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

Ep 650: A Strategic Approach To Skills

I've done a lot of research this year around the move to skills-based hiring and skills-based organizations. Having spoken to a large number of employers on this journey, it is very clear that success is predicated on looking at skills strategically, holistically, and in the context of both business and personal growth. Ultimately, employers need to think fundamentally differently about talent and reflect this new thinking in talent acquisition, talent mobility, and talent development. My guests this week have just published an excellent book encouraging CEOs to embrace this new mindset to build the adaptable, skilled workforce they need in a way that doesn't undermine personal growth and champions the employee experience. The book is called "The Talent-Fueled Enterprise," and it was great to be able to speak to all three of its authors, Mike Ohata, Larry Durham, and Eric Dingler, who between them have 85 years combined experience in leading talent at Fortune 15 companies. In the interview, we discuss: The current most common talent challenges The tension between people growth and business growth Shifting from tech skills to Skills, Attributes and Experience Skilling for human potential Building teams for growth, adaptability, and empathy Rethinking Talent Acquisition Becoming a skills-based organization The vital importance of talent mobility Employee experience The impact of AI What will work look like in 5 years time? You can get 30% off The Talent-Fueled Enterprise by following this link and using the code Recruiting24 Follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts.

Duration:: 34m
Broadcast on:: 03 Nov 2024
Audio Format:: other

Ultimately, employers need to think fundamentally differently about talent and reflect this new thinking in talent acquisition, talent mobility, and talent development.

My guests this week have just published an excellent book encouraging CEOs to embrace this new mindset to build the adaptable, skilled workforce they need in a way that doesn't undermine personal growth and champions the employee experience.

The book is called "The Talent-Fueled Enterprise," and it was great to be able to speak to all three of its authors, Mike Ohata, Larry Durham, and Eric Dingler, who between them have 85 years combined experience in leading talent at Fortune 15 companies.

In the interview, we discuss:

The current most common talent challenges

The tension between people growth and business growth

Shifting from tech skills to Skills, Attributes and Experience

Skilling for human potential

Building teams for growth, adaptability, and empathy

Rethinking Talent Acquisition

Becoming a skills-based organization

The vital importance of talent mobility

Employee experience

The impact of AI

What will work look like in 5 years time?

You can get 30% off The Talent-Fueled Enterprise by following this link and using the code Recruiting24

Follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts.

