The New Talent Code

Talent leaders shouldn’t worry about AI harming equal employment opportunities. In fact, they should know that the right AI only enhances it.

Craig Leen, former Director of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) at the U.S. Department of Labor, is a proponent of using AI in hiring, especially when finding equal opportunities for all workers.

Join Ligia Zamora and Jason Cerrato as they sit down with Craig Leen to get the latest take on all things AI in HR, including:

What organizations need to look out for with new AI in HR regulations
Why HR functions should audit job requirements as they go, and correct inequities with skills-based insights
How "good AI" helps to identify people who have historically been overlooked by humans or have been subject to unconscious bias

Don't miss these quotes from Craig Leen:

“Recognize that many combinations of experiences may lead to the development of a certain skill, and by looking for that skill only, it gives someone a chance to compete for the job." - Craig Leen [12:57]
“I would generally recommend profile masking so that when you make that selection of who to interview, you’re not making that decision in any way based on race, ethnicity, gender, disability status, or sexual orientation." - Craig Leen [20:57]
“There’s this idea that AI is going to cause harm to certain people. The less you can explain a particular AI's outcome, the more valid that concern. The opposite is also true though, particularly for good AI.” - Craig Leen [27:03]

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Like the transformation from paper maps to modern-day GPS, the world of talent management needs a faster, reliable, more intelligent way to map out upskilling and learning opportunities for people.

Steve Hunt, Ph.D., Chief Expert, Technology and Work at SAP, profoundly understands how technology transforms work. He joins The New Talent Code to discuss the intersection of psychology, work technology, and business performance.

And why every organization needs to clearly map out a path for upskilling – or be left behind.

Here are some key takeaways:

"There’s a myth that people aren’t good at change. That’s completely wrong. The competitive niche of humans as a species is our ability to adapt to changing environments. We are really good at it.” - Steve Hunt [08:20]
"If you look at what artificial intelligence and machine learning tools are doing to the field of skills and skills ontologies, it’s like what GPS did for maps. It's taking this knowledge and allowing us to more quickly update these things on the fly organically, like how Waze updates traffic patterns on the fly organically. As a result, it will enable employees to get much better insight into possible career paths in real-time.” - Steve Hunt [15:18]
"We don't want people thinking of employees as fixed assets. Instead, we want to constantly think of employees as something changing and growing over time.” - Steve Hunt [21:47]

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According to Josh Bersin, the time to implement a strategy backed by talent intelligence is now.

As one of the world’s top HR industry analysts and advisers, Bersin is leading the Global Workforce Intelligence (GWI) Project. Powered by Eightfold AI, GWI is a first-of-its-kind, innovative, large-scale initiative designed to help HR leaders better understand major workforce trends to shape their companies for the future. GWI delivers research and analysis leveraging billions of data points collected by Eightfold AI’s powerful Talent Intelligence Platform.

Together, this new approach to talent strategy will be game-changing for business leaders and HR professionals across all industries.

5 can't-miss quotes from the episode:

"So I'm very sympathetic to people who get laid off, are confused about their careers, don't know what they want to do next, hate their jobs. I completely understand where they're coming from, and I think there's always a path out of that.” - Josh Bersin [05:13]
“Most of the companies I talked to are still growing. They're seeing demand. People are still buying and going on vacation. The constraints of supply chains are all messed up, but that's all getting fixed. So I think we're going to be in a period of slowing growth.” - Josh Bersin [08:02]
“Recruiting, reskilling, retaining, and re-engineering—they're not separate things anymore; they are all interrelated. Those four things have to be stitched together. They have to be interlocked with a talent intelligence strategy.” - Josh Bersin [14:52]
“Intelligence is bringing these groups together and giving them a better data system so that they can make better decisions as a group. This talent intelligence team is going to become essentially the nervous system of the body.” - Josh Bersin [18:50]
“We can see very clearly the kinds of skills, job titles, and roles in existence in high-performing companies versus lower-performing companies. So it's a perfect roadmap for organizations on what they need to do next.” - Josh Bersin [22:01]

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"You need digital transformation to survive. It's not about technology. It's about fundamentally changing what a company is doing."

Hicham Zahr has a digital transformation background working for McKinsey, Oracle, and Gartner before joining Eightfold AI. Recently named one of 2022’s Top 100 HR Tech Influencers by HR Executive Magazine, Zahr has taken his lifelong passion for picking up new skills to transform people’s careers backed with talent intelligence.

With talent intelligence, "you're not just looking at that individual in the silos. Now you're putting those other elements—the ecosystem—around that individual to uncover all these skills," says Zahr.

In this episode, Zahr joins hosts Ligia Zamora and Jason Cerrato to discuss his research and how it can help any HR leader crack their talent code.

