Recruiting Future with Matt Alder - What's Next For Talent Acquisition, HR & Hiring?

Ep 630: Assessment in Skills-Based Organizations

Get my free whitepaper "10 Ways AI Will Transform Talent Acquisition" – Download Now Transform Talent Acquisition – Find out how my digital course will help you shape the future of talent acquisition in your organization – Click Here One key aspect of any journey to becoming a skills-based organization is having effective skills assessment strategies in place. This doesn't just apply to hiring and leadership development. Some of the most cutting-edge organizations are using assessment as part of the onboarding process to help understand the development needs of new employees. My guest this week is Simone Jacobi, Global Director of Talent Assessment at McKinsey. In our conversation, Simone talks about how McKinsey is gratifying assessments in its journey toward becoming a skills-based organization. In the interview, we discuss: What do skills mean at McKinsey? How McKinsey's talent acquisition process is evolving Broadening talent sources The advantages of gamifying assessment Onboarding and "Day One Readiness" assessments to help people become productive as quickly as possible Using Gen AI to Personalize Assessments Building individual skills profiles and mapping up skills development Reducing bias and using "Fairness Observers" when making people decisions What are the most essential skills for the future? Follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts.

Duration:: 20m
Broadcast on:: 24 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

Get my free whitepaper "10 Ways AI Will Transform Talent Acquisition" – Download Now

Transform Talent Acquisition – Find out how my digital course will help you shape the future of talent acquisition in your organization – Click Here

One key aspect of any journey to becoming a skills-based organization is having effective skills assessment strategies in place. This doesn't just apply to hiring and leadership development. Some of the most cutting-edge organizations are using assessment as part of the onboarding process to help understand the development needs of new employees.

My guest this week is Simone Jacobi, Global Director of Talent Assessment at McKinsey. In our conversation, Simone talks about how McKinsey is gratifying assessments in its journey toward becoming a skills-based organization.

In the interview, we discuss:

What do skills mean at McKinsey?

How McKinsey's talent acquisition process is evolving

Broadening talent sources

The advantages of gamifying assessment

Onboarding and "Day One Readiness" assessments to help people become productive as quickly as possible

Using Gen AI to Personalize Assessments

Building individual skills profiles and mapping up skills development

Reducing bias and using "Fairness Observers" when making people decisions

What are the most essential skills for the future?

Follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts.