support for this podcast comes from smart recruiters smart recruiters is your all-in-one platform but faster smarter hiring making recruiting easy and effortless smart recruiters are making some big changes revamping their user experience adding AI features and refreshing the UI i know from experience that they truly are a company that really values the recruiter and the practitioner they understand the intricacies of the recruiting business and this has always been reflected in their functionality and customer support so it's exciting to hear that they're making a bunch of updates if you're ready to be part of the future of talent acquisition head over to smart recruiters.com and find out what they're up to trust me your team and your future hires will thank you hi there welcome to episode 650 of recruiting feature with me matt alder i've done a lot of research this year around the move to skills-based hiring and skills-based organizations having spoken to a large number of employers who are on this journey it's very clear that success is predicated on looking at skills strategically holistically and in the context of both business and personal growth. Ultimately employers need to think fundamentally differently about talent and reflect this new thinking in talent acquisition, talent ability and talent development. My guest this week have just published an excellent book encouraging CEOs to embrace this new mindset and build the adaptable skilled workforce they need in a way that doesn't undermine personal growth and champions the employee experience the book is called the talent fueled enterprise and it was great to be able to speak to all three of its authors mica harter larry durham and eric dingler who between them have 85 years combined experience in leading talent at fortune 15 companies hi everyone and welcome to the podcast please could you introduce yourselves and tell us all what you do great matt thanks for having us i'm michael harter um former chief learning officer and talent leader at kpmg and currently um work serving um as a board advisors um as it will as advisor to um executives and do leadership coaching as well as writing thanks again for having us matt my name's larry durham i serve as the president of st. charles consulting group i've been in the consulting space for 20 plus years now with most of my time spent really on learning and talent and uh excited uh to be with you today hi matt my name is eric dingler i am the former chief learning officer for deloitte and now uh board director and ed tech startup advisor and also a consultant in my spare time fantastic stuff so um the reason that we're talking is you've you've all recently um collaborated on a book um tell us about the book and why you write it sure you know when we kind of collectively look at the context of organizations as talent and learning leaders we're often caught in this kind of sense of polarity between like business results and personal growth and clearly why we appreciate that there's a balance between the two and we feel the need typically to optimize around you know business results right because because that's how we make money that's how we get paid that's the way of for the careers we provide our employees and then we speak to the benefits of our workplaces right we we talk about how we provide learning how we develop skills and this is all really understandable but it's it's not enough well what we've kind of seen over the last five to ten years is that there's this really clear shift in the deals and employees want and and really in the forefront we know this down in our bones we know this our gut we really know that people want to grow they want to develop um and that's really a huge driver and sense of energy that our employees have and their interests are diverse right we recognize that but we tend to push them right we tend to push all our employees to that right answer the organization um that that they should be focused on professional development so this book is really a response and a guide toward a better way in setting the context around how we really want to achieve that agile workforce that we're constantly talking about and then we slip back into our institutional systems and forms of mind around talent one built on this sense of scarcity right we tend to think of our you know we we just really need to rethink our approach to talent here we have this sort of this sense of scarcity we we tend to kind of really just think about high potentials and high performance or high performers and and we ask the questions like really around that we're always kind of coming from this place around fearing um this war for talent but the better questions the right questions we feel like are from today is asking what is potential right how do we can how can we more clearly see potential in the people right in front of us and then how do we convert that potential into high performance or performance that's broadly you know recognized by teams in the organization and then how do we balance business performance with individual growth so whereas there's like what is that richness of professional development and personal growth that we can do together and then answering those who we really see as as we begin again to lead us to seeing all employees and seeing them individually as well so you sort of talk about um you talk about talent talent there and kind of what's going on what are the the most kind of common talent challenges that enterprises are facing at the moment uh well that uh I'll answer that which is and I want to build a little bit on what Mike said he talked about the the tension between driving business growth through driving high performance and people growth and recognizing and developing potential and I think that that's some of the challenges that manifest themselves in talent are a result of that right if you think about businesses today they're seeing an accelerating need for tech knowledge skills to solve their most complex problems and and they need that to keep up with the pace of change and to be able to capitalize on how rapidly evolving market opportunities um on the other side people individuals um they want development that helps them evolve beyond technology alone but includes things like sense of purpose they want to be recognized they want to be able to do more they want to feel a sense