3 can't-miss quotes from this episode:

"Unfortunately, when it comes to digital transformation, many senior execs are not thinking about butterflies. They're thinking about fast caterpillars. And that is why transforming that caterpillar into a butterfly is important but challenging." - Hicham Zahr [09:25]
"The half-life of a skill is five years. But when it comes to technical skills, the half-life of a skill is two and a half years. And it's diminishing. That's why up-skilling and re-skilling is important." - Hicham Zahr [15:55]
"When you are looking at architecting jobs, do not architect those for today. You want to architect those jobs for the future. This is what we call calibration nowadays. What's been emerging in the market? What are skills that are under the hood that not a lot of people have, but have been increasing in importance?" - Hicham Zahr [27:02]

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The U.S. Department of Defense is the largest employer in the world, with about 3 million people working across all services. With a budget of $753 billion and operations in more than 4,800 sites in 160 nations worldwide, it’s tough to imagine how challenging recruiting and talent management must be for such a large organization.

Craig Robbins is a Senior VP of Talent at Prositions, a human capital solutions and HR tech company. He’s also a Major in the U.S. Army Reserve, serving as Talent Management Chief with the newly formed 75th Innovation Command, and is an adviser to the Army at large. His mission is to connect people from all walks of military life to meaningful work.

Hired for his potential, Robbins is now a decade into the HR space and focused on looking for new ways to place people with the right opportunities.

Here are a few key learnings from Robbins (his views, not the DoD) on how the military is amping up its hiring programs. This includes a critical project called GigEagle, a new Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) project that leverages top talent from the Reserve and National Guard on demand.

“When it comes to talent discovery, how do we even see the skills and the experiences and the certifications of all those people on our team? If you don't capture the data, you can't search for the data. And so getting to GigEagle because the 75th Innovation Command is unique in the sense that we employ people's civilian skill sets. We had to create a system that would allow us to capture and discover those skills.” - Craig Robbins [13:43]
"It's so much more than skills matching. We're trying to rethink the way we look at work and rethink the way we even think about the team members on our team. And so this is really about transforming our culture at large. How can we enable people in the Reserve, the National Guard, and the active duty Army to work across those boundaries? So we're trying to break down these barriers and we're trying to create essentially a gig economy within the DoD." - Craig Robbins [19:35]
“We're not just trying to leverage the whole person of the members of our team. We're really trying to enable critical mission success. So when you think about a national cyber-security incident or a crisis, when you think about a national healthcare crisis, like COVID, the fact that the Department of Defense cannot see any of its people who have healthcare skills or cybersecurity skills outside of the military is a huge problem. I mean it, quite frankly, to me is a crisis of sorts and certainly, we know what units and where our nurses are in the Army Nurse Corps. But when something on the scale of COVID occurs, we need to know where all the Reserve folks are.” - Craig Robbins [21:18]

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Rachelle Snook, the Global Talent Director from WD-40 — yes, that ubiquitous garage staple that can seemingly do everything — is a fan and proponent of breaking down silos and building people up to create a more agile workforce.

WD-40 has been all hands on deck for a while now, tapping into employee insights from around the world, especially in critical times like handling supply chains during the pandemic. Snook says it’s their unique perspective on working cross-functionally on a project basis that makes it all come together.

5 key quotes from this episode:

"By decentralizing those decisions and inviting those peer groups together, we created great outcomes, wonderful solutions, and we could respond really quickly to the business needs.” - Rachelle Snook [08:34]
“Our leaders are more focused on what needs to get done rather than the where or the how, and our work from anywhere philosophy is enabling them to do that." - Rachelle Snook [12:08]
"We have a philosophy at WD-40. We don't go where we're not invited. So HR is not going to be banging down the door saying, ‘Hey, we want to talk with you about being a more agile organization.’ No, we are creating and asking the questions. What can we do?” - Rachelle Snook [16:58]
“By allowing our people to work on projects, either in their functional area or outside their traditional geographies, they're creating opportunities for themselves, so they're now on the radar for that next role or lateral move within our organization." - Rachelle Snook [19:39]
"The first thing to do is for each coach to ask their tribe member, 'What can you stop doing to create time for this?' The other thing is to provide a place where we can post these project positions so that we can be equitable and everybody has visibility to them." - Rachelle Snook [31:09]

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Mary Faulkner, principal at IA-HR, joins The New Talent Code to discuss the questions every HR leader should be asking as they gear up for a business transformation.

As a talent strategist and problem solver, Faulkner has extensive experience helping organizations optimize their HR practices to take a more future-forward approach. She specializes in change management and teaching people how to transform their organizations from within.

This episode explores best practices for when to start the change management process, how to get leadership buy-in, and how to identify broken processes before embarking on a transformation journey.

