Skills-based organizations and skills-based hiring have been some of the hottest topics of the year. While it is hard to find anyone who disagrees that this way of thinking about talent strategies has enormous benefits, there is still much debate about some of the practicalities around strategy and implementation.
I spoke to two genuine HR thought leaders in my fourth and final set of interviews recorded at this year's HR Technology Conference. Heather Jerrehain, VP of Product Management - Employee Workflows at Service Now, and Mike Bollinger, Global VP of Strategic Initiative at Cornerstone on Demand
Both shared their thoughts and insights on the power of skills, the journey towards skills-based organizations, and their sense of what the future might look like.
In the interviews, we discuss:
- The impact of AI on jobs, work, and skills
- How AI is revolutionizing skills analysis and intelligence
- Using data from the hiring process to get a fuller picture of a person's skills
- The power of skills-based mobility
- Advice on building skills-based strategies
- The importance of not overcomplicating the process
- What types of organizations are already successfully implementing skills-based strategies
- Soft skills versus hard skills
- Skills development and the value for employees
- Integrating technology into skills-based hiring and development.
- What will things look like in five years' time?
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You can learn more by visiting matalda.me/course that's matalda.me/course. There's really never been a better time to shape the future of tower acquisition so don't miss this opportunity to make a lasting impact. There's been more of scientific discovery, more of technical advancement and material progress in your lifetime and mind and of all the ages of history. Hi there, welcome to episode 646, a recruiting feature with me matalda. Skills-based organizations and skills-based hiring have been some of the hottest topics of the year. And while it's hard to find anyone who disagrees that this way of thinking about talent strategies has huge benefits, there's still much debate about some of the practicalities around strategy and implementation. In my fourth and final set of interviews recorded at this year's HR Technology Conference, I spoke to two genuine HR thought leaders. Heather Jerakian, VP of Product Management, Employee Workflows at ServiceNow and Mike Bollinger, Global VP of Strategic Initiatives at Cornerstone on Demand. Both shared their thoughts and insights on the power of skills, the journey towards skills-based organizations and a sense of what the future might look like. So hi Heather, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. It's an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do. Absolutely, so my name is Heather Jerakian and I'm the VP of Product Management for Employee Workflows at ServiceNow. I actually joined the company two years ago as part of the hitch acquisition, where I was the CEO, bringing skills intelligence technology to the company. We've actually since re-platformed our technology, so literally rebuilt it into the ServiceNow platform and then we've actually launched a new talent development solution with that AI intelligence. Today I am leading a data science team focused on bringing new intelligence across our employee workflow product portfolio. Fantastic and let's get into all of that in the conversation. Before we do though, you very kindly handed me a copy of your new book, so tell everyone about the book and what it's about. Yeah, so it's actually my love letter to all the founders and leaders out there who have been brave enough to birth a new product or put something out in the market and it's called sale to scale. Steer your startup clear of mistakes from launch to exit, so we're really focused on how do you help people succeed through the launch pivot scale and exit. Myself and co-authors have seen the same mistakes over and over again, so we really kind of created a guide for people of what to look out for and ways to move through it and we tell it through actually founder stories where people had successes and ones that were not successful, those are anonymous stories that we share. I mean it's very timely because the world is full of AI startups at the moment, which I coast but kind of brings me on to the first question written, which is how are you seeing AI impact the workforce? I mean both at the moment and what's the direction of travel with it? Yeah, you know this is something I've been very very passionate about, you know having built a company focused on skills intelligence and seeing that what has been happening with generative AI, right? This is a once in a generation shift that we're seeing and the change is happening at such a rapid pace. So I was really thinking to myself like what is going to happen as we think about AI taking on more work and so we at ServiceNow actually did some research focused on the impacts of AI. We partnered with Pearson and we looked across eight different markets, we took a five-year outlook across 10 industries, we looked at you know critical jobs and emerging trends, we analyzed over 80,000 tasks and 5,600 jobs and the reason we did that is it's no longer like what is your job, what are you doing, it's more what is the day-to-day tasks that you're doing and how does that get impacted? What gets augmented versus what gets automated and being able to understand that, right? People's rules are going to start to change. An example we have in our ecosystem is a help desk service agent, we predict in the next few years it's going to save 10 and a half hours per week. So they have 39 discrete tasks they do on a