of organizational support and that helps them unleash their potential and at the core of both of those is the concept of agility right an organization wants to be more agile and individual wants to be more agile and so as Mike pointed our existing L&D models and perhaps how we think about talent acquisition they focus primarily on technical skills for today and those aren't sufficient for the future I like to think of these as some shifts so I think that the talent challenges that organizations are faced today are represented by a shift from embracing performance for today's jobs to equipping people to thrive in a tech enabled future where human relationship skills actually matter more than they used to because generative AI and technology are gonna take a lot of that technical information and knowledge work a shift from a role based orientation that we've historically focused on um to one that really uses skills and experiences and attributes as we think about how we think about people um a shift from a one size fits all learning to personalized development for more people I like to think of is how do we do development at a unit of one and finally a shift from focusing on business skilling for performance to also because we still have to do that to also focusing on skilling for human potential yeah if I take a talent sourcing lens on that mat right these shifts also impact what we might look for in terms of capabilities in terms of what we just might assess for what we might think of how we might even think of fit what might be the skills that we get primacy to in terms of when making a decision on different candidates and I think if we address those both in how we acquire and then and how we develop we're going to impact retention we're an impact engagement we're an impact the performance of the company because we will be contributing to enabling both organizational and individual agility and I think when you enable both of those that's a sweet spot no absolutely and I think um you know I think the thing there is there is such a big shift I suppose just in the thinking for you know both individuals and companies in terms of in terms of talent how do we need to kind of broaden our thinking and think differently about talent to kind of really you know kind of really make this work sure um there they're really we really need to kind of refocus and reframe several mindsets that we have um in our older kind of um talent models first we need to see the potential all employees and I started talking about this earlier and this includes really looking at the context for performance which is really the team right so then how do we think about teams how do we design teams or redesign teams and then or and the organization with the skills the attributes of characteristics and the experience that actually going to set that team and set that foundation for learning and growth and really it's in that context of the team that performance takes place so what I find really fascinating for all of us is that we often work on teaming and different styles and roles we talk about communication we talk about high performance teams and yet when we look at performance we tend to abstract the individual from the context of the team and we isolate them right and then if we look at friction we tend to look at friction and the team is bad and really friction just could be around you know collaboration it could be innovation it could actually be challenging you know in that in that place it's safe in that place where there's a lot of kind of open discussion friction could actually be seen as a way of actually um generating even more innovation for example more solution and solving and that kind of good stuff um so then it becomes really critical then how do we look at leaders and their roles and how we put together teams right so that's a big that's one big change up in our mindset the second one is we need to really broaden the scope of talent and learning to and look more to look at more than just skills right so we we talk about attributes those human characteristics right the things that make us kind of the qualities that help us adapt to apply skills really to take on new challenges right and you know we have those common ideas we we talk about adaptability we talk about learnability we talk about empathy and those really are those human qualities that actually help us to be agile over time right and then we need to along this line we need to think about all the work experiences and the richness of work experiences is not just about it's you know has to really grow right has to be about pushing and expanding not only the capabilities of people right employees but also the organization and and and it's not just looking at our employees as tools right so if we only build for skills and this is something Eric and Larry have talked and I have talked a lot about if we only look at skills um we're going to continue to struggle in this system that's constantly looking for new tools and we're forgetting about the core materials right those core things and make up the talent in our organization and then thirdly what I would say is we do need to settle on some view about enterprise skills are for the organization and then we need to design a workforce education that can span both those business outcomes we need and also the growth that employees desire and you know if you listen to us it's not an either or it really is a both and we really can achieve that it just it's really more we have to get over this hump of thing that we're giving up something so a lot of organizations only think about learning and developments like if we if we go down the personalized learning path we feel like we're giving up on business results and I don't think there's any data to prove that right it's it's really this notion that if we can get the kind of the both of those and being done we're going to get more engaged employees and as as employees get engaged they're going to perform no absolutely I think that that that whole bit around skills and attributes is so it's just so interesting and I know it's a it's a kind of a big thing that lots of kind of companies are considering and I suppose on the the skills part of that I know that for many companies understanding the skills that they they that they're going to need but also the skills that they already have within