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There's a free trial to try everything, and if you need more, Willow's tailored plans include features to help you expand your talent pool and streamline recruiting operations, all with 24/7 live support. Request a personalized demo today at willow.video. That's W-I-W-L-O dot video. There's been more of scientific discovery, more of technical advancement and material progress in your lifetime than mine, and of all the ages of history. Hi there, welcome to Episode 630, a recruiting feature with me, Matt Alder. One key aspect of any journey to becoming a skills-based organisation is having effective skills assessment strategies in place. This doesn't just apply to hiring and leadership development. Some of the most cutting-edge organisations are using assessment as part of the onboarding process to help understand the development needs of new employees. My guest this week is Simone Jacobi, Global Director of Talent Assessment at McKinsey. In our conversation, Simone talks about how McKinsey is gamifying assessments in its journey towards becoming a skills-based organisation. Hi Simone, and welcome to the podcast. Hey Matt, thank you for inviting me. It's an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please could you introduce yourself and tell us what you do? Sure, happy to. So I've been leading McKinsey's Talent Assessment Centre of Excellence for more than seven years, and before that I've worked as a selection assessment expert as well as in a client-facing consultant role at McKinsey. I have a PhD in Leadership and Cultural Studies. I live in Stuttgart, Germany together with my husband and three kids that keep me very busy and active, and if I'm not working I enjoy being outdoors in nature. Fantastic stuff, very keen to find out more about McKinsey's assessment process and how that's developed. I suppose to start things off just a question really about skills. What does skills mean in the context of talent development at McKinsey? Sure, so I guess it's fair to say that McKinsey is on a journey to become a more skills-based organisation. What do I mean by that? I think the good thing is that in talent selection we've always had clearly defined skills and capabilities and performance levels associated to them that we use for selecting our talent. So in that space it's not new to us. However, like many other organisations, for a long time we've relied on typical career path, on tenure in a role, but also on people doing evaluations for people whose role they had before. And so with still the requirements changing more rapidly and some colleagues joining McKinsey later in their career, we've actually seen a need to focus more on clearly defining what skills we need in which role and at what time in your career. And so yeah, I think in that space, so in the learning and development space, I would say on a journey to get better at defining what the skills are that we look for. And what about your talent acquisition process? I mean, how has that developed over the last few years, particularly in terms of assessments and things like gamification? Yeah, so I would say about 10 years ago was a really critical turning point for us because we realise that in order to broaden the sources that we find talent at, we really need to go and digitise our assessment at the beginning of our selection process and ideally do that in a fun way. And so at the time we started working with a startup that helped us develop a game that would assess the problem-solving skills that we see relevant for the entry-level consultant roles at McKinsey. Excitingly, we have brought this team in-house in the meantime and so they continue to evolve our recruiting game, which we call Solve, but they're also seeking opportunities to see how we can think about gamifying some assessments for the firm for learning and development purposes. Tell us a little bit more about the assessment of how it works. Basically, if people are interested to learn more, you can always go and find more information on our careers website, but the idea is to put people in a situation where they need to solve problems in a natural environment. So no business-related problems, hence also no requirements to be familiar with certain concepts, but we really want to focus this on very basic problem-solving skills involving structuring problems, being creative, doing numerical analysis, and sort of solving problems in a truly different space that hopefully help people to get a bit into a game flow as they are doing this assessment and hence also don't experience the nervousness that you would typically do in an assessment. And thankfully, most of our candidates say that they really enjoy this playing this game, which of course we are excited about. Fantastic stuff. And sort of moving on, I suppose, to the skills assessment part of it and how you move forward with this. How do you support people to become productive as quickly as possible when they join the organization? Yeah, so I think like many others, we have an onboarding program for all our new joiners, and it consists of different modules. Some of them are in-person, also to foster the connectivity that is really relevant in our culture, but then of course also to learn about McKinsey's values, about business skills, leadership skills, technical skills, the guardrails we need to be aware about when using AI and generative AI. And so I think while in the past, we've of course done most of this in person, and we've really relied on people just knowing what we expect them to learn in this course, we are now experimenting with what we call day one readiness assessment in sort of working terms. And we are hoping to develop something that could essentially be at least a simulation or a game-based to help understand whether people have really learned what the performance objectives for these onboarding modules are, or where we could support them with additional learning assets. What are the advantages of using sort of gamification for that kind of purpose? They are multiple, so I think the first big advantage is experience. I think like we've seen for our candidates playing a game in this election space, I think most of the people who receive an offer take it and are excited to join McKinsey, but I think it's also fair to say that quite a number of them are nervous on whether they will be capable to do their job well. And so I think we want to avoid the term assessment, of course, and we really hope to make this this assessment experience engaging and enjoyable for them as much as we can. The second big advantage, I think, is we're hoping to also share a bit more about what the work during your first few weeks at McKinsey at a client engagement would actually look like. And so the type of work that we do is so varied. And so even in our very first MVP, we are putting in a story and some context that helps people understand, okay, this is why this question is being asked. I need to develop this problem-solving statement. What is the context for doing this on a client study, for example? I think the next advantage for me is more also a curiosity-related one, which is that we want to explore whether and how we can use generative AI in a game-based assessment. What do I mean by that? I think some people on this podcast have probably heard about the opportunity to use generi to help you give feedback to something that you're saying and then you're attempting to bring a certain message across in a certain way, and then generi can actually tell you whether it's working or not. And so if we were able to do that successfully, I think this could really change the whole cost structure and development times for games or simulations, where you usually had to hard code and