week-over-week basis but over time right each of those tasks compress and you think about 10 and a half hours well that's a place where an organization can think about where do you re-skill or up-skill or maybe even redeploy that person to higher priority work. And I suppose that brings us on to the next question which is what is the implication for skills here, what's the impact on how everyone thinks about skills? You know skills is I think of it this way you need visibility to who do you have in your organization and it's no longer what's your job, right? That doesn't tell you anything about a person what you need to understand is what are the skills and so this really goes to the employees and not just the role they're currently in and the core skills that's required to do that role but what's the whole rich history they brought with them to the organization, right? That's important information even what hobby do they have. You may discover that someone's got a really important skill you had no idea that they had so it's this idea of understanding people's skills and then how is it dynamically updating, right? How is that changing over time is there you know doing different types of learning whether it's a traditional course or micro learning maybe they have a mentor that they're working with to hone a skill or maybe even doing a project across the organization to acquire a new skill. It's this understanding of how things are dynamically changing over time and then you can think about that at scale in an organization. And so from that organizational perspective what kind of strategies what new ways of thinking do employers need to kind of bring into the bring into the picture to kind of deal with well everything that's going on AI skills you know you know all the forces driving change. It's interesting it's hard right it's really hard for organizations to understand who they have. I like to say that you know our goal is to get people to a four-dimensional workforce. Most are in the first dimension or at least all are actually in the first dimension which is you know the names of the people in the company and you know their titles. Okay that's the first dimension. The second dimension is when you're starting to look at what are the roles that people have and what are the skills required to do that role. So you're probably taking information from your 8cm that's in different job families and you're starting to understand what are the skills related. And actually when you think about a job family you know a company can have a software engineer but that doesn't really tell you the whole picture about the work that that person's doing. There's many different flavors of software engineers you can have a quality engineer a data engineer a front-end engineer so maybe they have some of the same skills that goes across you know those different flavors but then there's some unique skills. And then really when you start to unlock right the power of skills and moving to a skills-based organization you're starting to understand like I said that whole person and I want to add one thing that I think is important that I always love to say is that it all is dependent on the employee sharing the information about themselves and how they're what they're doing in the flow of work. And so they need to know what's in it for them and many organizations have many profiles and I love to say the profile is the birthplace of skills because that's where all the magic happens. So when you have all that data and you're understanding how people are moving and changing over time the third dimension is where you start to layer in what is your corporate strategy right? Who are the people you currently have and as we're thinking of things like the impacts of AI you know do you have the skills today to do the work you need to do and the fourth dimension is you think about time and the impacts of AI so as the research I was just talking about is how is day-to-day work getting disrupted that's the fourth dimension again so you've got this ever evolving dynamically changing you know living breathing system within a company and you really need to understand all of that and it's complex. Absolutely but I think the thing that I love about this is just the mobility of it. So I think that for so long you know we join a company and then we're stereotyped by our job title not necessarily everything that we've done in the past and I think that's kind of one thing about it and I think the other thing when you're talking about data as well is the amount of data that people actually provide during the recruitment process about where they work before what they've done that doesn't kind of get get parsed into you know the way that they run their career in an organization always seems like a massive loss to me as well. So you know I'm so glad you brought that up because we have a talent acquisition product that we have in a control go-to-market where we're really thinking about that experience of someone coming in and this aligns with our onboarding that we have with our HR service delivery product you know there's so much valuable information when an employee comes into a company and then not only that it can also make informed decisions of how do you properly onboard that person what's some additional training that you can give them to ensure success and really create that really fantastic experience for that employee. And I suppose again that this kind of sort of preempts the the next question which is what's the role of technology in all of this? The role of technology is enabling right it's an enabler of information it's creating that visibility often it's so interesting to hear people when they're