their existing employee base can be can be a real issue what would you what are you kind of thoughts on that how can companies understand you know what they have and what they're going to need so Matt on this concept of skills if we go back to this dilemma that organizations may think they're in where they're having to make a trade-off between do I invest in the individual or do I drive the business when we think about development actually think skills are part of the answer but not all of the answer and how you can actually do both right if you want effective workforce planning and if you want to be able to understand and involve the organizational capabilities you actually need to be at the skill level to do that I like to think of skills are becoming a new currency and how we in our language of organizations and organizations need to have a command of those the skills that an individuals need to have that as well in terms of what do you have what will you develop and what because that also can then inform what you can hire in the marketplace or what you should go higher in the marketplace and then it can allow us to manage proactively and strategically versus what I see historically is we really have managed with instinct and gut all right you know and it can take some work right so when you talk about you know how do companies do this you need to it starts with a catalog framework that can satirize and organize skills for the organization and that's the starting point for describing capabilities and from there you know you can think about it in different ways are there's clusters or there's connections or there's patterns but you need to get to that organizing framework that works for your organization because there's value in creating a shared language and then understand having a framework that then allows you to use data to assess what you have and then once you have that framework you can define what's critical for the organization and the skills that matter for business performance there's two things I want to call out here based on what I've seen in my many years of organizations trying to move to skills based construct first you can spend all your time trying to define a framework you can spend a lot of time trying to get to we think it's complete and by the time you get there it's going to be outdated right so in a donut taxonomies or ontologies become the shiny object that distracts and I see it in some many organizations becoming the shiny object that distracts and organizations spending two, three, four years trying to define it don't make it complicated if we talked about we talk about in our book start small and high before you go broad and deep and that to me that's the essence of agility in another level and two if you only look at skills as the answer it's insufficient you need to build your model your framework etc to be about skills attributes and experiences as Mike mentioned because that's what allows you to assess potential and if you build how you hire and how you develop around those then you're going to drive both work agility and performance and you can drive individual performance and that's the win-win for me that's secret sauce right you can hire for those enterprise skills but when you consider attributes and experiences as part of that you have a more holistic understanding of your talent as an organization and you also with that understanding can actually enable that the development of the individual that unit of one so you don't have to be either or you can be the hand and I suppose following on from from that a little bit how important is is talent mobility in all of this that's a really good question Matt maybe before I jump into that I'll just talk about talent mobility when we speak of that for anyone who's been in the marketplace for a long time like the four of us have I think oftentimes mobility is associated with high potentials right for certain groups high potentials we rotate them through there's rotational models things like that to further develop skills where we see the marketplace heading and organizations heading with the advent of skills people using these attributes new ways of working changing business models mobility is one of the key foundational elements when you think about it the dexterity of individuals to do something different than what they did before is critically important so when we think about mobility it's not just someone raising their hand it's not just a new need what we're finding is a lot of adjacency of skills so you may not have the exact right skill that you need but you've got to move someone from one place to another individuals want that same experience and I think for businesses the models where mobility is a distractor is a process and a thought that's going to have to change because if you've got an organization that is very rigid monolithic in a dynamic skills based environment it makes it exceedingly difficult if mobility of talent is something that you're I'm going to say opposed to or that makes it more difficult for you to do your business because I think long-term mobility is an enabler that's going to have to be present for you to succeed in the environment so I mean there's a there's a lot going on here there's a lot of change thinking about a lot of things differently kind of you sort of alluded to kind of experience there there briefly what considerations are around the employee experience in this in this kind of new model of talent where does that fit what do people need to need to think about yeah it's a really good question uh it I think at times when so much is changing we look we look for something that's uh constants that we can hold on to and I think you're right map that many many things are changing when we think about the employee experience if I just look at research over the last 10 years how quickly things have changed part of that has been covid driven part of it's been uh generational change in the workplace those types of things but when I think about the employee experience for a long time it was pay and benefits you know how much is the pay and and what are the benefits and where do you want to work now it's about flexibility we've seen the headlines right of people not wanting to go back to a traditional work environment now to compound that or to add to that uh a change in skills the mobility that