Here are the biggest takeaways from the episode with Mary Faulkner:

"If you find yourself constantly changing, but you don't have a change methodology to help support people through that change, all you're going to feel is chaos. It's never too soon to start thinking about change management, your communication plan, your training plan, your stakeholder identification." - Mary Faulkner [11:37]
"The organizations where they centralize that ownership of a job description, I think it's smoother. So it's not the hiring managers reacting to something and having to rewrite it, somebody else is doing it for them. Someone who's knowledgeable, someone who understands the market, somebody who has talked to compensation." - Mary Faulkner [20:12]

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There are still too many barriers when it comes to hiring and advancing women in technical roles. Fortunately, those obstacles are being overcome with the help of people like Alaina Percival, co-founder and CEO of the nonprofit Women Who Code.

In the latest episode of The New Talent Code, hosts Ligia Zamora and Jason Cerrato revisit a conversation with Percival from Eightfold's Cultivate event. In this talk, Percival shares several pieces of advice on how to examine each breakpoint in the pipeline to design for inclusion and how to support women on their continuous upskilling journeys.

3 key quotes from this episode:

"Make sure you're examining each break point in the pipeline for designing for inclusion. So if you realize that you're getting 95% male applicants maybe should be (shameless plug) posting on Women Wo Code's job board. If once you're going through the hiring process, and no women are making it past the whiteboarding session... you have a lot of opportunities for evaluating what questions are asked." - Alaina Percival [21:25]
"The most important thing you can be doing right now is investing in the teams and the talent that you have inside of your company. And some of the things that you really need to be doing is helping women to understand what their path is inside of your organization and what they need to be doing to achieve that next position." - Alaina Percival [16:51]
"Software engineers know that you have to continue developing your skills. You're not going to just learn one programming language, one framework. And for women, it's so difficult to decide to take the time to invest in yourself. And so you need to make sure that people have the avenue and the clarity that they should be investing in themselves, and that they have the support and resources to do so." - Alaina Percival [18:27]

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Josh Bellis joins Ligia and Jason on The New Talent Code to share how and why he found his specialization as a diversity and inclusion practitioner and which processes, systems, and mindsets organizations need in order for their diversity programs to actually be successful. He shares how his unique experience with a variety of organizations has shaped his approach to DEI, and he dives into the practical advice on how to integrate DEI beyond acquisition into talent management.

Here are the biggest takeaways from the episode: - "It's really about a culture shift. It's really about making the whole company find out what they can do to advance diversity initiatives. And I think for too long, it's just sat with the DEI people." - Josh Bellis [7:28] - "It is worth taking a step back, even if that means that yes, you're hiring slower, to actually think about the available market and what we can realistically hit with that. Understand the market that you're in and understand the levers that you have available." - Josh Bellis [10:54] - "We're moving away from the things that we traditionally think make someone qualified. And I think looking at those transferable skills [is important] because, for a lot of underrepresented groups, they don't have the connections to get into these things." - Josh Bellis [26:40]

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Alexandra Levit joins Ligia and Jason on The New Talent Code to share her five pillars of career durability, and how companies can help employees visualize their career paths.

From an emphasis on applied technology skills to deciding which skills employees should really focus on in their upskilling and reskilling efforts, Alexandra shares practical insights for anyone reshaping their mindsets towards work and non-linear career paths while enabling companies to make skills-based talent decisions.

3 quotables from this episode:

"You're never going to get people in the door to see what their learning agility ability is, if you are insisting that they have the exact combination of skills and experiences that you would ideally want in that role. " - Alexandra Levit [20:23]
"Maybe this is something that you revisit every six months to a year to really look at your current size, your composition as an organization, how you've developed your workforce to start evaluating demand for skills based on the direction that the market is taking, and that your competitors are taking, and determining the gaps where there's going to be a need for skills that you don't currently have." - Alexandra Levit [23:33]
"In your culture, is it OK to tell your boss that you want to move into a completely different function?" - Alexandra Levit [25:22]

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Welcome to The New Talent Code! In this first episode, Ligia Zamora and Jason Cerrato kick off the show to share how they have cultivated a passion for the talent space as well as what makes them qualified to speak to an audience on how to crack the new talent code alongside their guests.

Jason dives into his non-linear career path - from recruiter to HR leader at United Technologies to Gartner analyst to vendor product marketing - and how these varied roles have all been connected by adjacent skills.

And Ligia describes her own non-linear career path from civil engineer to "accidental CMO," and why she keeps coming back to work in the HR space.

Join Jason and Ligia as they delve into the transformation that needs to happen in the talent space in order to take on the new world of work. And to figure out how to hire, upskill, reskill, promote and re-deploy talent based on an individual’s capability and potential.

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