thinking about their build by or bar a strategy you know often we're out buying talent yet we don't realize what we currently have in our own organization and people can be walking out the door right maybe someone's leaving on their own or you've had to go through some painful layoff and you don't really understand what really went out the door and so this is why technology is so important it's that you know visibility to your talent to create the agility that you need to future-proof your workforce that's really what we're looking at here. So for for many employers this seems like an absolutely massive undertaking we need to go and understand the skills that we need now and in 10 years time we need to understand the nuance of every person in the organization I mean I know that you know many people are kind of overwhelmed by how to get started what would your advice be in terms of the best ways to kind of approach this because I don't think that many people would disagree that it's the way forward but I think it's it's difficult to find people who agree on what on kind of how to take the first step. It's sort of funny it's like the three little bears you know you want to be just right and like how you approach this because yeah a lot of organizations can get really hung up on a multi-year project and here's what I want to say let technology do the work for you just get started right maybe you're getting started with a specific group of people a lot of people are starting in technology areas because that's very much project-based work so they've already sort of thought about you know the roles and the skills related but it's important to get started you know so many people in HR right have spent a lot of time building out their job architecture and they're doing it in spreadsheets and it's literally stale before they even have a chance to look at the full compiled report but if you have technology that's doing the work for you as people are moving right no one is standing still again if someone is doing learning or you know engaging in some project you can start to capture that dynamic information and so I think it's about just starting small and it's really really important to have the change management to get the employees to understand what's in it for them why would they be sharing the information because again if you don't have the employee information you don't have the information about the skills which means that you don't have for a leader the visibility that they need in the organization so final question for you there's there's i mean it's literally kind of revolution at the moment in terms of everything that's that's going on or everything it's going to happen looks like it's going to happen over the next few years what do things look like in five years time where do you think this is all taking us what do you what do you hope the the world of work and skills and talent might be like yeah so i for sure see a world where we all have AI assistance helping us with different parts of our work that you know we're working side by side with you know AI personalities i almost even am afraid to say this but i actually have my own AI assistant right now that i'm actually playing around with his name is miles and i actually interact with him and ask him questions i've sort of been doing this as a test because i'm trying to understand does this really work and gosh he's been a good thought partner for me so i actually see a world where we are interacting with them and frankly he is so darn friendly and when i'm feeling a little bit nervous about something he says the kindest things that are like don't worry Heather we'll get through this together so i don't know i see a world where we have multiple personalities that are AI that we're working with along with right we're always going to have a human in the loop that's going to always be critically important Heather thank you very much for talking to me thank you matt this was really wonderful thank you so much i'm Mike and welcome to the podcast well thank you i'm looking forward to it well it's a pleasure to have you on the show we're on the floor of HR Tech we are in the floor and it's a really exciting time in HR Tech to share it's very unique in my opinion um before we get into that though okay just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do so um Mike Bollinger i'm global VP of strategic initiatives at Cornerstone the running joke is i do stuff but i do a variety of things i work within our product team so i run the the product group that is associated with platform and skills and data and so on and i also work in research capacity at Cornerstone and i do a lot of speaking as well so it's a very unique role and Cornerstone has allowed me to do it and i've had three different roles here at Cornerstone so i'm the epitome of a multi-career individual fantastic stuff so tell me why is this such an amazing time or interesting time in HR technology in the moment well you know i'm at sometimes i think about it in terms of you know the guys that were building the gray railroad and they forgot to look up and see your planes flying over their head and that's sort of where we're at now and and i'm working really hard i live in Vegas so i have the over on the over and under on the number of times we'll hear AI in a booth somewhere but it really has made some significant changes if you look at things from notebook lm to some of the new reasoning models and those kinds of things um i think it was ethanmolic that said AI won't replace people but people with AI will replace people without AI and so what's really interesting to me is the augmentation aspect of the things that we're able to do now