you and I just talked about uh I think workers want to develop themselves if you think about the younger generations that are coming into the workforce there's no way anyone's expecting to stay in a role for 40 years right or in an even maybe in an organization for 40 years it's very dynamic uh they grew up in an environment where you choose what you watch when you watch it in the form in which you do it everything about their life is is very dynamic and I think when we think about the employee experience it's getting paid well having flexibility pursuing skill development and the way you choose to do it now for us that run businesses you step back and you say how is all that possible and I think that's still to be seen but I think the employee experience is going to demand more of us than than less in the past that's just a fact no I completely I completely agree and I mean with with business and everything just changing so quickly at the moment I'll do you know how can employers kind of anticipate and prepare you know for the for the skills of the future you know in such an uncertain kind of environment that we're in it's a great question that and I think both the individuals care about how do they anticipate and develop and and the organizations do as well right and so how do you create that capability first what we call in our book skills sensing all right and I think when it starts with what I talked about previously we need to have that framework that creates that shared language and understanding and a belief and understanding of what are the key enterprise skills and then from there you can create what we call a basic enabling business process around skills sensing that that's about creating a network that can leverage the collective wisdom that exists because the wisdom is in the masses and a governance form that is uses data to then that assess and prioritize it sounds you know fairly simple and I do think it is it just creates the fortitude to build this process and if you operate it with consistency then you can begin to create an organizational habit from there you can start making choices and decisions that advance your strategy with that in mind and such you can move from being that reactive and good to that actually being strategic and proactive and you can build into that process the use of attributes and experiences as well as part of your evaluation right so you can it's not just a skills you bring into this concept of these enduring human capabilities and then that's what leads to creating agility for the organization and agility for the individuals so that you can adapt at the pace of change or even get ahead of the pace of change but it requires an organizational mindset to create a process to sense and to use data to assess and make choices and I think you know we've we've not so talked about AI directly in this conversation but it's kind of it's kind of in there in the background skirting around the edges sort of shaping a lot of a lot about what we're talking about so let's kind of sort of take that sort of full on would you anticipate the the impact of AI is going to be it's a good question uh we'll have to come back in 10 years and look back and see how how close we were but when I think about it it's it's impact AI uh simply stated will impact the work it will impact workers and it will impact the intersection of those two things now that sounds really really simple but let me explain what I'm talking about when we think about the the work that people do all the clients that that we serve and where we've worked in the past are experiencing right now the transformation of work now they're just scratching the surface in terms of what's AI going to do that we do today that's fundamentally going to change how we work so the work itself is changing that has a direct impact on what do we need uh talent to do uh how are they going to work how are they going to offload a many administrative tasks that they do today using AI what will they not need to do any longer that AI does for them and the question is as always when you take that away and have them be more strategic in their thinking what's that going to mean I think for the for the worker for talent dexterity uh being agile open to change learning new skills we've talked about being a lifelong learner for a long time now it was kind of a an aspirational thing and now it's a requirement right because if you don't you will fall behind talent will fall behind I love the statement that gets used often now you won't lose your job to AI but you may you lose your job to someone who's using AI and I absolutely think that's true if if we don't upskill ourselves uh in in AI other people will come along and be highly more efficient I think in our book one thing that's quite interesting and we're already seeing this in the marketplace amongst our clients is the intersection of these two things what skills do I need and what skills do I have and AI enabled technologies that are actually bringing that together now we think we have some organizations think they have a fairly sophisticated talent model but in all the research we've done what's really fascinating you'd think it would be something really tricky the number one question or challenges we don't really have a good sense of what skills we have within our own organization think about that for a second that's not rocket science that's just we don't think about it that way we work on competencies and other things but when you get down to practical application skills we don't have that so identifying that identifying what skills are necessary and there's a number of technologies and companies working on what those taxonomies and skills look like the ability to quickly match skills and resources I think is very exciting uh Eric Mike and I have talked a lot about this I think that's the promise and the concern from a talent perspective the promise of being able to put the right people on the right projects or with the right skills or develop the right skills is exciting I think from a talent model perspective with AI where we have to be careful is that we don't over index on the skills and devalue the talent right where we become a widget and it's just like I need two of Eric and one of Mike and one of Larry and three of Matt and I don't think the the employee value proposition and and what people