not just for now, but as you say, for sort of the next year for the next five years. 10 years. However, far ahead, you’re looking this skills based approach and talent centered design is that approach that brings all of those units together and brings that cohesion a little a little bit more together again, rather than having a hiring manager saying, Well, hold on, I’ve got this, you know, these old job descriptions is pretty much the same role. Let me turn these out to the market again, and a learning and development leader who’s saying, Well, someone on my team thinks that we should set up a design program for this specific coding language, let’s let’s run a session on this. You’ve got such distinctive approaches there. Whereas if you can bring in everything under one roof, with that really sort of talent centered approach and that skill centered approach, it has all of those different departments working together, and as we say, almost helps helps HR be a bit more strategic by eliminating a lot of a lot of the confusion and frustration that goes on there. We also sort of just before we came on to that touched on on the topic of AI, we did have a question that came through from Evelyn about how that we know that AI will be unbiased as she shed, I think you sort of touched on that a little bit. I wondered if maybe you could just go and go over that, again, for sort of maybe a 30 seconds to a minute in terms of some of the some of the checks and balances that you sort of typically would expect that obviously folks will go through working with any AI enabled technology to make sure that that we know that you know that bias isn’t going to be creeping into the process.
Ashish Mediratta 49:12
Rebecca, you want to go with this first?
Rebecca Warren 49:15
For sure, sure. I mean, that’s something that we’re really concerned with in our space ourselves is making sure that we are aware of bias. And so making sure that we have clear understanding of the AI, what’s it what is it doing, and folks inside of HR should do that as well. Right? Understand, we call ours AI for good Explainable AI. So understanding the model. Now I’m not saying that we’re going to you know, like, you don’t need to know how to create an algorithm that’s going to drive this, but understanding how it works, and making sure that you understand the benefits as well as the limitations right. There are no systems in my opinion that are perfect. So understanding where bias might creep in and then make Seeing sure that you’re like aware of that and staying ahead of that. I also think that regular monitoring and monitoring and ethical audits, you know, we do that and staying ahead of the game, they’re making sure that we’re auditing, asking the right questions, doing those compliance checks, making sure that the system is functioning the way that we expect it to making sure that there isn’t the opportunity for bad decision making or bias creeping in. And I would say any provider that you use should be able to explain to you how the AI works, that should be able also to give you those audits, and showcase where they’re compliant with the different regulations. There’s a lot of things that are coming out in the world right now different AI, boards and councils to try to also help give some guidance there. But I think making sure you understand the AI and then continuing to monitor and then looking at those ethical audits are ways that I would at least start. Ashish, what are your thoughts?
Ashish Mediratta 51:02
Absolutely, you’re spot on. With that, I’d say Rebecca, I’ll just add a couple of points. Number one, I would say when you are evaluating the AI, please check if the AI takes care of eliminating PII like the in the algorithm, any bias on account of PII could be location, gender, it could be the kind of school, you know, any such biases should not creep in. So please check for PII being taken care of in that AI. Second, do check for the the wealth of data that’s gone in into the design of that AI. There’s a few 100,000 data points, a few million data points, it’s, it’s something to watch out for that the algorithm should not get biased, just because the extent of data on which it has been trained, was limited to a few organizations or to a small setup, let’s say in an industry. So an industry specific data was used, right? So I think that’s where Eightfolds algorithm becomes really beneficial that we have more than a billion data points more than a million skills that the AI is looking at. And learning from all the while, please do remember that there are more than 2000 products out there that claim to have AI, right, even a chatbot is an AI. But you and I know that after three questions, if that thing falls flat, how good that AI is. Right? So one has to really keep thinking on those lines in terms of evaluating what’s relevant for your organization.
Rebecca Warren 52:53
Yeah, that’s a great call out.
Ben Broomfield 52:56
Absolutely. Wonderful. Well, we have one more question planned that we were going to cover, but we’ve got around eight minutes left. So I just want to put a call out to the audience as well. We’ve had two great questions that have come through from Claire and from Evelyn. If you’ve got any other questions around this topic around making skills based organizations reality shifting to talent centered design any of those challenges that you’re experiencing? On your journey so far, then please do send them over. And we’ll we’ll have a few minutes to go through them. But I thought maybe we could we could just run through perhaps some common mistakes that you see organizations might make when trying to shift talent centric design. Obviously, we’ve, we’ve spoken a lot about that journey. And sometimes it just those classic pitfalls that unless you’re sort of speaking with organizations who are doing going on this type of journey all the time you might not be aware of so yeah, Rebecca, Ashish, what are some of the common mistakes that you typically see organizations making when they go on this journey?
Rebecca Warren 53:49
Well, I’ll throw out one. And Ashish, you brought it up when you had said initially, when organizations go out to consulting companies, which is great. I mean, there are some amazingly smart people in different consulting firms that come in to build a competency model or a skill, taxonomy. But in today’s day and age, as soon as it’s created, it’s out of date, right. And so I think some of the mistakes that folks made to say, I built this model, now we’re good for another 510 15 years, and and trying to build a static skills list. In a dynamic world, there is a mismatch, right? So what we need to make sure, as we just said, this is building an ontology of skills, where it’s dynamic, it’s using data that is inclusive and continuing to be refreshed, to make sure that the skills ontology that you’re working with, is active, dynamic and continuing to grow. You know, if you look at even five years ago, some of the skills that were out there that folks aren’t using anymore, or how it’s shifting If you’re building your business on a static list of skills, you’re not going to be able to move forward the same way that some other companies are. So that was, what that was one that really stood out to me is building on static lifts of things that tend to go out of date, you’ve got to use some kind of technology, some kind of additional information to visualize and to understand what’s coming next, as opposed to saying, Here’s my static list.