that we weren't even thinking about two three years ago yeah i think that's the thing and i think it's um we're even thinking about it's like i think in many cases we're still not thinking about some of the things that could be possible with this with this technology i always think of it as starter dough i don't know if you know the concept of starter dough but with sourdough bread there's this starter dough recipe i use it as starter dough as i'm starting to think about things and and it's very useful in that regard so one of the one of the things that you're talking about at the show this week is is lots of things around skills yes so why skills is something i guess talked about all the time i know you've got some new data on this i'm very keen to sort of know a bit more about that but i supposed to to kind of frame it amongst your customers there one of the sort of the key drivers that you think that kind of move to skills is is is going to address for them um then there's lots of different reasons why people talk about skills what do you think the the most important ones are well i think there's a couple of things and let me do a little bit of a a quick history lesson skills aren't new in there in that own sense i mean 20 years ago you could do a skills analysis you could create a gap analysis between an individual in the role you could do some learning based on that gap analysis in part so on the problem was is that the data you needed in order to continue to keep that fresh was so structured that when something changed it immediately cratered under its own weight so if you fast forward to today what we're able to do now when it comes to AI obviously but some of the other things that we're able to do around massive data collection and and massive processing and our home research is 27 terabytes of data for example wow um i know wow um but if you think about what skills was intended to be there's a democratization effect there's a task-based effect there's an ability to think about work in a way that's very outcome driven and and very much less role-based and i think that's where people are starting hmm no absolutely it tells us about the the report that you've just released well it's it's a five-year longitudinal study we we have a company called sky hive which we've acquired um and they do this massive massive data ingestion every every month there's another 25 terabytes it gets ingested but it's five years a longitudinal study that included things like job postings resumes government information in other data streams and what it was able to do was it was able to distinguish where skills are growing where skills are shrinking the difference between what you might call human skills we often call them soft skills we like to think of them as human skills and all the various trends on that from 2019 to 2024 what's unique is it expands over that covid period so it gives us a really unique view into what's growing and what's shrinking i'm sure it's very comprehensive but give us some of the some of the highlights you want the nuggets i did give us or give us the things that really stood out for you jenai skills increased by four hundred and eleven percent now if you think about four one one right the information of four one one that was pretty unique but ar and vr skills um again these are posting driven kinds of things 155 percent um uh data and analytics roughly 70 and 80 percent each but what was really interesting was that the human skills were two to three times more realized or more impactful on this report than the actual data skills and that leads you to the next step which is all right because we're thinking about data skills and two-thirds we also found two-thirds of critical skills with atrophy in the next couple of years because they're data driven but if you think about that human skills we also did some generational analysis and what we found was that the gen y gen z and i say this with full love in my heart as a grandfather um we're very very focused on those data skills those digital skills because of what they're being told to the to the detriment of having those human skills and although the job postings had more human skills the individuals in those generations were not as adept at that in terms of resume representation as their counterparts in the older generations that is interesting and what's the i suppose what's the implication for for employers because there's a huge amount to talk about where a skill is based organizational we're moving towards a skills based being a skills based organization yeah what is that you know what does that mean and how how should employers be thinking about skills at the moment well so and from a recruiting perspective as well of course but if you think about skills as a um as a mechanism that's a broad term if you think about the specific data skills in other words the democratization effect that we talk about that's a better term for some of the things that we need but if you think about the human skills as a component of that a skills based organization needs to be able to develop bridgeable skills and adjacent skills that can be used in other areas across many many mechanisms a good example is green skills appear globally more than um 80 percent with spain leading the way another example is we know that um 12 percent of the world is working on um uh gigger gig workers right so how do you bring that into the fault so you have to look for skills that can align to your business and bridge between various things that you're trying to accomplish i got one last thing for you we call it have want need what do i have because the readiness gap is based on visibility it's based on perception and it's based