different answers and so on. And so this is a new space that we're excited to learn about. Yeah, I mean, that's really interesting, isn't it, in terms of being dynamic and flexible and being able to adapt and personalize things very quickly? Yeah, yeah. And I think then the last point that I don't want to neglect, it doesn't necessarily just show up as an advantage for a game-based assessment, but for digital assessments in general is of course the system integration. So we really regard this learning about someone's day one readiness skills as the beginning of a journey and would like to feed this in the future into an individual skills profile where a new joiner could actually see where they're already meeting the bar, maybe where they bring particular strengths, where we can encourage them to build on those strengths, but also see over the course of their career where there are gaps or maybe even feed, study feedback into the skills profile. So again, that's an area that we're experimenting in, but that wouldn't work if we didn't do this in a digitized way, of course. No, absolutely. I suppose it tells us a little bit more about maybe how you do that now. I mean, how do you map out those skills that people need and that development as their career progresses? Well, I think it's a big question and probably a lot of other organizations can relate to that. So I think the great news is that McKinley has a history of strong leadership development. So what this means for us is that we have a number of artifacts in place that we can use. So, as I mentioned already, for our talent selection purposes and selection assessments, we have clearly defined skills and capabilities of what we really believe people need to bring in order to be successful in their roles. But in addition to that, we have something that we call a leadership development model that also outlines behaviors that we expect people to show at certain stages in their career for different paths. And we have a similar set of artifacts related to technical skills. So in some of our roles, people really need certain expertise and digital skills or coding skills or analytics or so. And so again, we have some documentation of how we want these things to develop. Now, there are two challenges about having this documentation. The first one, as you, I'm sure you know that, is this is never static. So skills change and so part of our time also from my COE and also in our learning design, COE, for example, is invested into research of how the skills for the future change, what is relevant. We really aim to establish even better feedback loops to understand, you know, if there are gaps in skills, are these things that we can develop better ways of learning or apprenticeship for, or are these things that we really need to add to our list as selection criteria early on. And I think the other challenge or I would say it's again a topic that we try to continue to get better at is making sure what we write down as requirements is as fair and unbiased as possible so that we really don't prefer certain behaviors which certain groups seem to show more than others. And that is an area that I'm personally very passionate about to really make sure that everybody has the same chances to advance no matter what their personal preferences are. Just tell us a little bit more about that in terms of how you do that or what some of the considerations are. There is a lot we're doing in different places. I think one part of it is just awareness building for all colleagues in general, right? What are biases? What are unconscious biases? But then also, for example, in our hiring process, we typically do a series of interviews and then we come together in a decision meeting and then in most of them we have someone who plays the role of a fairness observer who is really there to listen to comments that don't refer to the objective capabilities or skills that we've defined but to other random comments and can sort of ask the question, "Is that relevant for this decision? How exactly did it play out? Can you give more color to it?" Which I think has really sharpened awareness for especially people who make people decisions within McKinsey. You mentioned a minute ago about the shortening lifespan of skills and how skills are changing all the time. As a final question, what do you think the most important skills are going to be moving forward or in the future? What are you as a business looking for or anticipating people are going to need? About a year ago, our people leader asked me the question whether we should start assessing for digital aptitude. And I thought this was actually an interesting question and first of all, we thought out to find a definition for what we mean by that. And for our purposes, we actually said this is a curious mindset towards applying new technology solutions that could potentially change or simplify the work of an employee. And by digging into that definition, we realized that a number of key skills that underlie this potential digital aptitude are things that we've always been looking for. So really great problem solving skills, drive adaptability. And so in that respect, they didn't change that much, but rather helped us focus to say these things really matter. Are we still assessing them in the best way possible? Do we need to think about new ways or double down on some of them? So I would say some of the things will actually continue to stay the same and equally relevant in the future. But two skill areas, I would call them that I find becoming more and more relevant is one curiosity and the other one self leadership. And so on curiosity, I mean, maybe some others on this podcast have heard your discussion met with Stefan Bernhoydung from the Curiosity Institute. And I think this idea of intentional curiosity is really a big one that could drive exceptional problem solving skills that are highly relevant, at least in our industry, in the future, especially in times where JNI will do part of the problem solving for us, but not all of it. And so understanding this whole topic better and then also figuring out how to assess for that is one of the key challenges that I see for us or exciting topics to tackle. And then on self leadership, I think that's also a bit colored by my own experience with two teenagers at home. I think in a world where they could just basically spend all day or day on a couch, you know, at a fingertip just surfing the world and the internet and finding all relevant and irrelevant information without moving. It really becomes an interesting question. How does self leadership develop? Where does it come from? How much energy are people willing to invest for what? Are they ready to go the extra mile? How can you trigger that? Or where does it come from? And how can you maybe train on these things? Because I see that this is clearly what we need at McKinsey. I think we have so much to offer, but we need people to self lead. So they need to lead their learning journeys and development journeys. And so understanding that whole world better is really something that I strive for for the future. Simone, thank you very much for talking to me. Thank you very much for having me. My thanks to Simone. You can follow this podcast on Apple podcasts on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also subscribe to our YouTube channel by going to matholder.tv. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com. On that site, you can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Recreating Future Feast, and get the inside track about everything that's coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I'll be back next time, and I hope you'll join me. This is my show. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]