want from an employee experience that's not it and I think finding the balance between the use of AI and the deployment of talent to make it a meaningful experience for the employees and for talent is the sweet spot that each organization is going to have to think about but AI is going to have a radical change in just about every way we work no doubt about it and it's the final question what do you hope that work is going to look like in five years time you're all start off of that and and I believe I think Larry and Eric will also jump in as put their answers as well you know in five years time I think you know following what Larry's talked about I really like to see sort of this you know this level of process driven transactional work really been taken on by AI right I do think it's true that a lot of workers are going to be using AI to complement their day and and I think it's actually going to fundamentally start to change how we think about recruiting for example so if we get if we can combine the AI sort of driven AI and enabled view of skills and we can really begin to transform our mindsets around how we look at getting work done through skills and characteristics and attributes and so forth we're going to have a fundamentally different model for how we fulfill work for example and that's I think that's going to be hugely profound I think in five years we're going to like just be getting going on this journey as some of the capabilities fully start to advance but I envisioned this world where you know that we're not looking for you know 95 percent skills match to get work done but you know 75 might be okay 60 might be great because the person's learning something new 50 might be an okay threshold as well but for all you know we tend to hire for like these really high percentage matches and I think that's one thing as AI gets adopted and and work is actually being managed or carried out right through AI then we're going to see I think the opportunity for us to really get serious about how do we redesign work and so I'd love to see this notion of like the gig economy right for the knowledge work of really kicking the place where the day job is actually a series of gigs and I keep thinking back to my assistant law and her days at Intel and she used to tell me these stories where they're all working on a project and then when the project was done everybody was let go and each basically had a period to go find a new project to work on and I still really remember this seems you know like a long while ago they ever looked at on the basis of their skills and experiences right and I just thought like what we're talking about really shouldn't be nominal or new it's it's really I think a much clearer and more focused way around how to effectively get work done we tend to create jobs and try to hold people to jobs and think that people should stay in jobs and as we've talked about it's just not true anymore like people are looking at like no I want skills I want agility I want mobility I want to be able to move around I want to I want to develop myself and you know employers are scratching our heads and we're going why why don't you like this job that you're doing this process 80 percent of the time of your day right and you know and attending meetings the rest of the time right so this I really envision like there's going to be a really great kind of shift as we get to this more gig based work yeah I would follow on to what Mike said Matt you said what do we hope happens in five years I would hope what Mike just said where it's more of a gig economy working within organizations because I think that's going to do a couple things one it's going to enable an AI empowered workplace which we believe is is coming we believe people will be more satisfied with the work that they do I think the real question is will we able to get be able to get past some of the things that we're seeing we know historically that we organizations take what they do today and then try and do it with something new and I think with AI and with talent and with skills and attributes and all the things we've talked about if you try and wrap everything you do with that you're going to get a very very different look in terms of how work occurs I think there has to be a I hate to use the word transformative but a fundamentally different way of coming about what it is you're doing if you start with your work and then try and look you know infuse it with AI you're going to get kind of this strange looking approach to work I think stepping back rethinking how work occurs and really focusing as we talk about in the book you know having it be talent fueled and thinking about how the talent can thrive and how the business can thrive using new technologies and talent I think that's our that that's my hope for where we're at in five years within many organizations and I would build upon what Mike and Larry have said because I agree with both what they've contributed and how work can be different and if the work can be different in the ways they described it right I think then work becomes more fulfilling right there's greater emphasis on personal growth and development and as a result of a different work environment individuals are being developed better they're able to achieve their potential and that doesn't stop in the workplace it actually enables them to have an impact in their families and in their communities and there can be an incredible butterfly effect to this by changing the way work is done and then by changing how we think about that intersection of skills attributes and experiences and to me that is what's really exciting those organizations that double down in my opinion on driving those enduring human capabilities focusing on skills attributes and experiences are the ones they're going to set themselves up for success in the future and will perform better than those that don't and those that do that will change work and I believe they can change lives Eric Larry Mike thank you so much for joining me my thanks to Mike Eric and Larry you can follow this podcast on Apple podcasts on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts you can search all the past episodes at recruitingfeatured.com on that site you can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter recruiting feature 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]