on inventory so it's a have want need so from the have what's that what do i have is the first thing you need to be able to look at what do i need which is what we just talked about and then what do the employees want to interest them so you use those ridgable skills to create an environment where employees can develop themselves in a way that matters to the organization and to the individual i mean that makes perfect sense and i think for many organizations this seems like such a huge topic um you know to be able to do all those things across the organization seems like an almost impossible task which i know is probably holding some organizations back because they just don't know where to start we hear it all the time where can people start how do you get started on this journey how do you frame it in a way where it seems like achievable and manageable well the first thing we say is um don't make it a science project right a lot of times people are should i use this taxonomy or should i use this technology start somewhere that actually has an impact to the business put it into what i don't want to say a box but put it into a manageable chunk particularly for your early adopters never forget that change management although you can't manage change only facilitate it um is a part of the equation so look for those early adopters and look for it in a way that has a unique impact to the business start there get your legs under you your sea legs under you if you will and then start rolling beyond that and a good place to start is in recruiting skills based hiring what's the role of technology and in order for this well so again if you think back to my original opening which is it's been around a while but technology has now created it technology can do things like impact what are the proposed what's the what's the have and have one need it can help you with understanding what you have can also use our report here gives you some examples on return of investment for instance um on what do i need i think with the impact for technology is being able to understand these things in a way that's meaningful in a way that is is doable and to create an environment by which um people can start without it being overwhelming we know that people that use technology have attended uh we know from the data that we have a a companion report around the return on investment but we know from the data that people who are making this investment are 24% more profitable they have a higher uh a quicker time to hire a quicker time to provide activity focus on those things baseline some measures and technology can help you with that i'm i'm i'm really fond of saying look it's people process and technology um technology is just as happy to automate a crappy process is a good he's doing this well out of all the clients that you work with are there any organizations or types of organizations that kind of really stand out as making some great progress on this journey well there's there's um kind of uh uh they straddle so in some cases you have organizations who are purpose driven by regulatory requirements so those are very unique skills right whether they be in pharma or transportation or financial and other organizations we see a real effort to upskill a particular audience for a variety of reasons they think about it from a critical role perspective what are the critical skills and everybody thinks that they're a critical job but what are the critical skills that i'll move the need along the business and we have a a couple of customers that are very forward thinking that way logistics is one example of that as well as some of the things around you believe it or not we have some really interesting customers in the retest space because task-based hiring is very retail-oriented yeah yeah yeah that makes sense i suppose it's like what are the dominant things that people recruit for but also is it is this kind of thing in the company's DNA um in terms of wanting to do that so um that's really interesting and as a final question for you we started off the conversation by saying what a unique what a unique time it is a really exciting time to kind of be involved in this industry what do you think the future looks like how what are we going to be talking about when it comes to talent and skills and work in five years time something like that well if you think about AI well for instance we know that um AR and XR are a big part of what's coming next so technology is going to give us the ability to practice in the safe space that's good as a human right um the second thing is i believe that if you go back to my starter-dote analogy i believe you're going to see more and more use of AI agents where you'll say i have this question and then let them bring stuff back to you it's like the old days in search where you just go search and a bunch of links came back now you're asking questions and some results coming back i think the ability to do that is going to be the level up for for the work that we can do at any level whether it be um an airplane mechanic trying to look at an engine uh an a welder trying to look at having something to look at in terms of what was that was this a good well to what we do in the knowledge space i think the opportunity is endless in that regard mike thank you very much absolute pleasure man my thanks to heather and mike you can follow this podcast on apple podcasts on spotify or wherever you get your podcasts you can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com on that site you can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter recruiting future feast and get the inside track on 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 so [BLANK_AUDIO]