Ashish Mediratta 55:24
And I guess I’ll add to that, Rebecca, saying that we have to use our data. Now data when you talk about in terms of skills is is precious, right? How many times do we know that the talent acquisition team hired people with certain skills, and the talent management team or the lnd team never even came to know about what skills have been hired for? So the TM team may the job description, which was perhaps five years ago, totally outdated, the TA team is doing its own thing, making the JV and, and the search based on what the business wants now, and the lnd team doesn’t have a clue of what skills have been hired. And say, a year down the line the CHR wants to know, guys, what skills have we hired in the organization in the last 12 months? Oops, that’s a tough question to ask, right? Now think about it. What if all of that data and that power was available to you and skills was that common thread that’s connecting the three pillars of HR, as I love to call them T ATM? lnd. Right. So that common language that runs across these three pillars of HR is going to be around skills in my view, and the more granular view you have, of what skills we have hired for what skills are declining, and yet we have hired for, right? So you You at least need to know what you don’t know, or what you didn’t know in the past. Right? So things are changing, like pretty rapidly out there. And I would say that the power of that data needs to be with the HR team.
Rebecca Warren 56:58
And I’ll add one more benefits. All right. Real quick. So I think the old way of doing HR was you’ve got your annual review, you’ve got here, here are the three things you do well, here are the six things you’ve got to work on. Right, maybe you get a mid year review. And then you do your annual review. Again, succession planning, is very static happens potentially once a year, after annual reviews are done, then you take that information and figure it out. But it’s based on an old way of doing things. And it’s based on what a manager thinks are the skills that someone has and needs to work on. So I think another thing that people get hung up on is old processes, but trying to do new things. So when we get out of that yearly review cycle, right, here are the things that you need to do, right, everybody’s got those goals. And then like six weeks before review, time comes around, you’re like I haven’t done any of the things that I committed to doing to make myself better, until people are scrambling, putting together their their last minute goals trying to showcase that they’ve checked them off. It’s not done well. And it’s not effective. So I think staying in a static press or an old school process isn’t helpful, either. So if we shift to dynamic conversation, to my personal opinion, blowing up the review process, like I hate the annual review, what does that look like on a regular basis, if you’re talking to your folks, and you’re transparent, you’re having those conversations and managers, you’re not afraid that your manager is going to penalize you for sharing where you may want to go next, right? That talent hoarding is out of your process. If folks don’t shift to a dynamic review process, I think they’re going to really find it hard for folks to feel good about even just a mid year and a one year review, not having that dynamic understanding of the skills and what they want to do and where they want to go.
Ben Broomfield 58:52
Fantastic. We just have one more question that came in from from Evelyn, I think hopefully, it’s one we can answer really quickly. Who’s responsible in the who is responsible in the business for the maintenance of the dynamic database? When it comes to that that skill space? If it goes to managers, will it be burdensome on their on their workload? So who does that responsibility for it typically?
Ashish Mediratta 59:11
So I think that’s a fantastic question, and a very operationally relevant one. Typically, what we recommend to our customers is to have someone in, you know, what we call as the talent management team in an admin role, who is looking at skills and of course, working very closely with the HR business partners and the business managers, right, somebody has got to keep an eye on what’s changing, right? You just cannot leave it be for, you know, the system to take care of itself. It’s not that evolved yet. Perhaps a few years down the line, maybe the system will start nudging people and say guys do something about it. Right. And, but for the moment we are recommending to our customers that you should have somebody in the talent management team Even an admin role, who’s looking at the skills architecture within your role architecture, and then really understands what’s going on. And they are working very closely with the HR business partners and business managers together to get this sorted and bring that visibility in the form of dashboards, right? We don’t want I mean, we don’t expect decisions being taken by one individual across the entire organization, or we make it so democratic, that it’s like free for all for everyone. Neither of these models will work, you find some something in between somewhere, that one person has a visibility and a dashboard and a control and who who can then help drive it with the other key stakeholders in the company. Of course, we both Rebecca and me are on LinkedIn. So friends do please feel free to reach out to us nudgers, if you want to have a chat offline. Absolutely on. That’s right.
Rebecca Warren 1:00:53
Yep. Well,
Ben Broomfield 1:00:55
We’re nice and snug up to the hour. So she’s Rebecca, thank you so much for taking the time to go through all of those questions. As as you say, feel free to connect with them on LinkedIn. If you would like to carry on the conversation, feel free to reach out to us as well. And thank you so much to a fall for helping put this session together and to all of you in the audience for taking the time out of your day to listen take part in the pollen send of your questions. Hopefully it’s been a really helpful session for you all. Thank you so much.
